A MOLE LEAVES HIS HOLE

Abstract

This paper uses the example of setting up a community-based adolescent psychotherapy and counselling service to explore the difficulties and anxieties that can arise when psychoanalytic practitioners venture out of the consulting room to become involved in planning and organizing services. Emphasis is placed on the complications of such a task in a climate of rapid change, when levels of anxiety, fuelled in many different ways, can threaten the viability of the task one is engaged in. The author argues that in a political climate that is generally not very supportive of psychoanalysis, it is possible none the less for psychoanalytic ideas to have an important impact on how psychological services can develop, and this in itself can challenge many of the preconceptions about psychoanalytic practitioners that one can be confronted with when one leaves the comfort of the consulting room.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank David Travatt, my ‘partner in crime’, and Nicola Woodward, for the metaphor of therapists as moles, and for encouraging me to leave my particular mole hole.