Editorial

The question of an analytic stance, and how it can be understood across a range of registers, is the explicit and implicit theme of this issue of the BJP.

Within our profession, governance is usually discussed as a matter - sometimes contentious - of impending statutory registration. Within a political register, a requirement to make the interests of the public paramount is central, but poses difficult questions about reconciling such a requirement with the privacy and individuality of the analytic treatment. Ann Casement has a particular interest in comparative aspects of this debate, and brings her wealth of experience, internationally and as a former Chair of the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy, to the discussion. Her focus, wide-ranging and contextualizing, is on the way in which legal process in the round relates to the mental health field in the UK. Noting that ‘transparency and accountability are the twin pillars of ethical governance not only in the mental health field but in the socio-political-economic life of much of today's world’, she suggests that they are ‘particularly vital in the kinds of small, face-to-face organizations that abound in the analytical and psychotherapy world’. She further argues that ‘ethical governance in psychotherapy and psychoanalytic organizations is imperative in order to support the inner ethical needs as well as the ethical practice of psychotherapists and psychoanalysts in their consulting rooms’. In an informative and robustly thought-provoking contribution, Casement identifies the implications of recent legislation for the psychotherapy professions. She traces the origin of the Psychological Professions Alliance Group (which includes the UKCP and the British Psychoanalytic Council), and identifies its current work with the Head of Professional Regulation at the Department of Health in London. Perhaps most controversial - and doubtless a focus of ongoing debate - will be the idea of National Occupational Standards