Trahison Des Clercs: Professional and Political Notes on the Inflation of Psychoanalysis - Responding to Lesley Murdin

I want to write this response in a racy and direct manner. The influence of the state and its penetrative bureaucracies has had a bad impact on the way psychotherapists and counsellors think and write. No need only to turn to identification with the aggressor for an explanation, it's more a question of our writing what we think we need to write if we want to be in their gang.

Why does Lesley write about the future of the ‘transference-based’ therapies? Why not the ‘relational’ therapies or some wording that would underscore a difference from what she imagines goes on in CBT. Maybe it is because she is very well informed indeed and knows that those practising dialectical or dialogical CBT also claim that they ‘work with’ the therapy relationship, and so there is a need to up the ante by turning to the unique selling point of psychoanalysis - transference. I suggest we need to see through what is going on in Lesley's paper or any victory we gain will be entirely Pyrrhic.

I have seen much the same process involving a search for what is exceptional in psychoanalysis going on in the meetings held between the former Psychoanalysis and Psychodynamic Psychotherapy Section of UKCP (now the Council for Psychoanalysis and Jungian Analysis) and the British Confederation for Psychotherapy (now the British Psychoanalytic Council). There, some BPC members have announced that what distinguishes psychoanalytic therapies from the others, and placed them in a superior and more demanding category, was that only such therapies work with transference and this, in turn, is because only such therapies have any conception of the unconscious. Hence, the inflated claim continues, work done by the BPC is much more dangerous and demanding than work done by, say, an integrative psychotherapist - which would therefore justify some sort of representation of the hierarchy and differential in any state regulation, whether by the Health Professions Council or another body. In extreme form, it was claim