Fonagy's faith in the chemicals of the brain

The recently published list of people selected to sit on the professional liaison group for the HPC as it approaches the question of regulating counselling and psychotherapy includes the Freud Memorial Professor of Psychoanalysis at University College London, Professor Peter Fonagy. However, on the plg, he is neither credited with his academic title, nor his professional one, but appears as a representative of a Government Ministry: Skills for Health.

Peter Fonagy is a prolific writer and a busy manager - but it is difficult to square his current work with the aims of psychoanalysis. For example, he has abandoned the idea of the patient as a human subject in favour of the fashion for Gold Standard's of Objectivity. Under his directorship an era of randomised controlled trials was been ushered into the work at the Anna Freud Centre. Another quite alarming report appeared in the Times Newspaper about a year ago. It also appeared as a little news item reported in Therapy Today - the BACP monthly magazine:

"Toddler brains scanned for neglect" (From The Times, May 12, 2007, by Jo Carlowe - click heading for link)

"Psychologist Peter Fonagy, chief executive of the Anna Freud Centre, wants the Government to routinely scan toddler brains to discover signs of neglect - in order to find which children may grow up to be a nervous wreck, a criminal or a psychopath if early intervention is not made. 'The idea would be for parents to check if their kid's socio-emotional development is as expected. There would be no stigma attached,' he says. 'If a child needed a little developmental help, they could be put into a remedial programme, such as psychotherapy.' Fonagy has already started to scan infants to track differences between 'normal' brains and those of children who are neglected and unloved. The aim is to ensure that a child grows up mentally healthy."

quoted from BACP magazine Therapy Today, June 2007, vol 18, No 5 p26

This is quite a backward version of psychotherapy, and quite a contentious view of child development. It is also quite a cynical use of brain scan technology. Rather than appealing to argument and reason to put the case for the link between a child's love relations and his or her destiny, Fonagy appears to be playing the 'government funding game'.