Does Psychotherapy Need ‘NVQs’?

Anyone who visits a professional person hopes that he or she will be competent at what they do. The more astute or anxious may enquire about qualifications, find out about people's trainings, ask for recommendations and compare notes with friends. Certainly, members of the public have a right to expect that psychotherapists will be competent to practise psychotherapy and to expect there to be professional bodies that can control the quality of training, enforce standards and provide redress in the case of incompetent or unprofessional behaviour. This is the rationale for the existence of the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy.

Competent in this sense, however, is a far cry from the so-called ‘competencies’ that we are currently being asked to consider as a possible framework for training and practice, and I think the profession would do well to examine further the philosophy and assumptions that lie behind them. These competencies are proposed as the key element of a National Vocational Qualification (NVQ) that would guarantee common standards of training and practice across the profession (The Advice, Guidance & Counselling Lead Body 1993). Currently drafted for counselling (including psychodynamic counselling) it is proposed to extend them to include psychotherapy. They are offered as neutral descriptions, as a process of mapping that we can contribute to and as an open participatory framework that will benefit public and profession alike. I argue in this article that they are not neutral. I believe that they propound a philosophy that is alien to psychoanalytic psychotherapy and that, if extended to include psychotherapy, they would initiate changes in the training and practice of psychotherapy that would benefit neither the public nor the profession. (The Draft Standards for counselling that I refer to in this article have been amended following consultation and are now published in a final version [April 1995]. Although some changes have been made, their o