Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Now

Abstract

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 organizations. 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. In order to survive and develop we need to recognize the differences that exist within our community; not to pretend we are of one mind, but instead to find a way of working together, recognizing that what binds us is much stronger then what separates us. Perhaps there is a problem for us in that psychoanalysis is so linked to the work of Freud and his corpus, that as practitioners we can become unwilling to challenge, develop, or even discard elements of practice that we find not to work. Finally, we also need to recognize that the 'now' in the title of this conference, 'psychoanalytic psychotherapy now', does actually mean 'right now'.