Northern Exposure

Dear Editor

I write to congratulate you for including the article ‘The Abuse of Power Within the Analytic Setting’ by Marguerite Valentine in the Winter issue of the BJP. It seems to me it is high time a somewhat censored subject received a public hearing and, hopefully, discussion within the training bodies that currently exist, not only for training psychoanalysts from the traditional schools of thought, but also those currently working under the auspices of the UKCP training arrangements.

Most of the latter inherit the culture of psychoanalytic training and enjoy not only its benefits but also those practices and beliefs that have become, to quote Valentine, ‘reified’. And so what was once merely an idea or proposition to be examined and ‘played’ with becomes promoted as a fact. We have all felt our hearts sink when, in discussion or in personal therapy, we hear the authoritarian voice of analysis telling us that a suggestion, or metaphor, such as the ‘bad breast’, ‘good breast’ or the ‘unconscious’ becomes thrust upon us as essential objective experience with predetermined outcomes.

My special interest at present is in the issue of training supervision where much that is described by Valentine as occurring in personal therapy may be experienced in the training process. My views are elaborated in the Spring issue of the Journal of the West Midlands Institute for Psychotherapy. The splitting that has occurred in the training of psychoanalysts in London, which has given rise to such obsessively tight control of the supervision of trainees, is, I fear, being repeated by the newer bodies entering the field of training analytic psychotherapists. Some years ago I was advocating at the West Midlands Institute that we should offer a core course of teaching and learning covering the main schools of psychoanalytic thought, in a historical perspective, leading on to personal options chosen by trainees from within the structure of training. Trainees would then choose, in associ