ABSTRACT
Since the establishment of national organisations such as the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy and the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy that govern psychotherapy and counselling in the UK there has been an on-going discourse about the pros and cons of the professionalisation and regulation of the talking cures. Janet, a contemporary of Freud, noticed that people who had been traumatised became arrested in some way. Freud observed similar phenomena in his patients and, initially, came to the conclusion that their “hysterical” symptoms were caused by having been seduced in childhood, causing them to be “doomed to repeat” the original trauma rather than to remember it. People with personality disorders can be seen to having interpersonal and behavioural patterns that are limited in range and that are “maladaptive”. Fragile self-process is always a complex and relational process involving another person or internal and external conditions.
