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Chapter Five - A Beginning – Page 181
unreliability, at least she offers it for some form of scrutiny. An outstanding feature of
this beginning is the way that Judi and I fail to comment on this and all manner of other
matters, and, going beyond this synchronic extract, how we fail to structure the ending
of the course (in Session 15, and leading up to it from this Session 10 and before) so as
to make sense with the group of the process that has passed and is passing between us,
including the less than fully conscious aspects and the less than fully palatable ones.
In terms of what does happen in this session, there appears to be a thread of interaction
through the sequence traced above (Paula as mother, loose talk, sadistic pleasure, and so
on). Towards the end of this, it is as if there are attempts to have conflict in the room,
but this does not quite happen. For example, it is as if Mary’s attempt to confront
Frances on behalf of the group comes to naught, as does Tom and Frances’s
disagreement with Paula. Interestingly, when Ron suddenly introduces David and
Ursula, the people who left after the first year, this serves to highlight that Judi is a
person who has come.
My analysis is that these elements (noted in the last paragraph) represent deep issues in
the mental life of the group. Part of what the group is struggling with is ending, which
in this case involves loss and abandonment, growing up, a difference between
generations, and unresolved concerns and fantasies about what tutors/parents get up to
when their door is closed. From accumulated experience of the clinical phenomena of
exploratory psychotherapy, these tasks of ending and separation, for that is what they
are, inevitably evoke profound resonances with early experience. I see there being a
process following the crystallisation of people who leave without saying goodbye
properly with a replacement mother figure, which involves attempts to process the
affects stirred up by these two figurations. This process flows through the group fleeing