ABSTRACT
The United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy is embracing the language of government and economics: commonly used words such as “competencies”, “consumer”, “skills”, “outcomes” are signifiers of state organization and intervention. Critics found in the psychoanalysis of S. Freud and many of his followers who gathered within the International Psychoanalytical Association intentions, unconscious or otherwise, to normalize, control, and contain analysands and return them to an ideal of conformity as represented by the nuclear family. The push towards statutory registration specifying competencies, which all trainings are supposed to comply with, falls into a similar trap. In England, in the training of clinicians, there has been a tradition of a single-theory approach. The “mapping of competencies” document, together with the push towards statutory registration, which appears to some to offer a strengthening of the position of the therapist, seems far more likely to generate a form of dependency or even enslavement to the politically led, dominant ideology of centralized mastery.
