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Chapter Four – The diachronic analysis – who, what and when? – Page 136
and the hatred of learning from experience. We are certainly in touch with the more
regressed aspects of the students, and note several of these in our discussion, for
example bids by more than one student to be special. At the time, we may well have had
a conscious imperative that we ought to be classically psychoanalytic (as in Freud,
Klein and Lacan, prior to the intersubjective turn) and encourage the presenters of
displaced material to ‘take it to therapy’. That would be to avoid something, perhaps in
the same way that the eschewal of countertransference was in part an avoidance of the
hatred of the therapist of learning from (I slipped here to by) experience.
The Mid-Semester Break (2 Weeks) comes between Sessions 10 and 11
Session 11
Present: Bill, Judi, Frances, Tom, Paula, Heidi, Mary, Kelly, Nancy and Veronica.
Absent: Ron.
In Session 11, Paula presented her work with a woman who hardly ever came, and when
she did would come very late, and Paula struggled in the group with her shame at the
fact that her patient picked at her face. Looking at the transcript, the session itself seems
to consist of a Work Group in Bion’s (1961) terms, with the group doing well with the
patient, although much less focussed on the relationship between patient and therapist,
and the process between the clinical work and the group. It is as if they are getting on
with it.
When Judi and I break, we actually have one of our most difficult consulting breaks
(discussed in Chapter Eight, ‘The Scrap’), when there seems to be a lot of hostility
between us. I wonder if this is some referred impact of Paula's competitiveness (noted
by Judi in the break in Session 10), which is not able to emerge in the flow of the
session. And does this (all) represent the group at work, almost as if we were linking the