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Chapter Six – Part of a Session – Page 196
inviting them to go deeper, and if they wished to do so, to use hypnosis. As I write this
description, I wonder, does Tom want to put Veronica and Paula, or the group, to sleep?
Both Veronica and Paula are strong personalities, and are confident in their coming
forward into the group, bringing personal experience (particularly current or recent
immediacy in their client work, in some ways the focus of the semester) with apparent
ease. Tom has acknowledged already (in session 5, see Chapter Four, The Diachronic
Analysis) his feeling of vulnerability in displaying his work, as well as his unfamiliarity
in being aware of and using countertransference. One view of the dynamic between
Tom, Veronica and Paula in this session is that they are representing core conflicts for
the group. These could align around the clinical challenge in psychotherapy of whether
to head into or away from anxiety (a symbolic representation of Freud’s (1900/1953)
Reality Principle). More particularly, and linked to some of the underlying themes of
the session, this alignment could be around the conflict in the group, between being
honest (yet vulnerable) and being competent (yet distanced from oneself and from the
freedom to learn).
The break
It is notable that Bill and Judi seem in this break to be reflecting rather than reflecting
on the nature of the discussion, in that there is a space, but no clear structure for using
that space. There also seems to be frustration (I want to say here ‘a sense of’ frustration,
meaning that I, Bill as Researcher, have a sense of there being frustration between Bill
and Judi in the break). I think it reflects the disarray in the apparent collapse of the
frame of the course represented by the group ending up without any clinical material to
discuss) that there is apparently a collapse in the frame of the break. Incidentally, I