Response to Jeremy Holmes

In response to the article ‘NHS Psychotherapy - past, future and present’ by Jeremy Holmes (BJP 16(4): 447-457), I would like to add a footnote.

This is in the form of an amendment as regards the story of psychotherapy in Scotland. Holmes rightly mentions the long tradition in psychotherapy in Edinburgh and Aberdeen. No mention is made of Glasgow, which from 1920 had the first Child Guidance Clinic in Scotland, and in 1938, like Edinburgh, began an outpatient psychotherapy clinic for neurotics (the Lansdowne). Both were taken over by the NHS. In the mid-50s Glasgow was the more active NHS psychotherapy centre. The Professor of Psychiatry in Glasgow employed a fully qualified psychoanalyst, Dr Tom Freeman, in 1952 to assist with training of junior psychiatrists in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Freeman later became Director of the Lansdowne Clinic and had other psychoanalysts on his staff. He wrote an article in the British Journal of Psychiatry (Freeman 1967), presenting the results in 33 cases of individual psychoanalytic psychotherapy and 95 treated with group psychotherapy.

The culture of mental hospitals in Scotland, from their inception in the nineteenth century generally tended to be more human than was common in the South and there was some practice of individual psychodynamic psychotherapy in Glasgow Royal Mental Hospital, Gartnavel, in the 1950s. Dr Freeman was also employed there and had sessions too as psychotherapy supervisor from time to time in the Professorial Unit in Dundee and at the Crighton Royal Hospital in Dumfries. The latter hospital, during World War II, had on its staff psychoanalysts who were refugees from Hitler's Germany.

Even the small hospital, Dingleton, near Melrose, had psychotherapeutic input as was shown in the 1960s with the introduction of therapeutic community measures by Maxwell Jones, an Edinburgh graduate with much psychoanalytic background. He had earlier pioneered therapeutic community work in Belmont Hospital near London (late