Within capitalist "techniques-based" societies, there is a pattern of tolerating inventiveness, experimentation, creativity (and their companions - individual crankiness, eccentricity and idiosyncrasy) followed by periods of control through licensing, patents laws, accreditation, certification and the whole panoply of professionalisation. The social and psychological function of this pattern seems to be as follows: a top-down consumerist society has to attempt, or at least be seen to be attempting, to satisfy the ever-increasing demands and expectations of its members, which it fosters, with a steady stream of the "new", the more "efficient", the "modern", the "safer", in order to legitimise the fictions of progress and the ever improving "quality of life" that sustain it. However, during the period of spontaneous creativity, "dangerous" ideas projects/ inventions/thoughts are likely to be thrown up which, if allowed into general currency would threaten the very basis of the social structure, e.g. the idea that poverty can be eradicated; the possibility that most peoples' lives could be more joyous, healthier, freer; deep and thorough-going critiques of patriarchy and capitalism. These and many other radical ideas and inventions and creations have to be nipped in the bud before they spread a more general disaffection and questioning of priorities.

Bureaucracy of the prophetic
The process whereby social control is maintained and the ideas, inventions and images that can profitably be utilised within the existing social set-up are hived off from the potentially "dangerous" tendencies of creative thought and imagination is primarily bureaucratisation. Bureaucratisation was seen by the great German sociologist Max Weber (and imagised by Franz Kafka and others) as the primary feature of modern technological societies. The process whereby the "useful" creative tendencies are isolated and compartmented off from the "dangerous" creative tendencies he called the "bureaucratisation of the prophetic". Other writers have referred to this process as one of "pulling the teeth off the tiger", emasculation of the bull" and so forth. Freud's ego, id, superego model expresses in psychological terms a comparable dynamism. The heart of the imagery is that the wildness, iconoclasm and potential dangerousness of creative thought and imagination has to be tamed, anaesthetised, and rendered anaemic in order to be safe for social consumption.

When the bureaucratising apparatus itself proves too costly for late-capitalism to maintain as a social defence in depth, the system bares its teeth and resorts to simpler but no less effective means to isolate and neutralise the threat from below; firstly the media is harnessed to slander, ridicule and hence isolate the proponents and the followers of revolutionary thought that gains public attention; secondly much else - fuel-saving technologies are a case in point - dies of neglect (selective inattention); and finally the professions are leant on to get their houses in order, close ranks and pronounce authoritatively on what is legitimate, "possible", "realistic" or "true", in the current state of social reality and what is not. The professions and the media become the umpires of social reality by screening and policing the cultural atmosphere defining what and who is wise, politic, dangerous, sensible within the parameters of the pre- determined social reality. Whenever the social construction of reality becomes blurred, uncertain, confusing, politicians, professionals and media are called on to predefine by pre-digesting it. Social anxiety is allayed and isolated from too close a contact with those voices that might speak directly to it, awakening it to its own deep inner sense of alienation. Humanistic psychotherapy has always been potentially just one of those voices in modern societies; people have started to listen to it, and now humanistic psychotherapy is being professionalised (ostensibly to come into line with that super-bureaucracy, the E.E.C). What is the cultural significant of this as sociological process, what do we need to look out for, what legitimations and rationalisations of this process are we being sold, swallowing and selling to others?

Masking and Mystifying
The first point that I have been making is the obvious one. Professionalisation is a social process, not a psychological one to be understood sociologically, first and foremost. A profession which stresses insight and awareness and personal responsibility is not exempt fr~m the sociological process. The first step towards not losing larger vision in the process is to be aware of where this process is coming from. Hopefully what I have written thus far can serve at least as the beginning of a background caveat - others can, I'm sure, sketch it in more fully.

Secondly the usual arguments in favour of social controls like professionalisation always stress the interest of the client/consumer, the safeguards against fraud, quackery, charlatanism, well-meaning incompetence and the like, the greater range of service to clients/consumers, and the wider audience (market) that respectability and control will bring. When I say the "usual arguments" I mean that we are dealing here with "rationalisations" and "legitimations" that are routinely wheeled-out to mask and mystify what is really going on. So what is really going on?

The wool is once again being pulled over someone's eyes (the client/consumer) by empowering the "experts" at the expense (literally) of the clients. The naive "client" (projection of underlying attitude) has to be protected from (veiled conceit) the incompetent charlatan (disowning of "unwanted" qualities from actual "in" group onto mythical "out" group created by the projection itself) when in reality the client is being given less choice and charged more money for receiving a service that is now less comprehensible and hence less assimilable. Dependencies are created', empires built and nests lavishly lined. Restrictive practices, closed shops, protection and collusion follow in their wake and are their mode of operation.

All of this is slightly exaggerated of course, but as in a Gestalt exaggeration hopefully some underlying truth becomes clear - if only as a warning.

The other bit of the professionalising argument - the good bit - rests in a confusion between being a "pro" in the intrinsic, ongoing way that Bugental speaks of, and being a professional through belonging to professional bodies (the extrinsic process). Suffice it to say that the latter does not guarantee the former outcome. And the former outcome - being an intrinsic process, can't be produced or legislated into existence. But can't it be facilitated by external factors? Obviously it can, but it will do this too in an ongoing, intrinsic way creating the structures that it needs as it goes along and then leaving them behind. What is going on now could be seen as opportunist manoeuvring and empire building taking advantage of bureaucratic directives that are meant to make the practise of alternative therapies with-in Europe less restrictive and not more restrictive.

Having exposed the Emperor's nakedness, why are we going along with the fiction and how consciously are we doing that? What is our interest and what historical tendencies are there in Humanistic Psychology that would lend themselves to our blinding our vision in the process and buying the story about his outfit? To answer these questions we need to be capable of seeing Humanistic Psychology's own myths and embarrassment, of "seeing through" depth-psychology psychologically as Hillman puts it. But where are we going to begin in finding out the truth about our parentage and the myths and stories of our childhood days?

Pro-stitutes
I want to begin this process of "seeing-through" by asking two questions that I think interconnect and together yield some clues; one, what is psychotherapy and secondly why has psychotherapy tended to look to scientific models and research to legitimate and explain what it is when there are "obviously" much better sources of legitimation available? The immediate answer seems to be - because psychotherapy is uncomfortable with what it really is. So what is it? Trouble is psychotherapy is probably a whole bunch of different things that don't fit under any one obvious umbrella. Some of psychotherapy seems to be to do with repairing holes in the social fabric, as when the functions of re-parenting and re-modelling predominate. Some psychotherapy is a kind of remedial emotional and physical education (a role that Freud stressed - a kind of holding the baby between a transition in social norms of education and parenting). Some of psychotherapy particularly with older people has to do more with a kind of spiritual counselling or the kind of "soul-making" that Hillman speaks of. (To say as Hiliman does for the archetypal that this is the real function of psychology is to mistake a part for the whole.)

But what links all of these functions together is that for each of them psychotherapy stands in the place of (literally: pro- stitutes) something missing in the person's history or current social context, the absent father, mother, brother, sister, sage, guide, tribe, community, history."Psychotherapy" is the vessel that catches and attempts to redeem some of the fall-out from an alienated and soul-less culture. It is both a sanctuary and a training ground of possibilities for a new culture. Its characteristic acolytes are priests and priestesses and rebels.

Seen from its radical edge Humanistic psychotherapy can be regarded at least in part as a kind of half-way house between a dying outmoded social order based on patriarchy, exploitation, inequality, sexism, fragmentation and soullessness (the critiques of feminists, Marx, Weber and Durkheim) and the new social order that may or may not arise to take its place. Its role has been to provide a place of safety, healing and recuperation for those victims, refugees, escapees, rebels, who can find their way to it and to help them on their way by providing healing, rites of passage, travellers maps, rules of thumb, stars to sail by and some good tall stories. Above all, perhaps, a renewed sense of family, tribe and community, of relevance and of mythology.

For Humanistic Psychology to professionalise now necessitates a premature definition of itself, what it is and what it does and who does and who does not do it. This is not helpful to the role of social sanctuary that it now plays rather well. By surrendering the historical rebel role of humanistic psychotherapy we project the rebel elsewhere, tighten ranks against him/her, and alienate her/him to other, perhaps, more dubious causes.

The Embarrassed Rebel
Thirty years on from Camus the rebel role is now rather misunderstood and indeed maligned and no doubt psychotherapy has done more than its share to promote a false conformity at the expense of the creativity of the life force latent in the rebel position. To describe oneself as a "rebel" today is almost antiquated in an age: when even adolescents do not rebel. But the rebel archetype underlies much that is of value in our history and culture - it is there in the figures of Socrates and Jesus at the origins of rationality and faith, in Columbus, Newton, Copernicus at the origin of science and exploration, then in Beethoven and Blake at the origins of romanticism and later in Darwin and Freud at the origins of relativism. Looking back the rebel has been an honourable figure,, perhaps the honourable figure par excellence when the rebellion has succeeded by virtue of its charisma, daring and glory in changing our view of the world.

Depth psychology has proceeded itself by way of perpetual rebellion against equally perpetual and usually premature attempts at respectable orthodoxy from Freud, the excruciatingly embarrassed rebel, to the Rebellions of Jung, Adler and Reich and onwards to the rebellions of Gestalt, encounter and Humanistic Psycho-logy itself. At each point mirroring the discomfort and defence mechanism of Papa Freud each new rebellion has recoiled from its rebel act and sought almost immediate legitimation beneath some older orthodoxy or by quickly creating its own orthodoxy around it, closing ranks and projecting the rebellion outside itself, calling itself respectable and suspecting dissidence everywhere. It would take a comic genius to do justice to these rapid changes of posture, protestations of innocence, purity, respectability and scientific method that have characterised the evolution of depth psychology from its beginnings. When depth-psychology finally gave up rebellion, Humanistic Psychology appeared as the new revolt. Its founders saw it and described it in this light and yet within twenty years most of Humanistic Psychology has become fashionable, respectable and orthodox and the only rebels that it had or could create were those who threw the whole thing over and went Red Indian, Taoist or Egyptian. The new rebel today has to resort to a very primitive myth of rebellion indeed - that of taking his licence to practise direct from God, the Tao or the Living Spirit. At the root is Humanistic Psychology's refusal to accept its rebellious and pagan spirit as its source, allegiance and legitimation. Unable to accept its bastard parentage it claims to be the legitimate child of Freud, or Gestalt psychology, existentialism or modern science.

When all else fails the Holy Spirit and the Immaculate Conception are invoked. Underneath all the manoeuvrings we can feel the excruciating embarrassment of Freud himself at his unmasking of the bourgeois family's (his own family's) pretences and myths about itself and exposing its naked sexuality. Undressing, unmasking, exposing, debunking, revealing, shining the light on, these images of exposure of nakedness, of sexuality, of the genitals, dominate the early history of depth-psychology and they are of its very substance. The game that every humanistic therapist has inherited from Freud is the game played out in countless forms in myriad groups of undressing the parents. The naked encounter group is, and was, the logical extension of this tendency, the ultimate truth game. From these themes of nakedness, embarrassment at nakedness, fear of exposure, inherited from Freud, we can understand much of the development within depth and Humanistic Psychology; the constant taking off and on of clothes literally and symbolically, changes of name in systems, the search for a scientific clothing, the search for respectability, the emphasis on truth (nakedness psychologically) and the need to hide what it is really about in systems and pseudo-systems. Most of the historical development of psychotherapy as a profession can, I think, begin to be understood in terms of reaction-formation to the fear of exposure inherited from Freud. Science, empirical research, scientific models and hypotheses constitute the obsessional hand-washing ritual of the neurosis.

The Conservative Role
In its defensive reaction-formation it has the capacity to be more royalist than the king, as the histories of psychoanalysis and analytical psychology show. There is nothing in humanistic psychotherapy to prevent it from being used in the service of corporate structures, of profit for profit's sake, of exploitation, of new forms of tyranny. Humanistic Psychology does unlock human potential, but it does not guarantee what it unlocks it for. The assumed "human nature" of Maslow and Rogers is a moralistic, not a psychological assumption as Hillman has shown (Gestalt is a little more sanguine here with its original view of aggression and anger) and assumptions can change.

Furthermore humanistic psychologists are often blind to the deeply conservative role of psychotherapy as an agent of socially acceptable change, whose role is to pick up casualties of the change in social norms and to try out the new social norms in safe groups: i.e. to find out that it's O.K. for men to cry, for women to get angry. In fulfilling this role, the undressing game is of crucial importance because it's the revealing of the parents' nakedness (and dishonesty) that allows for tradition and history to be quickly debunked so that rapid social change can take place from generation to generation. Our culture needed some way of nullifying the more ancient tendency to venerate tradition, the elderly and the parents - Freud provided it and Humanistic Psychology has inherited it. In this role humanistic psychotherapy is a factor in the social process, not an initiator as it supposes, and this role is a deeply conservative one as radical sociologists have always maintained (and humanistic psychologists rarely understood). And this conservative role is proved by the king of socio-economic groups from which it draws its clients.

How then do psychotherapists prevent themselves from being used in a conservative way? By allying with the rebel, and as that arch peaceful rebel of the 5O's and 60s Paul Goodman argued - pressing on to the next resistance. For finally what is repressed in culture will turn up inside the individual as dark and burdensome and uncomfortable, manifesting in behaviour and expression as pathological and ugly, appearing in dream as nightmare and in waking consciousness as mood. The unconscious, the core become the last portals of freedom and it is the figure of the rebel, who stands guarding the door. The subjection of psychotherapy to the secularising process of professionalisation is a selling out of the rebel and of the soul. To the extent that we are wise to this, the process masks the covert forming of a priesthood. To the extent that we are not, the process marks the bureaucratisation of the prophetic and rebel strands in Humanistic Psychology.

The behaviour of the "profession" itself is the next bit of resistance that needs looking at. And a Humanistic Psychology that stops short of looking at this, that is willing to exchange its ramshackle sprawl of refugee camps for a place in the sun' that strives to define and limit itself before it is anything more than a stopping-off place between here and there, is not simply in danger of deserting its presiding genius, it is very much in danger of being unmasked itself. As Paul Goodman wrote: "Professionals are bound to develop a ritual and a secret language and mystify the laity, but this is acceptable (within limits) - their thing is a mystery and they have to do it their own way. What is unacceptable is for them to get the State to certify them as the only legal practitioners and exempt themselves from competition and criticism. The pretext is to protect the public from quacks; the effect is to increase the number of quacks, including those who are certified."

REFERENCES

J.T. Bugental - Psychotherapy and Process
A. Camus - The Rebel
P. Goodman in Pens, Hefferline & Goodman 'Gestalt Therapy'
P. Goodman -Little Prayers & Finite Experience
J. Hillman - Revisioning Psychology
F. Kafka - The Trial and the Castle
P. Berger & T. Luckmann - The Social Construction of Reality
Max Weber - The Sociology of Religion.