A Night at the Opera: The Freudians at Covent Garden

Although Great Britain boasts approximately eight thousand psychotherapists registered with either the British Psychoanalytic Council or the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy—the two principal professional bodies for psychotherapists in this country—we have, at present, only thirty-five fully accredited marital psychotherapists, or, as we have recently become known, "couple psychoanalytic psychotherapists." After much spirited debate, our tiny, intrepid band changed its name from the Society of Psychoanalytical Marital Psychotherapists (the official grouping of the graduates of the Tavistock Centre's training in marital psychotherapy) to the Society of Couple Psychoanalytic Psychotherapists, in an effort to reflect the fact that many of the "marital" couples with whom we work nowadays may never have exchanged jewelry or paperwork, or may, in fact, be gay or lesbian. So, the term "marital psychotherapy" has become superseded by the moniker "couple psychotherapy," at least in Great Britain. Our American colleagues, so I understand, still refer to themselves as "M.F.T.'s"—Marriage and Family Therapists.

As couple psychotherapists in Great Britain, we do important work, helping often deeply troubled couples through long-term psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy, hoping thereby that they may recapture the joys that they had once experienced together. Why, then, do we have only thirty-five fully accredited clinical members of our professional organization, especially when we have a population of some 45,000,000 adults, most of whom live in a marital or cohabiting arrangement? Our training at the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships, part of the Tavistock Institute of Medical Psychology, demands a great deal of time and effort, like any intensive psychoanalytic training. The clinical trainees generally undergo five or six years of study—and often longer—in order to complete their postgraduate diploma, treating at least six couples successfully in long-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Many of the students will already have completed an individual psychoanalytic training, so we do not attract, on the whole, young energetic students; rather, we appeal to older, we hope wiser, trainees, who will, however, also be burdened by extensive domestic and professional commitments. This explains, to a certain extent, our relatively small numbers.

One might understand the dearth of marital practitioners in Great Britain by recourse to external factors (such as age, time commitment, cost, etc.), but I suspect that there may be a far more important reason why colleagues often neglect marital work as a possible field of specialization. Not only does couple work force us to question the strength and creativity of our own primary relationship, but as couple psychotherapists, we must spend a great deal of our working lives in the presence of warring couples, depressed couples, hypersexual couples, hyposexual couples, mentally ill couples, forensic couples, bereaved couples, and the like. Not only does the nature of the work stretch our psychological digestive capacities, but also it requires us to tolerate being a "third" party in an oedipal triangle; and as many of us may already have felt excluded from such triangular experiences as infants and children, we may find ourselves avoiding the marital situation as a defense against having to tolerate triangulation.

Whatever the ultimate explanation for the sheer paucity of couple psychoanalytic psychotherapists in Great Britain, those few of us who have made a lifelong, passionate commitment to the work continue to struggle to find ways to generate interest in our field, both among our individual psychoanalytic colleagues, and among members of the public alike, many of whom might require our services, or might benefit from them, and who, because of our small numbers, do not even know of our existence.

Some years ago, my very charismatic colleague Pauline Hodson, then Chair of the Society of Couple Psychoanalytic Psychotherapists, twisted my arm and encouraged me to serve on the Executive Committee of our dogged group of marital workers. Knowing of my involvement in the media, as a presenter of both radio programs and television programs dealing with mental health issues, Pauline thought that I might be able to make a contribution to the "public face" of couple psychoanalytic psychotherapy in Great Britain. At our first committee meeting, one...