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Chapter Five - A Beginning – Page 176
may represent that. Clearly here, in this difficult area, Paula, in representing and
expressing difficult, primitive and (from a conventional perspective) relatively
unacceptable feelings and impulses, is doing a great deal on behalf of the group.
A series of pairs of people get alongside and face each other
It is as if members (including the tutors) play some things out between people. In this
case, it is initially Paula and Mary, including a near-breakage of eggs outlined above.
Bill and Judi seem to mimic that dynamic but ineffectively. Then Paula starts again, and
begins to really open up, joined again by Mary. Judi meets Paula, but Mary joins in
behind Paula, and Judi withdraws, apparently disorganised. Frances then arrives as
Paula is talking for the third time. Frances takes the floor. Mary seems to attack Frances
in a veiled way on behalf of the group, but then falls in behind her. Judi then turns back
to Paula to invite her again to begin, now for the fourth time, and slips to bringing-
up/up-bringing
The group tries to tell of their struggle and to bring it into the here-andnow
I think here particularly of the theme of this session, ‘Up-Bringing’, which comes from
Judi’s concern at having described Paula as bringing something up. I think this captures
the tension between the wish to make something known and the sense of taboo about
doing so. Paula and Mary are talking about the Third Hour, 9 or at least the impact of it
on them. To talk about it risks challenging the boundary around the Reflective Group,
but not to do so risks leaving key personal experience out of the arena of this group, the
learning group.
9 This refers to the Reflective Group, discussed elsewhere, which is deliberately arranged to be highly
separate from other parts of the course.