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This short paper was prompted by the Letter from America by Jeremy Holmes (1994) in this Journal entitled ‘Who Owns Psychoanalysis?’ His title struck me as apt indeed for I believe the question of ownership lies at the heart of the problems faced by the analytic institutions in this country. I have discussed some of the consequences that I believe flow from this problem of ownership elsewhere (Kitto 1988). It is interesting that it is not the academic aspects of psychoanalysis that present a problem of ownership. Quite the reverse, these are, and have been since the beginning, firmly in the public arena, the province of philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists and others, not to mention the recent university departments. The ownership problem is about the clinical and professional aspect where status, employment and referrals are at stake. Dr Holmes's example from the United States is instructive, indeed the problems he lists can be seen here as has often been pointed out, for example, infantilising, pathologising and the failure to relate psychoanalytic work adequately to the wider context.
In October 1993 I gave a brief paper to the members of the London Centre for Psychotherapy at a day conference on the subject of organisational identity. These two questions of ownership and identity are so closely entwined that perhaps it is not surprising that many of Jeremy Holmes's ideas coincide with mine. It is always a comfort to discover that someone is in agreement with you, particularly on a subject as controversial and heavy with history and tradition as psychoanalysis and its institutional arrangements, and so I approached the editor who kindly agreed to publish what is a shortened version of the paper on identity I gave last October.
There is a problem of identity which all the organisations practising what is called analytic psychotherapy face in one way or another, arising from the question: what is analytical psychotherapy and how is it different from psychoana