The Psychotherapist and the Professional Complaint: The Shadow Side of Psychotherapy

Patients should be safe and have the power to complain when things go wrong. Equally, so should the therapist. Curiously, there are no procedures in place to protect the psychotherapist from being abused by their patients. This omission is particularly glaring regarding

complaints: the current complaint procedure, unintentionally, punishes even the innocent therapist.

In The Psychotherapist and the Professional Complaint, the authors explore this dilemma with sensitivity and rigour. Amongst these chapters, the contributors examine how to constructively deal with conflict, the role of professional unions in protecting their members and the current complaint procedures in NHS services. This hopeful book provides essential support for professionals and policymakers in the field of psychotherapy.

Contents:

Introduction

Part 1: Receiving a complaint: experience and reflections

Adah Sachs: The psychotherapist, the profession and the professional complaint

Fiona Farley: When healing is halted by fear

Anne Kearns: Love and hate in the time of Covid

Kay Beaumont: A constructive way of dealing with conflict

Valerie Sinason: Complaints in the field of dissociative disorders: six key categories

Part 2: Professional complaints: the past

Brett Kahr: Filing psychoanalytical complaints in the pre-ethical era: from verbal assaults to the crushing of the larynx

Lesley Ironside: Serving two masters; a patient, a therapist and an allegation of sexual abuse

Emerald Davies in interview with Valerie Sinason: Then and now: a historical perspective

Part 3: Professional complaints: towards the future

Philp Stokoe: The unique nature of boundaries in psychoanalytic therapy and the implication for ethics and complaints procedures

Romanie Dekker & Rajnish Attavar: Complaints and incident procedures for clinicians in the NHS

Philip Cox: Uses, misuses and abuses of Fitness to Practise processes

Philp Cox, Richard Bagnall-Oakley, Sasha Kaplin: The Psychotherapy and Counselling Union: therapists supporting therapists through complaints

processes

Julie Norris & Andrew Campbell: Reform