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Chapter Six – Part of a Session – Page 191
modelling, but do not really offer any, and it seems in hindsight that part of the problem
is that there is no map for where or how this session is to go. It seems unclear whether
the staff have such a map, or if instead they are expecting the students to draw one. In
the confusion, frustration mounts. This part of the session ends with Tom describing
what is presumably his own practice of using hypnosis to manage distance, which seems
to directly challenge the concern that both Veronica and Paula have raised in different
ways, as well as the purpose of the semester.
The next episode is the break. Bill and Judi get to a concern that they are being too
supervisory or behaving too much as teachers. Their discussion doesn’t really reach the
level of considering the dynamics of the group, focussing instead on impressions of
individuals and expressions of anxiety. Bill has an urgency, though, to become involved
in the dynamics of the group, and is short with Judi, wanting to look ahead.
Thirdly, there is the return from the break (which is the episode transcribed above). This
is dominated by Heidi’s statement, made as the group is still resuming, but in response
to Bill’s question as to where the attention of the group is now following the break, that
she feels dead. The rapidity and intensity of this communication (in following the break
and being part of the resumption) is what gives it the quality of an eruption. Heidi
acknowledges her own part in this, including an identification with the client discussed
the previous week, her sensitivity to changes in her life outside the course, and the
unbearable pressure she feels in the group to ‘get it right’ when actually she is feeling
extremely small (i.e. as if she were extremely young).
Fourthly, Bill introduces the question of the culture of the group, asking ‘What do we
co-create here?’ Paula talks about missing her own therapy appointment that day, by