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Rosemary Randall (1995) has painted a very black and white picture of the difference between the role of the UKCP in ensuring that psychotherapists are competent to practise psychotherapy, and the NVQ Draft Standards for Counselling published in a final version in April 1995. While I agree with her that the language of NVQs is offputting, I feel that perhaps we, as people who live in glass houses ourselves, should not throw stones. We ourselves use off-putting terms such as ‘paranoid-schizoid position’, ‘penis envy’ and ‘unconscious fantasy’ as part of the vocabulary we apply to patients and their relationships.
I personally found the experience of being involved in the trials of the Draft Standards as a thought-provoking and invigorating experience. The task we were set was to think about (a) what it was we really do in offering counselling and therapy, (b) what is best practice in the field, and (c) how could someone else decide whether what a counsellor or therapist was doing lived up to an appropriate standard of competence? Stelzer (1987) suggests that students in training in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis select themselves because of their narcissistic need to be used by people with intense narcissistic needs, and that they have developed very sensitive antennae, enabling them to be empathic with other people, in the same way that they have been ‘hypersensitive to their parents' needs in the past’. Stelzer goes on to say that they will also have a need to fit in ‘as trainees in an institute which they must please, in order to succeed and gain acceptance within the “psychoanalytic family”’ (pp. 63-4). My hypothesis here is that this need to comply while being necessarily trained will usually lead to taking practices on board as a matter of faith, rather than a clearly thought through position about what is good practice. Although far from perfect, I would suggest that the lists that the Draft Standards contain could be used as a chance to rethink practice in t