Divisiveness and the Need for Debate

Dear Editor

I write as a ‘parasite’ who has paid ‘£25 in order to bypass the … training of the British Psychoanalytical Society’, thereby ‘pass[ing] myself off to the public’ as a psychoanalyst (Carola Thorpe, Letters, BJP 20(3): 413-416). Carola Thorpe's letter cogently summarizes the position of the BPAS and, hence, of the British Confederation of Psychotherapists.

I would like to respond to the helpful comment made by the Editor in her introductory note to the publication of letters, including the one from Carola Thorpe. Ann Scott wrote that publication of the letters would enable the BJP readership to come to a ‘considered, well-informed view about whether The College is divisive, or is making a sincere attempt to achieve pluralism in a divided profession’.

Our profession has certainly suffered from divisiveness in recent years and, in the spirit of Ann Scott's words, I would draw your readers' attention to the following:

-the foundation of the BCP itself in 1993, which was triggered by the refusal of the 1992 United Kingdom Standing Conference on Psychotherapy (as it then was) AGM to accept a resolution proposed by the BPAS for what they termed a ‘Security Council’ model for the organization of the profession of psychotherapy. In this model, all serious power and responsibility were to reside in a small number of long established training bodies. Majority decisions of the ‘Security Council’ were to be absolutely binding on the whole organization. Had the ‘Security Council’ model been established, the effect would have been to dominate the whole field of psychotherapy, not only psychoanalysis. This resolution had been prepared for by meetings of a closed and self-selected sub-group of the then Psychoanalytic and Psychodynamic Psychotherapy Section of the UKSCP plus representatives of the British Psycho-Analytical Society (as it then was), which was in fact a member of another Section altogether. The existence of the sub-group was not secret but it had been assumed b