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Chapter Five - A Beginning – Page 182
from Frances’s albeit veiled invitation to them to tackle her about her lateness, through
Bill’s attack on the group (in referring to Reder’s paper), to the ‘fight’ that Judi and Bill
do manage to have in the break (even if it remains formally unacknowledged). I suggest
that even if these dynamics have hardly been made explicit at all, and even if there is
apparently very little intentional participation from Judi and Bill, nonetheless their
contributions do lead to the group being able to enter so readily into work on return
from the break.
My thought is that Bill and Judi, not least through their restraint from reacting, have
somehow managed to contain and deal with something between them. This includes not
least the projections of the group, and but also the more primitive responses of the
students and themselves to the experience of membership of the learning group.
Thinking of what becomes of what they bring and how we deal with it, I recognise that
in this session we have not been diverted from our task. This is, I believe, the
integration of theory and practice, through participant observation in the discussion of
clinical work. As noted in Table 5.4 on Page 184, I consider the dominant characteristic
of the unconscious represented in this session to be timelessness, in that lateness and
anxiety do not inhibit the significant work of the group.
Conclusion - findings, both methodological and substantive
Methodologically, this episode is an illustration of the choice of a sample of interaction
together with its context, forming an episode, and the analysis of that episode by
exploring the meanings around a sequence within the episode leading up to and
following a moment of disruption. Because the sequence is a structure present in the