​The foundations of our own professions are deeply set in strata of politics, money and social class yet we are not expected to discuss it with our peers let alone with our clients.
 
There is evidence that Freud exaggerated his parents’ lowly background and experienced ‘poorhouse neurosis’: the ‘irrational and deep-seated fear that an individual and his family were on the verge of being placed in the poorhouse because they lacked any funds.’ His peers disliked his refusal to work for no fee, which he justified by speculating that free treatment created a transference-countertransference problem, an issue that remains current.
 
During WW1 ordinary soldiers were diagnosed by psychoanalysts with ‘hysteria’ while officers experienced ‘neurasthenia’ when both were suffering shell shock. Ordinary men were returned to war in far greater numbers than officers.
 
And so on into our own time, where the financial costs of training on top of basic fees include supervision, personal therapy and often hundreds of hours of compulsory unpaid work. The filtering of the rich to become therapists from the poor to become clients is straightforward – but ignored.
 
As a profession we uncritically leaped at the idea of working with the Department of Work and Pensions when offered employment to make unemployed people return to work. We will choose to pay to work as part of a system that has been unequivocally shown to damage practitioners and patients, because the system is seen to be prestigious. That system, IAPT, was created by an economist specialising in the costs to the State of unemployment who theorised that IAPT would be funded by a reduction in unemployment benefits.
 
Until very recently, our professions ignored these glaring problems. It is only when our own incomes became affected by austerity, in the form of increasing costs not being met by decreasing income, that we have begun to take note.
 
In the meantime we have returned to Victorian understandings of class and income, where unemployment and the entitlement to state benefits is a symptom either of moral degeneracy or mental illness, the cure for both being work – often unpaid.
 
How might the requirement for therapists to complete compulsory unpaid work sit with the increasing numbers of clients who have been forced into compulsory unpaid work? How might our unconscious responses to people who are unemployed be influenced by our own class backgrounds and our own limited opportunities for paid work? How might our individual class cultures affect our relationships with and expectations of different kinds of clients?  How might the fear of the food bank and a brutal benefits system be projected onto clients?
 
The personal is political, and the political very personal.
 
Please join us on December 16th to learn more and to contribute to this neglected but fundamental subject.

Leicester Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Centre,
15 Wellington Street
LE1 6HH
 
£40
 
To book please email clareslaneycounselling@gmail.com