The
London Society
of the New Lacanian School
15 June 2008
Darren Buxton
Skills For Health
Dear
Darren Buxton,
The action of the Skills for Health working
group on 'psychodynamic competences' is quite scandalous.
It
has has produced a draft version of what is now called the
Psychodynamic/Psychoanalytic National Occupational Standards. This
document crushes psychoanalytic practice under the weight of 451
rules that the practitioner will be required to follow in order to
comply with the competences required for working in the field of
health.
For more intelligent reading on the question of a
regulatory policy, you might wish to look at the "Guiding
Principles for Any Psychoanalytic Act", adopted by the WAP in
Rome in 2006. www.londonsociety-nls.org.uk
The so-called
'competences' were published on the SfH website:
www.skillsforhealth.org.uk
<http://www.skillsforhealth.org.uk/>
on May 28th with a deadline for this Sunday,
which permits only two weeks for the practitioner to wade
through the 451 weeds that aspire to choke his voice and, thereby,
his practice.
We
note that the 'manuals' providing the sources for these rules are
qualified by being based on 'evidence and efficacy'. In this, we can
note the shadow of a CBT intent on remaking the entire world of
psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in its own image. The clone, the
ominous figure of 451, has its own historical resonance - Fahrenheit
451 - and stands 450 degrees away from the 1st rule of
psychoanalysis: Free Association.
Why pretend that this is
psychotherapy; a talking treatment, when the basic drift of all this
is clearly to try to ensure that everyone shuts up? I can well
understand the wish to keep the unbearable utterance of the other at
bay: If one hasn't done a great deal of work in reducing one's own
distress, latent or otherwise, it is simply too much to be able to
listen to anyone else's day after day.
The predetermined
outcomes that this aspires to are just the usual drone of performance
targets, and bear no resemblance to a formation that could sustain an
engagement with the real of the drive. The drive always has its own
agenda, and we have not proved terribly good at shifting it by the
usual sticks and carrots. If we had, we wouldn't be seeking treatment
in the first place. Judging by the seriousness of the current
economic and political situation in the world, we are idiotically
deluded if we think ourselves to be masters in our own house. These
are fundamental premises of psychoanalysis, my dear man. By pursuing
this folly so relentlessly, we are writing our own death warrant.
Freud wrote about this too; see Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
Psychoanalysis is the application of ethics to the
field of the treatment of psychical distress. It aims to enable the
subject, where possible, to assume the dignity of his own symptom by
devising his/her own solutions, since these are the ones mostly
likely to have the traction to hold his impulses within a bearable
threshold. To snuff out this impossible project - impossible because
it is the imponderables of life itself that actually call the shots -
would be to cut off one's nose to spite one's face; a very small act
with very big consequences.
Regards,
Penny
Georgiou
Practicing Analyst
Chair, London Society of the NLS