Rosemary Rizq PhD
C. Psychol AFBPsS FHEA is a chartered psychologist, an HCPC registered counselling psychologist and a UKCP-registered psychoanalytic psychotherapist.

She is Principal Lecturer in Counselling Psychology at the University of Roehampton and has worked for many years in the NHS, both as Specialist Lead for Research and Development for NHS Ealing and, until recently, as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist for North-East London NHS Foundation Trust. She has a part-time private practice in West London. She was submissions editor for Psychodynamic Practice from 2004 to 2010, is a reviewer for a number of academic journals and she has published widely on issues related to organizational dynamics and psychotherapeutic training and practice.

Recent key papers include: ‘IAPT anxiety and envy’, ‘The perversion of care’, ‘States of abjection’ and ‘The Ghost in the Machine’.


Rosemary Rizq
Hospitality in the 'theatre of indifference': Psychotherapy in the NHS Today
Abstract

Nigel Lawson, ex-chancellor of the exchequer, once said that the NHS ‘is the closest thing the English have to a religion’.
Despite the enormous changes it has gone through, it is probably fair to say that the NHS is still held in higher esteem than any other institution in the UK. 

In this paper, I suggest that the offer of hospitality incarnated by the state’s establishment of a public health service free at the point of delivery is still powerfully felt today.
However, the advent of neoliberal ideologies within the public sector has transformed the NHS's hospitality into what John Berger has called a 'theatre of indifference' where a performance of care  now ensures that  'appearances hide failure, words hide facts, and symbols hide what they refer to'. 
What does this mean for our work as psychotherapists, and  how might we reclaim the ancient notion of hospitality within our work?  
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email: info 'at' limbus 'dot' org 'dot' uk
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