Hornby, S., Herst, E. (London) The Application of Psychodynamic Understanding to Organisations in the Helping Services. (Papers from the Public Conference organised in November 1988 by the Jungian Training Committee of the  British Association of Psychotherapists). 1989.

Hornby, in a paper entitled ‘A psychodynamic approach to the collaborative problems of practitioners working in the community’, makes the point that the potential for helping in the community is enormous. She goes on to discuss the need for collaboration of patient and agencies in order to enchance contributive efforts in the face of competitive strife. To this end and to combat isolation of individual workers, she makes an excellent case for cross-disciplinary group discussions based on trust and analytic work.

Dr Herst's talk, ‘The collaborative problems of an analytically based hospital psychiatrist’, not prepared for publication, is provocative and clearly intended to evoke discussion. Hence my disappointment in finding no word about the ensuing remarks from members of the audience. This is particularly sad as Herst raises at least five highly charged issues: the huge numbers of patients continuing to flood into psychiatric outpatient clinics; the still far from yielding barriers to discussion between the biochemically oriented and the psycho-dynamically based clinicians; ignorance of some appointing authorities in judging the authenticity of would-be psychiatrists of differing disciplines; ambivalence among British National Health Service authorities towards appointment of psycho-dynamically oriented psychiatrists; the competitive rather than the contributive attitudes of proprietorial sects within the psychotherapeutic profession itself.

Herst is informative about the attitudes and recommendations of the Royal College of Psychiatrists to these problems, thereby stimulating yet more questions in his listeners, questions which, in themselves, would have added interest and weight to his talk. The gloomy climate pervading the early pages of his contribution to this conference lightens in his final section, in which he describes his own solution to many of the difficulties.

By the end of this short, wide-ranging talk Herst looks forward to better-educated trainee psyc