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After reading James Norris’s article ‘(Overcoming) attacks on thinking: the importance of psychoanalytic thinking in surviving systemic fragmentation of the public health sector’ I felt compelled to respond with thoughts that I have held for some years. These concern the question – why does our profession remain in CAMHS? After all, it is an environment inconducive to our way of experiencing and thinking about the subjectivity of patients, their families, and the work-team environment. In the 18 years until my retirement in 2018, I was head of child psychotherapy within various large NHS Trusts, a position that gave me a seat in the Trusts’ senior management teams. These years saw my informal job description require me to be squashed between the demands of clinicians and the policy directives of Trust boards. The upside was that I learned a great deal about how the implementation of service contracts was experienced by all levels of management and clinicians. Since retirement I have been contracted as an external consultant to many mental health teams due to their staff’s low morale. Norris highlights low morale as one consequence of the removal of the need for clinicians to understand complexity in patients. He sees this removal as made almost explicit in mental health policies that have created the NICE underwritten IAPT service delivery model. Norris sees them as an attack on psychoanalytic thinking. Whilst he offers a plausible psychoanalysis of how these attacks are motivated and targeted, I do not think he gives a complete picture. This is because he locates the only origin of the attacks as outside the psychoanalytic disciplines. In being split in this way, this picture cannot be the full reality. Attacks go on within each of the mental health disciplines. Colleagues, including child psychotherapists, are rivalrous and some find their envy destructive. Then, there are the perennial rivalries between disciplines, usually motivated by the desire to acquire more