More on Mourning

Dear Editor

I doubt I will be the only one to observe that David Malan's response to Ian Craib's paper does not remotely engage with its challenging theses (British Journal of Psychotherapy 11(3)).

As I understand it, Craib is calling for a degree of collective self-reflexivity and professional self-consciousness on the part of mental health professionals, especially psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists and group analytic psychotherapists.

He wants us to accept (a) that our ideas and practices cannot be sequestered from their relations with wider social, cultural and political forces; (b) that there is a degree of imperialism and self-benefit in the extension of therapy expertise into psychosocial areas such as dying, death and mourning (I see no judgementalism on Craib's part about this - the problems start when his point upsets people and so gets denied); (c) psychotherapy cannot avoid making a whole set of normalistic and moralistic statements about the phenomena it deals with. This mourning process is going well, that one pathologically, that one has only just started. Again, I don't read Craib as saying this is a terribly bad thing that we must stop doing, only that something of value in earlier theoretical formulations that valorized unpleasure may be being lost in a kind of feel-good manoeuvre that wins votes or clients in the short-term but evacuates depth in many other ways. In my opinion Dr Malan is, in a sense, caught up in a turf war over the psyche when he uses words like ‘paranoid’ to summarize the tone of a thoughtful and scholarly article.

To the extent that our field is in a state of (dis)ease, it has to seek some of the therapy it needs from the kinds of self-questioning theses and texts that are presently being produced by writers like Ian Craib who are well-versed in social theory. This means challenging the silly clinic-academy divide that has sprung up in which clinicians ‘feel’ and have the last word about ‘people’, and academics ‘think