What Role Ahead for the British Journal of Psychotherapy?

In setting out a vision for the future, it is worth tracing a line to the past. It is worrying how often the past can get lost, and we should be guided by the maxim of learning from the past in order to avoid repeating mistakes. We are aware of organizational upheaval in the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP) and the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP); both organizations have recently seen the sudden resignation of their Chief Executives and other senior members of their leadership teams. And there are heated debates concerned with the Scope of Practice and Education (SCoPEd) framework and the implications for the status of members of the profession of psychotherapy. Debates and divisions are not entirely new to psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. In the 1970s the Rugby Standing Conference was an effort to build a cohered voice for psychotherapy in the UK. Jonathan Pedder (a Maudsley psychiatrist and psychoanalyst) wrote about the various strands of influence that saw the emergence of the Rugby Standing Conference and the establishment of the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP) which was an attempt to cohere a unified voice for psychotherapy (Pedder, 2011). Dorothy Hamilton, a founder member of the Association of Group and Individual Psychotherapy (AGIP), recently gave a paper to the College of Psychoanalysts about the foundation of the of the UKCP and AGIP's stake in that process (). Dorothy detailed the struggles to define the profession, which resulted in the eventual adoption of an inclusive stance where various training organizations were recognized under the rubric of ‘psychotherapy’. This produced an initial cohesive body, followed by the move to federation and the division into modalities. This was all conducted along democratic lines, each organization represented by delegates voting at the AGM. Meanwhile, however, a conflict was developing amongst those of the ps