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Chapter Two Part Two – Methodology - Page 83
and elements consistent with group-analytic ethnography if not articulated as such. In its
extension to research, the perspective enables the study of the process of teaching and
learning, with a view to the further theorisation and hence development of that process.
In relation to research, and in particular this study, the perspective is used to notice and
mark phenomena (for example, as ‘Sticky Moments’), and to consider those phenomena
as though they are the clinical material of an individual psychotherapy session or the
conductor experience of the interaction of a group-analytic psychotherapy group.
At this level, the theoretical perspective determines central issues which influence
decisions elsewhere in the process into which it is adopted. In particular, the
epistemological perspective involved in working clinically in a group-analytic practice
tradition has major implications when transferred to teaching and learning or research
settings.
As an illustration of this last point, and returning temporarily to a pedagogical
perspective, the therapeutic capability that is being developed in the trainee in the
training under study (which cannot be expressed as ‘taught to’) involves a capacity to be
present with a patient, listening carefully, and responding in a measured way that
includes consideration of what the patient has said, as well as what they have not said,
what is evoked in the therapist, and what is known about the patient and their
experience from the experience of the relationship with him or her. This captures a
distinctive stance of this perspective on how things are known. In this invented clinical
vignette, the therapist does not ask the patient directly what the therapist wants to know,
and does not then share all of their reasoning explicitly with the patient, revising their
formulation for the full agreement and sign-off by the patient. What the patient reports