What changes your mind?

The British Psychoanalytical Council is represented on the C&P PLG for the HPC by Julian Lousada. He made two memorable interventions in the first meeting of the PLG - they were made with gusto. First he expressed his discomfort at the amount of pseudo politeness going on in the group which created a pretense thateveryone was friends and all shared the same ideas. He made the very sensible point that this was not true, and the factual point that it was known that the issue that brought them together was itself rather contentious. He called for some straight talking, and to get the issues out on the table. Gusto or not it didn't work.

Later he made a direct reference to the poor excluded group of people who talk of Principled Non Compliance. He thought that this group were isolating themselves and in effect signing their own death warrant. He made a plea that something be done to leave the door open for these poor deluded fools so they would still be able to work after the PLG had done its business.

Judging from this google entry (below), I begin to understand the force of his point, and perhaps the reasons that he made it.

At a Freud Museum Conference in 1999, he delivered a polemic against the comodification of the psy field. Below is a quote from a review of the papers of that day.

THE FUTURE OF PSYCHOTHERAPY
Saturday 20 November 1999

Getting things done' was a theme of Julian Lousada's paper 'The State We're In' in which he pointed out that the government regulation of psychotherapy services may have a negative effect on the essential value of psychotherapy. Julian Lousada is the chair of the adult department at the Tavistock Clinic, London. In a sustained polemic he argued that the trend to turn patients into 'customers' and the service into a 'commodity' is the greatest present threat to psychotherapy. By fostering this 'business state of mind' psychotherapy becomes entirely concerned with instrumental objectives, without real emotional investment. These effects have come about through a change in the form of government intervention. Whereas government used to organise the 'means of production' or supply of services, it is now more concerned with specifying outcomes - "Where government was, now audit and regulation is". This affects not only service provision, but the training of therapists. Lousada pessimistically anticipated that the 'caring professions' may be veering towards a state of mind which itself is scared of forming relationships - the deathknell, surely, of psychotherapy as we know it"