ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis in social theory is all well and good, but I was also beginning to be more interested in how it worked out in practice, and how to make sense of competing approaches to psychotherapy in the British National Health Service. We can see here how psychoanalytic ideas have needed to adapt themselves to health institutions in order to survive. Bit by bit, by engaging more with the theory and exploring how it worked from the inside, and lured in further by the idea that I could be an amateur anthropologist in the strange world of psychoanalytic psychotherapy, I was getting drawn into clinical work.
