Classic and modern - power play remains the same no matter what the date is

Do you remember the excitement of watching the milometer clicking over from 9999 to 10000? Do you remember the excitement of the supposed millennium-bug ten short years ago? Did you read those interesting books that came out then to teach us what we’d forgotten about zero? Georges Ifrah – The Universal History of Numbers; John D Barrow – The Book of Nothing; Robert Kaplan – The Nothing that Is; Brian Rotman – Signifying Nothing; and Charles Seife – Zero: The biography of a dangerous idea. They all reminded us that zero was an invention very tricky to grasp rationally. The first Civilisation that grappled with it, used to sacrifice members of their underclass when zero clicked over on their clock.

We’ve come a long way since then, yet there remains a certain madness that feeds off the notion of newness.

In today’s copy [Issue 2, Spring 2010] of the BPC’s (British Psycho-analytic Council) publication New Associations we find Julian Lousada (Chair of the BPC, hitherto the BCP) is quoted in bold as saying ‘in this day and age, self regulation is a dirty word’ and proceeding as if the slander is a fact. This is part of a three-page transcription of a discus-sion between Lynne Gabriel (Chair, BACP), Andrew Samuels (Chair, UKCP) and himself on the current state of HPC-play.

Lynne is quoted as saying, quite openly, that she is “challenged by [the UKCP’s] multifaceted position on regulation.” She can’t grasp the UKCP’s multi track position which recognises members who are pro-HPC and also builds a position for those who are opposed. If a future law forces people to sign up to HPC it will be even more important to establish positions of objectivity and rationality from which people can play the power implied by the new arrangement. The power that is circulating in the HPC has nothing whatsoever to do with that drawn from real work. It has even less to do with Hippocrates or Hephaestus – of which more will be said later. There is no genuine work to help hold it on course. Nor are there mechanisms by which people can call it to account. Those who pay the tax levied by the HPC are not entitled to vote. Ever. There is even less possibility of using the power of reason or argument on an ordinary everyday basis. The power in a practitioner-based organisation at least has the virtue of being linked to the rationality of knowledge and reality of praxis, as well as to a membership that can put forward arguments, call for information, and, indeed, vote. Lynne, are you saying that if a more powerful body threatens you, you must discreetly pretend otherwise, and do your best to not speak out against it?

This position finds a slightly different expression in Julian Lousada who invokes an image of a ‘good citizenship’ in order to thwart opposition (“The problem is that PNC [principled non compliance] is not a strategy of citizenship, it’s a strategy of individualism.” p3). Under what conditions does a man of such education, experience and position, seek to short-circuit a debate? Earlier in the piece he presented a slightly more ambiguous position which saw some value in a dissenting citizen: “My sense is that a combination of robust opposition (to the HPC as regulator) and the sustained discussions that we’ve been having with them on the same issues have together resulted in their [HPC] acknowledgement that there will have to be a substantial rewrite (of the generic standards of proficiency) in order to accommodate us. Perhaps wrongly, I trust that they are going to do that…” I’d like to ask Julian: on what grounds do you place your trust – it looks very much like an identification? And from the slippage in your position you have already answered who you think should be sacrificed – those who robustly challenge the HPC.

Dr Gabriel states openly that she is (and others are) pursuing HPC regulation to gain status, respectability, and money (p3). It would be a relief to hear this acknowledged more widely as the reason, and to ask how it fits in with the more usual rhetoric about ‘protecting the public’. Throughout the conversation Lynne talks about what the HPC will do, is going to do, has promised to do. She ignores the fact that the process, according to the HPC (and which her organisation has been an active participant in for at least the last 18 months) should by now be over!

I think it worth noting in passing that the word ‘modern’ is supposed to denote NOW, something happening in the moment, not the future, and much less in the conditional, and to remark that the only reason the HPC is still making promises (the proposed new generic standards, the proposed new FTP process, the proposed new changes to GP statements re health etc, etc, etc) is because active individual subjects took the time, trouble, and inconvenience, to remind everyone of the necessity to think.

There are two other articles in this BPC paper that I’m going to mention. The first is written in a very strange style and is placed (on page 9) in opposition to an essay by Andrew Samuels (which is entitled Regulation: do we have a choice? and appears on p8). It has no attributed author, but is presented under an Orwellian pseudonym: INGEGRITY. This turns out to be the cover for a group calling itself Integrating Social Responsibility into Psychological Therapies (ISRPT), which is described as “a number of practitioners [who] have recently come together to form a new group called Integrity that supports statutory regulation under the Health Professions Council”. We are not told who these people are. The mystification grows ever thicker as the text takes up the style of journalistic objectivity: ‘Integrity is a new body promoting statutory regulation … It came from a group of practitioners who were [sic] interested in working constructively with the government … Integrity say they want to gather voices… They want to harness our profession’s vision … The group says that regulation will free up access to funding… They want us … They believe that an independent regulator is vital in the 21st century… The group point to several facts… They claim that … ” Etc, etc, etc. It is only in the final paragraph that the author appears to acknowledge his or her relation with ISRPT, tho there is still some room for doubt: “It is the belief of INTEGRITY that if we enter into an effective partnership with HPC, they [the HPC] will become fit for purpose”. If the author is in fact not INTEGRITY, then INTEGRITY appears in the text like a kind of all knowing, all powerful presence: “It is the belief of INTEGRITY that if we enter into…” What on earth is going on here, and why does the BPC, in the voice of Malcolm Allen,‘welcome’ (p1)?

Finally, CEO Malcolm Allen (whose evident love of the classics does not stop him from using of a less sophisticated kind of power) writes the front-page news. Although he book ends his piece with two classical references (a quote from Hippocrates, and a reference to Hephaestus) the bulk of the text simply pushes the reader to buckle under the HPC. Malcolm, do you really think that Hephaestus would have earned his reputation in history if, seeking power, money and status, he had buckled under such a regime?