I found Sally Brampton’s account of her purgatorial passage through psychoanalysis (‘Journey through therapy’, therapy today, June 2008) highly entertaining, not least because of my own experience of four years of ‘brick wall’ therapy as I coin it. How I stuck it that long I’m not sure; except that, like so many, I assumed that I was the one with the problem, and that my confusion at the end of every session was symptomatic of my failure to understand the process. It took many more years and an education of a quite different sort to realise that what I was in fact experiencing was my therapist’s confusion. She really didn’t have a clue – or, if she did, she certainly never communicated it to me.

What I find slightly unexpected is Brampton’s conclusion that therapy should therefore be regulated; even though she then goes on to say that: ‘A great therapist is both a great teacher and a healer… A course in therapy doesn’t give someone that. Life does, or a great gene pool. Who knows?’ Precisely. The therapist I attended for four years was highly qualified, and would certainly have no difficulty with regulation, having all the right bits of paper. However, I suspect that she is as clueless about clients as she ever was.

I would understand from anecdotal evidence that personcentred counsellors are much more likely to have complaints made against them than most other modalities. Would it be unreasonable to suggest that the reason is that clients feel that, faced with a counsellor who is human and fallible, they can make a complaint, while, faced with the worst sort of expressionless ‘expert’, they lose every confidence in their own right to complain about anything? I can’t see that regulation would make the situation safer. Far from it, counsellors are much more likely to retreat behind the safety of professionalism, than to take the risk of being human and, God forbid, vulnerable.

Stepping sideways slightly, I also read with some interest the opposing arguments by Penny Spearman and Adrian Blake on presenting a united front for the profession in the face of regulation (‘Both sides now’, therapy today, June 2008).

Might I suggest an alternative: the Disunited Front. Let’s have a website where potential clients can find out about every sort of therapy, where they can read arguments for, as well as against. Let them see the dissent out in the open.
How helpful it might be to potential clients to have access to a place where the supposed benefits and shortcomings of every approach could be argued, out in the open. Alternatively, we can present a united front of regulated professionalism and good manners – and tell our clients precisely nothing.

William Johnston