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Chapter Two Part Two – Methodology - Page 84
and shows in other ways is crucial, but is not the sole determinant or source of what is
known by the therapist. Similarly, in the training under study, the staff do not just tell
the trainees what to do as part of their training, and neither do they directly model the
capability in question. Rather, they create a milieu, rather like that of an individual or
group clinical session, into which thoughts can be brought in various ways.
In a research example, in the current project, the teaching and learning that is being
studied is, like the process that is being taught (the practice of psychoanalytic
psychotherapy), profoundly intersubjective. Hence, as in the therapy where
manualisation is not appropriate, so too in the research, the interpretations that are made
will pertain in part to that researcher and that focus of study, although another
researcher following similar principles with a similar group would likely come to
similar conclusions.
As another clinical example, there is a strong trend currently in public-sector mental
health settings for every session of psychotherapy to be formally evaluated by client
completion of a standard form, because research has shown that attention to the
therapeutic alliance is highly significant in determining therapeutic outcome. This
perspective would take a very different approach to the same issue, attending to
therapeutic engagement in a manner with greater complexity, and according a lot of
emphasis to reflection by clinicians.
Approaching the study in question from this epistemological stance, one aim of the
research methodology that stands out is to privilege researcher countertransference. As
in the other domains of clinical practice and training, it seems important in group-
analytically informed research to foreground this and other ways of knowing that are