Response from the BCP

Dear Sir

In Vol. 9 (4), 1993 of the British Journal of Psychotherapy, Mrs Emmy van Deurzen-Smith, Chair of the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy described the character of the UKCP and its aims for the future. As the founder institutions of the British Confederation of Psychotherapists, we would like to take the opportunity this gives us to congratulate the UKCP on the impressive achievement which its establishment represents. What may be the eventual benefit of this development to the public, as well as the wide range of its member organisations, should be considerable.

However, since Mrs van Deurzen-Smith also refers in her article to the BCP, we feel it to be essential to respond in order to ensure that the wrong conclusions are not drawn from her remarks.

As the ten founding organisations of the BCP we state in the preamble of the constitution “that the disciplines of psychoanalysis, analytical psychology, psychoanalytic psychotherapy and child psychotherapy comprise the general field of psychoanalytic psychotherapy”. We then state that the public requires “a proper definition of the profession” and that “people will be at risk if they are not able to be sure that practitioners claiming to be psychoanalytic psychotherapists are properly trained and hold membership of a professional association to which they are answerable for their work and for their professional conduct”. Since writing the constitution the BCP has nearly completed a register of organisations and their members who meet the criteria recognised by it as of sufficiently high standard in training and practice to justify membership. So that while Mrs van Deurzen Smith is correct to say that the UKCP and the Confederation are not in a competitive relationship, the truth is not served by her claim that “The (UKCP) is now firmly established as the national umbrella organisation for the entire psychotherapy profession…”

Currently The Association of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in the National Health S