Renewal and Social Justice

In 2013, Harvey Taylor, a British Psychoanalyst, wrote a groundbreaking paper for the British Psychoanalytic Council (BPC) (Taylor, 2013). In this he proposed that key historical and institutional decisions have led inexorably to the current crisis in which psychoanalysis in the UK finds itself. This crisis takes the form of the almost complete disappearance of psychoanalytic work in the National Health Service (NHS), a chronic lack of candidates for psychoanalytic training, and the lack of a significant voice in public policy and debate.

This lack of voice is particularly noticeable at present, as the UK is in the middle of a revolution in mental health. Successful campaigning for “parity of esteem” between physical and mental health has led to considerable investment in new health service provision and there is a growing groundswell of public debate on the importance of destigmatising those suffering from mental health issues. Depression and other forms of illness are being discussed everywhere, with celebrities and parliamentarians sharing the issues they have faced in their own mental health. The UK government is even planning to locate psychotherapy within job centres in recognition of the links between depression and unemployment. The absence of the psychoanalytic voice in these developments is striking and leads to the conclusion that psychoanalysis is indeed out in the cold. In his article, Taylor argues that it has been psychoanalysis's individualistic approach that has led to the profession failing to build a psychoanalytic coalition. If psychoanalysis had built this broad and diverse coalition, it would have had both a collective voice and the ability to affiliate with other significant, powerful institutions—institutions that could, for instance, have contributed to the development of a convincing evidence base … something that is sorely lacking. (The Tavistock Depression Study (TADS) is a noticeable exception (Fonagy et al., 2015) as the first randomised