On setting up a psychotherapy training scheme*

In the last two decades several thinkers and researchers have shown the ways in which educational institutions constrain the discourse that takes place within them, thus preventing creative growth. It might be thought that psychotherapy, an undertaking designed to give maximum freedom to self-expression, would be an exception, but unhappily this is not always the case. In our group, therefore, we try to fight the tendency to rigid hierarchy, avoid discussions conducted in jargon incomprehensible to the ordinary citizen and, while valuing the works of Freud and other major thinkers, we try not to regard them as sacred texts from which deviations should be viewed with alarm or seen as manifestations of psychopathology. In the light of these ideas it seem a worthwhile undertaking to set up a group in which people could learn the practice of psychotherapy in an atmosphere as free as possible from these limitations.

The present climate of opinion in Britain is unfavourable to such endeavours. Permissiveness — whether in school or university — tends to be regarded as an idealistic dream of the sixties and, by contrast,