Editorial

There is not much in favour of hating the patient. And yet we must all do it; just as, according to Winnicott's plausible aphorism, all mothers hate their babies. Alan Prodgers draws attention to this and the importance of being aware of such countertransference disasters; and indeed of the ways in which it affects the therapeutic relationship. Without that counter-transference awareness the psychotherapist is at risk (and so is the patient) from the psychotherapist's defensiveness, from his method for dealing with the consequent guilt and, as Prodgers emphasises, the role that hate has in the motivation for treating the patient. Such an obstacle course for the psychotherapist's mind may never allow him to reach the potential usefulness of these counter-transference communications; though the art of psychotherapy is to keep on with that struggle.

But the negative aspects of the relationships our patients sustain with us is not the only tribulation we have to endure. There is, as often pointed out in this Journal, the intense negative relations amongst psychotherapists themselves. We are a cliquey lot. Peggy Jones describes a journey through her own encounter with certain psychotherapeutic writings which she characterises as the American self-help movement. Selfhelp and self-actualisation have a peculiarly American ring to them in the European ear; and a characteristically divided response. Jones has clearly tried to suffer that ambivalence and to come out with a balanced judgement on what she found. It is an exemplary process that perhaps we pursue each day with our patients; and then give up on as we relax from the daily grind and contemplate our colleagues from other schools of psychotherapy. Where, it is worth asking, does our own hostility go? To the UKSCP?

If the assessment of hate is an important counter-transference indicator in the pinpointing of the more disturbed forms of psychopathology, I have in my own paper in this issue tried to show the place that work