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‘They don't realise we are bringing them the plague’, said Freud to Jung in 1909, when they visited the USA together for a lecture tour on psychoanalysis (Lacan, 1996). One hundred years later, the UK's National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) published its Clinical Guideline for Depression in Adults (NICE, 2009). The plague had arrived, but not in America. Following the utter horrors and waste of the First World War, and speaking to the psychoanalytic congress in Budapest, Freud had boldly predicted:
Some day the conscience of society will awaken and admonish it that the poor have just as much right to help for their minds as they already have to lifesaving surgical help, and that neuroses threaten the health of the people no less than tuberculosis … on that day these treatments (talking therapies) will be free (Freud, 1918, quoted in Danto, 2005, p. 17).
It was our own National Health Service (NHS), the closest thing we have to a religion, according to some, the leading edge of implementing evidence-based practice for others, where we have been the first to invent a universal, free-to-access national talking therapies service for the people. These two critical books welcome this, the UK's ‘revolution’ in talking therapies, like the plague.
I should start with a disclaimer: I am to blame! If psychotherapy has been keeping such bad company over the past decade or so, as Farhad Dalal, and the contributors to Catherine Jackson and Rosemary Rizq's edited book both assert, due to its disastrous flirtation with neoliberal economists and hyper-rational CBT researchers (Professors Layard and Clark, respectively), then I could be seen as the Scarlet Woman in this