Psychotherapy and counselling: from cottage industry to factory production – can we survive, and do we want to?

Abstract

This article reports on a conference designed to explore whether something has gone seriously wrong with the psychological therapies. While through the state's Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) programme more people are having psychotherapy and counselling, is this through the psychological therapies becoming an industrial process requiring technicians? Is our work and training fundamentally changing with call centres, state regulation and manualization in addition to the overall ills of neoliberalism? In different ways William Morris, John Ruskin and Karl Marx saw the move from cottage industry to factory production as leading to a deterioration in working people's quality of life. Rather than the intrinsic pleasures of the work itself, instead money compensates for our working time, which leads to consumption as the external source of pleasure. Consideration is given as to whether this is also becoming increasingly true of the work of psychotherapists and counsellors, and increasingly inevitable for their working clients.

Keywords:

• critical
• psychotherapy
• counselling
• Morris
• Ruskin
• Marx

Disclaimer

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Del Loewenthal is Professor of Psychotherapy and Counselling, and Director of the Research Centre for Therapeutic Education, at the University of Roehampton. He originally trained as a humanistic counsellor at South West London College and the University of Surrey, and subsequently as an existential-analytic psychotherapist at the Philadelphia Association. He is chair of UPCA and practises in Wimbledon and Brighton. His recent books include Post-existentialism and the Psychological Therapies: Towards a Therapy without Foundations (2011), Phototherapy and Therapeutic Photography in a Digital Age (2013), Relational Psychotherapy, Psychoanalysis and Counselling (2014, with Andrew Samuels) and Critical Psychotherapy, Psychoanalysis and Counselling (2015).