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Chapter Four – The diachronic analysis – who, what and when? – Page 140
Summary and Conclusion
In these fifteen two-hour sessions, eleven of us meet (with between seven and eleven of
us there at any particular session). In turn, apart from the sessions at the beginning and
the end, we discuss clinical material brought by one of us. By the end, people have
moved in terms of their capacity to integrate theory and practice. They have had an
experience of thinking about working with a patient or client, forming a response to
what the client says, and of taking part in a particular kind of group discussing the
process and content of the clinical material.
As a story, it only seems to make sense with hindsight. Maybe that is inevitable,
because this has to be a story that writes itself as it happens. We are seeking to help
students to become more spontaneous and creative in their interactions with clients and
patients, and to help each of them to shift from doing what they feel they ought to do or
hope to be told to do, towards what they intend and are able to do, all the time having a
stronger sense of themself as an effective therapist. I will say more about this
transformation in other parts of the thesis, but for now, I am acknowledging that as
tutors perhaps we can only let each student’s narrative of this group emerge. We can
and do intervene very powerfully, but perhaps this can only ever be to create and protect
the frame around the emergence of the narrative.