CORRESPONDENCE

Confused or Invisible

Dear SirHere is a letter which you can publish if you want to, or send to Camilla Bosanquet

if you want to. I just had to write it.I've been feeling invisible again. It happened once before, and I wrote to this Journal

about it, and it led to an interesting correspondence with Bob Hinshelwood which waslater published (Vol. 4, p. 142). This time it is as a result of reading the article byCamilla Bosanquet entitled `The Confusion of Tongues and the Rugby Conference' (Vol.5, p. 228). Now I have been a pretty regular attender at the Rugby Conference (now ofcourse transmogrified into the UKSCP, an uninspiring set of initials) and I lookedforward to a good article living up to the fascinating title.

After all, the Rugby Conference is, or should I say was (these changes of title are abit confusing), more or less the only place where you could see eminent psychoanalystsplaying encounter games, or gestalt therapists smiling over their beers at some of themore fascinating analysts. To say something about the difficulties of communication insuch circumstances would be difficult but probably worth reading.

This is particularly so since there is not only the relationship between psychoanalystsand humanistic psychotherapists, but also the even more complex relationships betweenboth of these and child therapists, family therapists, cognitive and behavioural therapists,hypnotherapists and so forth, all grist for the mill, one might have thought.

The one which interests me most, of course, as a humanistic and transpersonalpsychotherapist is the relationship between the analytic sections and the humanistic andintegrative section. The former comprises twenty-eight organisations (in the uncorrectededition of the Yellow Pages for 1989) and the latter fourteen. None of the other sectionsis anything like these sizes so this represents a major division within the conference. (Ofcourse, as they never cease to point out, the behavioural psychotherapy sectioncomprises about 2500 members, so in a sense it is the biggest training organisationwithin the conference, but it has only one vote - an interesting phenomenon and onewhich might itself be worthy of some attention.)

So when I looked through the article, which covers twelve pages and hence was notcramped for space, I hoped to see something about all the sections, but particularly aboutthe humanistic and integrative section which has after all made quite a considerablemark on the conference and has I believe got further with working out its identity and itscriteria than any other section.

But not a word.Not a jot, not a tittle, not an iota.In the introductory section of the article there is this sentence: `This paper focuses on

the general difficulty and importance of language, particularly certain words, in thevarious psychotherapy organisations'. This raised my hopes as did the title of the nextsection of the article: Language and the Formation of Groups. But as I read on for thepromise of something which would include me and the organisations with which I amfamiliar, hope was deferred again and again. In the third section of the article, we got

Correspondence 603

the title which revealed something a bit closer to the real point of the piece: ThePerceptions and Language of Freud and Jung Compared. The next section is aboutJung, and so is the one after. Now it is clear that the writer is coming from a Jungianposition. The next section, a rather brief one, is about the problems of thepsychoanalysts. (Isn't it funny how the analysts call themselves Psycho-Analysts, andeveryone else calls them psychoanalysts?)

The article goes on to discuss the problems within the analytical psychotherapysection of the conference. But the next section goes to the very quick of the writer'sconcerns. She says in introducing it: `They have led me to look into the history of thecoveted terms "psychoanalyst" and "Jungian analyst"'). The use of the word `coveted'here is significant and I think represents the central issues of the article - status, prestigeand pride. This is an article about Who is really Who, rather than What is really What.

The article closes with a short piece about translation and a pious hope thatpsychotherapy will one day be unified. Well, I can tell Camilla Bosanquet that there is nohope of the profession being unified so long as people can write articles like this. Asevery therapist knows, there is no dealing with a problem until it is recognised, until it isbrought out of the shadows and made visible.

To put this more pointedly and personally, you can't make any proper decisionsinvolving the Rugby Conference (or UKSCP) until all of the Rugby Conference is visibleto you. Or perhaps (the chilling thought strikes) I don't really exist, perhaps I am just anillusion, perhaps there is no humanistic and integrative section within the UKSCP? Butin that case (I reassure myself) why am I there, as large as life, in the Yellow Pages? Butperhaps (I frighten myself again) there really are no Yellow Pages; perhaps the YellowPages are just an illusion too, just a list of would-be members of something which mightexist if it had any members. The shadows gather about me. Where is reality?

John Rowan

Dear John RowanI am sorry I have been the cause of your feeling invisible again. It certainly wasn't

my intention.My article wasn't meant to be an overview of the Rugby Conference as a whole but

only about the bizarre language which made definitions and communication so confused.This, I experienced in the analytic and analytical psychotherapy sections in which I wasinvolved. I was under the impression, perhaps wrongly, that your section of Humanisticand Integrative Psychotherapy was relatively harmonious, its language intelligible and,in the context of my paper, unremarkable; in the same way that successful marriages orwomen who haven't been raped are unremarkable when these subjects are underdiscussion.

The first part of my paper, `Language and the Formation of Groups' was supposed tobe about groups in general including yours as much as anyone else's, but perhaps itdoesn't apply to yours?

I used the term `coveted' in relation to the terms psychoanalyst and Jungian analystdeliberately because that was exactly what I meant. I said that the `term analysis hasbecome a colloquial term notable for its high prestige value rather than its specificmeaning.' Its specific meaning has got buried and needs to be disinterred. At the RugbyConference its prestige value in our section was particularly evident. I was deploringrather than condoning this because the political issue had obscured any discussion aboutwhat we actually do. Although some organisations took an independent view their voiceswere hard to hear amid the clamour of the others.

I quite agree with you that we should be discussing what we do but the subject of myarticle was the confused language which bedevils our understanding of this so it wasnaturally more about who we are and how we express ourselves. I hope that now the `United Kingdom Standing Conference of Psychotherapy' has been inaugurated we shallall feel less threatened and able to discuss what we actually do.

I am sorry there wasn't a `jot' or even a `tittle' about you. As a fellow sufferer fromfeeling invisible you have my sympathy. Leaving aside the somewhat unfavourableanalytic concepts concerning this phenomenon what about the magic gift of invisibilitybestowed by the powers that be to those undertaking otherwise impossible tasks. Howwould Jack the giant killer have managed if he hadn't been given a cloak to make himinvisible? Perhaps we should all have been overcome by giants and monsters real orillusory.

Camilla Bosanquet