Supporting safe therapy
At the BPC, we support safe, psychoanalytic therapy.
Primarily, the BPC keep the public safe in psychoanalytic therapy through its work as a regulator. If you’d like to learn more about what that means in practice, find out more on this page.
Regulation is the process by which standards are set and maintained for different professions, and the organisations who manage this are called regulators. Concerns around Fitness to Practise (FTP) can be investigated by regulators, and further sanctions can be imposed through the FTP process, for examples of this please visit our outcomes page.
The BPC regulate 2,000+ psychoanalytically trained therapists in the UK, we do this alongside other UK therapy regulators that are accredited by the Professional Standards Authority (PSA) who oversee these processes.
Want to learn more about the PSA’s work with regulators? Click here.
In the UK, there is currently no legal requirement for the majority of talking therapists to be registered with a regulator. Therapists can therefore choose to be regulated but aren’t bound by law to do so; this is called ‘voluntary regulation’. The titles of counsellor and therapists are not legally protected. This means that anyone can call themselves a therapist or counsellor, regardless of their training or experience.
Crucially, when looking for a therapist, you should confirm that they are on a PSA accredited register, like the British Psychoanalytic Council’s Register. When you find a therapist who is on an accredited register, you can be certain that their training and experience has been verified as part of their registration and they are meeting important standards of practice.
We protect the public by accrediting high-quality trainings, holding a public Register of qualified psychoanalytic clinicians, we set standards of conduct that must be met and we investigate concerns.
If you’d like to learn more about the difference between psychoanalytic therapy and other types of therapy, click here.
Frequently asked questions
The BPC is strongly focused on psychoanalytic therapy, which is a particular type of therapy. Other regulators may regulate other types of therapy.
Some therapists choose to be regulated by multiple regulators, and this may be because they get something different from each of these registrations.
