ABSTRACT
Experiences of managing play groups or union activity add to the referent power of individual qualified practitioners, but are not generally considered as relevant at the level of applications for clinical psychology training. Within the Department, the majority of psychological therapists conducted themselves along conservative lines. Articles published in mainstream journals in order to garner cultural capital should be referenced accordingly; unreferenced articles are rejected or dismissed as "personal opinion". Professional psychology is not entirely devoid of humour. Teachers, therapists, experts, all of us, pretend. Politicians, at the mercy of the press, have pretentions stripped away on a daily basis. Psy lecturers face inevitable accusations of at least bad faith, if not dishonesty. Promoting a particular form of therapy may involve citing research disproving efficacy of other therapies with no acknowledgement of difficulty of researching relationships, the vested interest of researchers or, ironically in a discipline devoted to the importance of the individual subject, the uniqueness of every therapeutic encounter.
