Ideology and Politics in the Struggle to Regulate the Talking Therapies: The rise and fall of the HPC plans, 2006-2011

This thesis offers a discourse analytic account, informed by Lacanian psychoanalysis, of the 2006-2011 struggle over plans to make the Health Professions Council (HPC) statutory regulator of the field of counselling and psychotherapy in the UK. I contextualise the plans in relation to the Government’s parallel Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) programme and the Skills for Health (SfH) project to map competencies within the field. These projects, along with HPC regulation, promised to render practice safe and effective. However, the HPC plans were seen by some as a threat to diversity within the field and were met with resistance from the (especially formed) Alliance for Counselling and Psychotherapy Against State Regulation. I assess these competing evaluations and argue that the HPC plans would have advanced a ‘transactional’ orientated regime, in which the field would have been assimilated to a more consumerist mould, and that in contrast, the Alliance were seeking to defend a more ‘contextual’ and ‘relational’ conceptualisation of practice in which expertise tends to be seen as co-created between client and practitioner. The HPC adopted a series of bald strategies to marginalise opposition voices, conditioned in part by structural features of the policy making process and supported by a ‘problem minority’ narrative in which inherent uncertainties about what counts as good and effective talking therapy are eclipsed from view. The Alliance, for its part, I argue, tended at times to espouse a position close to talking therapy exceptionalism, thus eclipsing similarities with more contextual healthcare imaginaries. I examine how fantasy provided these positions with affective ‘grip.’ Policy implications for regulation and policy making process are drawn out. More broadly, my account contributes to literature that questions the often-supposed democratising nature and inevitability of highly calculative forms of regulation and audit within arenas of indeterminate professional work, where enhancing practitioner responsivity to unique elements within each context they find themselves is arguably more efficacious and democratic in character.