June 14th 2008.

 

Dear Mr Buxton,

 

I have worked within the National Health Service for nearly twenty years; prior to that for over five years in the voluntary sector. My appointment was at Clin Psyc B in psychotherapy; following AFC I am a psychotherapist at 8c

 

During my professional career in the NHS, I have worked with CAT, group analytic therapy, psychoanalytic therapy, and with psychoanalysis

 

I write to object to both the content and and process of your lists.

 

Psychoanalysis as far as I understand is enabling for many people, not for everyone, and in addition can indeed be a dangerous and threatening procedure.

 

This threat of psychoanalysis also coincides with its greatetest benefit because much of its work is with desire and unconscious phantasies.

 

Usurping everyday consciousness by unconscious desire, or even preconscious desire, can indeed be uncomfortable and subversive.

 

1) With regard to the content of these proposals I do not recognize my own practice of psychoanalysis in them whatsoever. They seem to me to take the "psycho" out of analysis so that its dynamism is anaesethized for both the analysand/client and the analyst/practitioner.

 

2) Regarding the process of forming and implementing these standards, I object for the following reasons. Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, never wrote a treatise on method despite entreaties from his followers. This was because he realized that the process of analysis is for ever changing -and may even need to be invented anew by each analysand, client, patient. He was thus sceptical that psychoanalysis could be reduced to a list of does and don't do. The practitioners who demand such frameworks automatically exclude themselves for being analysts or therapists. They are uneasy with the threats, usurption, and dangers posed by unconscious desire and phantasizing. Any anyalst -whether Freudian or Jungian- will know that the answer to this situation involves the practitioner realizing their own limitiations by ceasing to practice in this way or -better- offering themselves for more analysis.

 

Every communication -even standards like this- have unconscious elements, demands, and desires.

 

It seems to me that demands or desires for control, classification, and protection are pre-analytic and unformed by any real notion of what analysis might, and does, involve. Of both its threats and potential benefits.

 

 

Mark Fisher

Liverpool.

drmarkfisher@axis-connect.com