Letter: A few more highways and byways to mental well-being

DR PETER Fenwick's article opening your series on mental well- being is characteristically fascinating and Angela Neustatter's overview of therapies available, excellent ("The dynamics of change" and "The mind business", Review, 17 March).

In the "Happiness Directory" and the glossary, however, psychoanalysis is listed at pounds 50 an hour. In fact its range is pounds 10-pounds 40 (or less). The brief note about regulation of the profession takes no heed of the register of the British Confederation of Psychotherapists, a register of all the long-established psychoanalytic organisations responsible for training more then 1,200 psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists in the UK.

While the glossary dutifully lists all three components of Freud's structural model of the mind (1923) there is no recognition that these make up such a whole and even the suggestion that the superego, certainly the last aspect to be conceptualised, is a system of personality in itself rather than an aspect of Freud's third model. There is even more reason not to lose sight of the original Freud in remembering that he advocated psychoanalysis not as a panacea for eternal happiness but simply to turn neurosis into ordinary human suffering.

Anne Zachary

British Confederation of Psychotherapists, London NW2