Boundaries and Dynamics of the Profession
The as-yet-unresolved and unconscious areas of an individual, repressed and denied at the intrapersonal level are displaced and projected into the life of the group and acted out in the psychodrama of the interpersonal dynamic.

Where these unconscious patterns resonate most deeply between the highest numbers of individuals, they set up powerful group norms and processes which energise and drive the dynamics of the group as a whole. These are the areas of common collusional repression and denial, followed by group displacement and projection across its boundary into the outside world. In the field of such groups and organisations, institutions and systems, the commonly repressed unconscious content of the intra-group levels is deposited and pooled into the inter-group and institutional process and acted out in the psychodrama of the inter-group. The higher the aggregation of the system the more the dynamics enacted stem from the most profoundly common collusional processes of the individuals concerned. It is hardly surprising therefore that the societal dynamics of the profession are least open to insight from within the profession. Individuals professionally involved in one-to-one relationships find themselves at the mercy of unconscious, irrational and often destructive forces being acted out at the corporate dynamic level of those organisations which bring psychotherapists, counsellors and analysts into organisational relationships. These dynamics are not unique to the profession of psychotherapy. The area represents the most common processes of human unconscious dynamic which can be observed throughout the whole range of group, organisation, institutional and social life and which at a higher level of aggregation dominate international relationships and the inter-cultural and inter-ideological processes of our global village. For those with eyes to see, therefore, the inter-institutional psychodrama within the world of psychotherapy holds a kind of holograph or mirror of the common unconscious of society as a whole. Insofar as these dynamics remain unconscious within the profession, they represent the ground of corporate collusion between the profession, its client base and its social environment. Insofar as the profession. becomes aware of these processes, withdraws and owns the displaced and projected material which gives them power and deconstructs the associated defences, is the profession as a whole able to engage across its boundary with integrity, insight and authenticity, instead of the present position of mirroring, collusion and counter-transference.

The words 'profession in general and 'accreditation' in particular have to do with boundaries. They differentiate between the inside and the outside. Within the profession there are many sub-boundaries which distinguish one sub-set or in-group from another. Until quite recently, these sub-professional boundaries had been the dominant carriers of the dynamic. The emergence of an external or extra-professional threat typically generates a meta-boundary and suppresses the splitting at the sub-group boundary. It is just such a process that now appears to be in place with the engagement between the UK and its partners within the European Community creating the meta-system dynamics which we are now experiencing. As a result the profession as a whole is beginning to distinguish itself from the social environment. Motivation is in part paranoid, driven by the (quite realistic) anxieties concerning the prohibition of conducting unauthorised or unaecredited therapy for payment. At another level anxieties have been expressed about 'the maintenance of our craft'. It is a phrase which became highly significant within the debates at the AHPP a couple of years ago. Initially it seemed a very genuine and straightforward concern, but as it was examined all kinds of difficulties emerged. Who were the 'we' who exercised ownership? Was it the group of humanistic practitioners gathered in the particular conference, not all of whom in any case would identify or want to be identified with each other as exercising the same 'craft'. What about the people who were within the field of humanistic psychology but were not able to attend that particular conference, were they also part of 'we'? Or did this first person plural pronoun stand in for a much wider gathering? In which case how was the boundary actually to be managed? Then there was the issue of the 'craft'. We began to become aware of all the nuances of the old trade guilds, ideally separating the skilled from the unskilled, in practice protecting the interests of an elite by disempowering non-members. 'Craft' could stand for a set of skills. It could also stand for 'guile'. We began to recognise the devious dynamics involved in craft-maintenance and profes sional boundary preservation, with all the shadowy Machiavellian jockeying for power, resources, status and exclusiveness that professionalism at its worst can represent. Then again the word 'craft' began to be identified with the little boat, the fragile craft tossed on a stormy sea - the lifeboat with limited resources, dedicated to survival under paranoid conditions. If skills were disseminated too widely, the livelihood of professional members would be in jeopardy. If too many differences were allowed among the crew, then piloting the craft through the stormy waters ahead would be impossible.

So the dynamics which emerge at the professional boundary are inconsistent with the value-system overtly espoused within that boundary.

At another level the dynamics which emerge in the group, inter- group, institutional and professional behaviours enact the corporately bonded defence constructs of the common unconscious. The more insightful the group becomes the more primitive its common defence construct, since the corporate dynamic reflects the most common, as-yet-unresolved, core of the unconscious. Professionals who are acutely alert to and have worked through the unconscious processes stemming from post-natal traumata will act out in their common behaviours patterns of corporate defence stemming from pre-and perinatal material. Groupings who share in common a process of integration of the perinatal impingement will reflect much more primitive patterns of regression and idealisation in their corporate behaviour. So it is that the corporate professional dynamics encode structures of anxiety defence to disturb which is to expose the people involved to restimulation of as yet intolerable and unresolved levek of terror, rage and grief and to be precipitated as a body into common patterns of psychodrama and abreaction of common imprinting. These levels of group psychodynamics are shared across the professional boundary with the client group and the wider society. Issues arise of power and powerlessness, omnipotence. There are fears about survival or destruction, blaming, scapegoating, inappropriate struggle for resources and irrational anxieties about implosion, chaos, fragmentation and annihilation. Patterns of splitting from this primitive level of defence are absolutised. Issues tend to be polarised into black and white, good and bad, us and them, inside and outside. As the dynamics build up in intensity, so inter-group negotiation becomes more and more fraught. As the profession as a whole increases the strength of its overall boundary and represses internal splitting, so the us/them, inside/outside projections are focused into relationships between the profession and its client system. Phrases emerge like 'accreditation gives permission to go into the outside world', as if the profession is bounded by some kind of mega-womb within which the professionals unconsciously regress into idealised dependency, with more and more time and energy vested in intra-professional engagement and less and less resources available to cross the boundary into the working interface with the client group.

Client Group Transference
In the one-to-one therapeutic engagement the distinction between the therapist and the client is clear. The limits of therapeutic competence are determined by the therapist's own awareness of unconscious process. Insofar as both therapist and client are both unconscious of what is going on, there will be collusion, transference and counter-transference and a mutual reinforcement of the defensive procedures in play. Growth and development in the skill of the therapist depends on the working through of their own internal defensive materials, which in turn leads to the withdrawal of collusion and the deconstruction of the counter-transference within the relationship. It is of course a life-long process, never completed and calling for sustained commitment to personal and professional development on behalf of the therapist.

That being said, however, it is inevitable that any therapist at any point in their personal development carries introjected transference, unresolved and acted out in counter-transference from the set of clients with which they are engaged. In this sense the therapist acts as a carrier of the unconscious processes of the client set. When therapists meet in a group they therefore carry into the group process the unconscious projections of their combined client field, mirrored by, colluding with and stimulating the as-yet-unresolved unconscious residue of the therapists' own internal worlds. The group, inter-group, institutional and professional dynamics of therapists may be seen therefore not only as generated by the intra-personal unresolved unconscious of the therapists, but also reinforced by and collusionally empowered by, the internalised transference from the client group as a whole.

It is this powerful collusional bonding between the unconscious of the intraprofessional dynamic and the unconscious of the client environment, that makes the intra-professional processes so occluded and so resistant to intervention and resolution. If therapists gained access to this level of material, they would not only have to deal with the reintegration in their own personae of repressed traumatic imprints, but also and in the same period of development, would have to interface their client set with the same areas of the unconscious. Recognismg that these dynamics are indeed the common areas of unconscious material, it is not simply the client set but also the familial, collegiate and social context of the therapists themselves that reinforce and empower the occluded common dynamic. So the unresolved infantile needs of the client-base are transferred into the therapeutic community. At the client-therapist interface there is a child-adult distortion of the transactional analysis. However, because of the common restimulation of the repressed as-yet-unacceptable parts of the child within the therapeutic set, the profession as a whole is dominated by regressive dynamics and acts out the unaccepted parts of its child in common psychodrama. In that sense the unconscious corporate dynamics of the profession mirror the behaviour of the regressed client, so reinforcing and maiiitaining the common defences against anxiety. There is, therefore, a very real sense in which however effective the therapist is in individual dealings with the client, the profession as a whole reinforces the common defences and acts as a powerful preservative node within the neurotic and psychotic levels of social behaviour. Not only are the unresolved infantile projections of the client base reflected in the corporate dynamics of the profession, the client community also projects its anxieties about dealing with the unconscious, its fear of the unknown, its terror of re-engaging the terrifying. The profession acts as a corporate receptor of such projected anxiety and therefore acts out in its institutional dynamic a pattern of paranoid response reflecting the intense anxiety focused into it from its environmental boundary. The defences against anxiety evidenced in the dynamics of the profession are therefore not simply generated by the intra-professional processes but are also an encoding of extremely powerful defences against the projected and transferred levels of anxiety from its client environment.

Systems of Social Collusion
An individual therapist, working with a presenting adolescent as client, will recognise that the child has been offered for therapy by the family system within its wider social setting. In that sense the client is a carrier of messages from a wider envir6nment into the therapeutic context. In other situations those deemed 'mad' by their social environment, carry by projection the parts denied and displaced from that environment. Excreted and exorcised, they are placed in some kind of institutional container and subjected to the same defensive repression and alienation as the disowned areas of irrationality within the population as a whole. These dynamics are clear and well known in the boundary transactions between the mental hospital and its surrounding community. A similar pattern of displacement, projection, disowning and dumping occurs within the less clearly institutionalised processes of therapy. In this sense the client group carries by displacement the feared unconscious processes of society. These elements of the disowned corporate unconscious are offered for treatment, resolution and containment by the therapeutic profession. The profession therefore shoulders the displaced responsibility of the community as a whole for owning and integrating its unacceptable parts.

Any given client is a carrier not only of their own intrapersonal material but also bears by displacement their familial and social context. There is often a sense of shame at having to have therapy in the first place and a whole host of subtle signals are mounted at the boundary of the client, so preserving the family and the society from any conscious awareness of unconscious material ....... lying behind its own defences. In this sense therefore the whole process of professionalism, accreditation and the engagement with clients serves the unconscious so cietal task of defence maintenance. When these processes are aggregated and summed across the whole field of psychotherapy it is possible to recognise that the aggregate dynamics of the profession as a whole mirror most profoundly the most common societal defence maintenance processes. It is therefore possible to interpret the psychodynamics of the profession as collusional counter- transference, maintaining the pathology of the social system, reinforcing norm patterns of neurotic and psychotic behaviour and reinforcing the stasis-maintenance dynamics of the community. Caught in this collusional dance, it is hardly surprising that the profession of therapy has so little impact on the behaviour of social systems. So the processes of professionalism and accreditation come to represent the internalisation of the shadow of the social environment.

If the social system as a whole is seen as a corporate client of the profession as a whole, then it is clear that client and therapist are locked in a collusional pattern of transference and counter-transference, mirroring each other's neurosis, preserving each other's defences and effectively blocking any possibility of progress towards maturation, health, wholeness and the releasing of human potential. Breaking out of the present deadlock requires dedication to excellence and competence, not only in the field of individual dynamics but also in the understanding and management of the psychodynamics of social systems. It is essential to gain access to and resoltition of the most profoundly occluded areas of our common unconscious if we are to cast any light on the Shadow of accreditation.