Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Now

These are hard times for our professional community. We not only feel ourselves, and our disciplines, to be under attack; often we rightly perceive that we are. These are also hard times in the wider world in which we live, characterised by social and political concerns about extremism and violence, the collapse of our economic and financial containers, anxiety about employment and insecurity in older age, and a loss of belief and trust in our democratic structures.

As practitioners we come together with different preoccupations, viewing our professional world from a number of different vantage points: from child and adolescent, family and adult work; from private and public sector practice; and then from the many different strands within and between our professional organisations. Instead of trying to encompass this diversity, I want to speak from my own personal experience, as a psychoanalyst, psychiatrist and healthcare manager, and to choose as my vantage point today the positioning of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy within the NHS and broader public sector. For clarification at the outset, when I talk about psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy I will be including both child, family and adult, and both individual and group analytic work under those headings.

As ever, when under pressure (not to say fearing for our survival) we cleave along our fault lines; along the boundary between inside and outside; but also within our own family, between ‘true believers’ and ‘collaborators’ - those who covertly, perhaps even unconsciously, seek to destroy the object of our love as opposed to protecting it; the only problem being that each of us believes ourselves to be in the true believer group!

In this way we form camps, and draw lines around those camps. We kindly offer interpretations to each other; or we accuse other camps of what to us are terrible crimes; of folly or stupidity, of turning away from reality, of turning towards the death instinc