I am Heward Wilkinson.
In these turbulent times for United Kingdom psychotherapists I want to begin writing about psychotherapy.
I also happen to be Chair of the Humanistic and Integrative Psychotherapy Section (HIPS) of the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP) and this will certainly influence what I have to say, but I also want to allow myself space to think out loud about the field as a whole – and not just about the immediate political stances we may be taking and by which my responses are guided. Obviously some things I shall not be able to talk about directly – but there is plenty which is left open.
And I won’t always be writing about ‘work’ either!
What triggered me to set out today was reading – on a USA based forum I am on, F2 of Waging Dialogue:
about our British regulatory dilemma, in our very own Daily Telegraph:
This seemed very odd to me. We in the Humanistic and Integrative Psychotherapy Section are the most threatened by the current Government dispensation on Regulation
and yet we are among the most committed to it. We do not find the models being proposed by the Health Professions Council (HPC),
several of whose meetings I have attended, anything like as problematic as certain elements in Department of Health, as illustrated by that initial statement (since qualified somewhat) on the Prime Minister’s website excluding Humanistic and Integrative. Though, as Robert Elliott’s blog suggests, there is an increasing flexibility being shown, and we are currently in talks to take this further, we still have a few problems with the Department of Health initiatives, Skills for Health, and Improving Access to Psychological Therapies!
Yet we do not fear the Health Professions Council, which appears to us a most transparent and fair-minded body, – and by the way, I think the 450 ‘guidelines’ for psychoanalytic psychotherapists which the rather condensed Telegraph article, (conflating several things in a reporters’ way), talks about, derive from work done within Skills for Health Reference Groups. At the moment the HPC is simply about to embark on a Call for Ideas and on setting up a Professional Liaison Group in which the main stakeholders will have a part, and it is not predefined on what basis Regulation will be presented.
The experience we have to call on is that the Arts Psychotherapists are the only State Regulated psychotherapists within the UK at present – and they are regulated by the HPC. And their experience has been that the HPC process has not in practice been reductive or manualising of their work.
So we are finding the dismissiveness of the tone taken towards the HPC rather puzzling. We know from experience there are ways in which the identification of competencies in our work can be developed in a non-reductive fashion, and we have reason to believe that this is the case with the Arts Psychotherapies – who are hardly involved in a simple linear model of therapeutic intervention. The Standards of Proficiency for the Arts Therapists are not exactly reductive or prescriptive, except in a very generic sense.
These standards are similar to those I was familiar with from long ago as a Registered Nurse, and which more recently I am familiar with in developing Learning Outcomes in various University linked Psychotherapy trainings.
We understand the objections of our articulate Anti-Regulatory friends from the Independent Practitioners’ Network, and perhaps we understand the principled objections of a committed Lacanian like Darien Leader, but we do not believe that there is any greater problem for Psychoanalytic Practitioners than there is for us, whose work is completely based on the supremacy of the individual and the relational – or, indeed, than there would be for a confederacy of wine-tasters! (And it was the supreme wine makers in all the world, the French, who invented the Appelation Controlee system on which all we taste snobs rely!)
So I think there is a little prior bias coming in here!
And for the moment I want to say, with apologies to EM Forster, Two Cheers for the Health Professions Council.
