Robert M. Young Online Writings
'The Profession of Psychotherapy in Britain' 33k.
This is a short introduction, written to provide context for a series of talks which were given at a public meeting of the Higher Education Network for Teaching and Research in Psychoanalysis (THERIP, which was, at that time, a relatively non-sectarian body) in 1991. The talks were the first public airing of issues surrounding the creation of a listing of reputable psychotherapists in Britain. However, years of negotiation came unstuck when the psychoanalysts and those who deferred to them withdrew and founded their own organisation. It remains true that little is said in public about these matters and the machinations they have involved. I have no particular stake in either organisation and belong to both, but I came increasingly to take exception to how the breakaway organisation's advocates behaved in my own training organisation, i.e. arrogantly and contemptuously. I have ended up writing quite a lot about these matters and - as the breakaway organisation becomes more and more machiavellian - I look like contrinuing to do so. I gather that similar things happen in other countries. Several of my essays have been collected in a book The Culture of British Psychoanalysis. This essay appeared in Free Associations (No.29) 4: 79-84, 1993, where the talks to which it was an introduciton also appear.