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Chapter Six – Part of a Session – Page 201
to invite participation. Heidi is chosen by the group to voice the negativity and
ambivalence evoked by the task, and indeed is helped along by Paula. However, she is
in that place because the tutors have apparently not managed to grasp the
communication underlying the choice of topics from the students, nor to address the fate
of the discussion in the first half of the session.
A conceptual structure (the Reference Locator) will be elaborated in the next chapter,
Chapter Seven, but in order to begin to introduce this here, it relies on consideration of a
triad of foci in a group such as this semester’s class, including clinical (the material
being discussed), task (relating to the outcome of the semester, the growth of
professional ability in psychoanalytic psychotherapy), and group (relating to the
personal and shared experiences of members of the group). These foci are arrayed as the
vertices of an equilateral triangle.
Considering the impact on the group resulting from Kelly’s failure to present some
material, or alternatively, to schedule a replacement, one consequence has been that one
vertex (‘Clinical’) of the triad of foci (i.e. ‘Task’, ‘Group’ and ‘Clinical’) has been
removed. This serves to lessen the attention it is then possible to pay to the ‘Task’ focus
(even though this ostensibly comes forward, but it does so at a time when there is no
link via the Clinical material). What becomes foregrounded is the ‘Group’ vertex, but as
this comes forward in a disconnected manner, there is maybe, in the minds of members
of the group, a collapse into something like therapy.
Briefly changing voice here, certainly at times the group feels more like a therapy group
than a learning group. By ‘feels’, I mean my felt response as one of the tutors to the
experience of being with this group, both at the time and in subsequent study.