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The deep unconscious contact of the psychotherapy consulting room can be risky for both patient and therapist; patients of registered psychotherapists in the UK are protected by codes of ethics and complaints processes developed and enforced by the psychotherapy and counselling professional bodies (or the National Health Service (NHS), for patients in the public system). This edited collection of essays provides critical perspectives on professional complaint processes, starting from the personal experiences of patient complaints received by its editors, experienced clinicians Adah Sachs and Valerie Sinason.
There is currently little literature on professional complaints in psychotherapy; this collection is especially unusual because it foregrounds the risk that a patient's unconscious aggression poses to therapists when magnified through the lens of a professional complaint and subsequent misconduct process and asks what further protection therapists need. It is divided into three parts: clinicians' personal accounts of complaints, historical perspectives and proposals for future reform.
In Part I, the contributors vividly set out several examples of patient complaints about their therapists from the perspective of the therapist. We hear from therapists who have been accused by their patients of lacking professional care, of being unqualified to practice and even of physical and sexual abuse. The clinicians describe their shock and hurt at being accused: Sachs ‘couldn't think at all’ (p. 4); another therapist ‘was….bombarded by un-wanted communications from [the patient] and … it was beginning to make [her] ill.’ (p. 30); a third felt ‘split into fragments’ (p. 49). The reader is left with a vivid impression of how shaming it can be for a therapist to receive a complaint from a patient, and how deeply the risk to their professional reputations and livelihoods can be felt, even when the allegations are obviously false. The contributors acknowledge that complaints are