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How do therapists evolve beyond formal training and qualification? What began as a personal question born out of my own distance in time from the training I undertook to become a therapist, and my subsequent involvement in the training of other therapists, suddenly acquired a topical significance when the UKCP document on ‘Continuing Professional Development’ dropped through my mailbox. A balanced and thoughtful document accentuating the centrality of reflective practice and the need for personal development, its main thrust nevertheless is towards the external world. Its methodology is chiefly bureaucratic, necessitating policies to be developed and implemented by member organizations. ‘Continuing Professional Development’ (CPD) aims to continue for practitioners the process of verification and accountability to the profession and to the general public that the qualifying process entailed. Yet we belong to a profession that has a unique distinction - we point not only to diplomas and competencies, but also to the therapist's capacity to participate in his personal development. This casts a different light altogether on how the clinician derives his authority. Jung writes of the requirement for a personal analysis in the training of analysts:
We have learned to place in the foreground the personality of the doctor himself as a curative or harmful factor; and that what is now demanded is his own transformation … as soon as psychotherapy takes the doctor himself for its subject, it transcends its medical origins and ceases to be merely a method for treating the sick. (Jung 1929, pp. 74, 75)
This will be the subject of my paper which will address the therapist's own development - a matter that inevitably goes beyond the compass of any CPD policy, and yet remains embedded in the discharge of professional responsibilities.
Jung wrote: