Talking Cure: Programme 1

I watched the first of the recent BBC series Talking Cure1, which presented the work of The Tavistock Clinic, with curiosity, excitement and anxiety. The Tavistock's decision to allow their work to be filmed and presented on TV is a breakthrough for psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, and represents a major move towards a greater openness to and engagement with the world at large. Some might argue that such openness could lead to a dilution, even destruction, of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic ideas — like mothers who cannot bear anyone intruding into their relationship with their babies, because they fear this may harm their special relationship or even the child itself. Others will suggest that this move towards a dialogue with the outside world can only be a positive and creative one and gives hope for the future growth of psychoanalysis. My own view is toward the latter, but I have some reservations. One is about the media itself, and how television can so easily trivialise serious encounters, or worse, involve the viewer in something voyeuristically perverse. On balance, the first of the series did not do this. Another important issue concerns the conflict between the need to publicise the work of psychoanalysis and the need to maintain patient confidentiality, even when the patient gives consent. In Talking Cure, patient confidentiality was breached and yet it was this very breach that gave the programme its impact — this was a real therapist doing real work with a real patient.

In his paper on Publication, Ron Britton (1999) discusses the betrayal and guilt which can be felt when we disclose patient sessions in the interests of scientific discourse carried out with colleagues. He suggests that in moving from the subjectivity of the analytic dyad to scientific objectivity, certain oedipal difficulties can be aroused, in particular, those of the father sacrificing his daughter to his continuing alliance with her mother. Britton is not questioning the necessity o