View/Open - Scholarly Commons Home

Chapter Five - A Beginning – Page 169
turned up. The two people are not named (nor have they been since). Judi then draws
the attention of the group to their main task (that is, the integration of the theory of
psychoanalytic psychotherapy into each person’s clinical practice).
Judi moves to draw the beginning discussion to a close, and Bill joins her, suggesting
talking about this in the second (sic) hour. This seems to be a parapraxis (Freud, 1914),
with a conscious purpose of suggesting that the group carry on talking about these
issues in the Reflective Group (actually the third hour), together with an underlying if
unconscious recognition that these are issues that need further discussion in this group
but which Bill fears may take the group too far away from its primary task. Bill and Judi
between them then arrange for the group to attend to the primary task.
THE GROUP MOVES TO 10 MINUTES OF SILENT READING OF
FRANCES’S TRANSCRIPT HERE, AND JUDI THEN OPENS THE
DISCUSSION
The section of discussion up to the break
One element in this segment is Bill’s bringing in of a reference to an article by Peter
Reder (1986) about how social service agencies reflect the dynamics of their clientele.
In the case about which Reder writes, that of a social work office, there is a lack of
appropriate clear boundaries between generations, so children in client families would
be raised by their grandparents, and very junior staff would be left to provide services to
clients with the supervision of a very few much more senior staff. In both cases, the
middle generation, of parents or of senior caseworkers, is absent.