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Chapter Six – Part of a Session – Page 203
Third, this session contains an attempt by the students, the tutors and the group to
address the frustration implicit in the task of the semester. This frustration follows from
the notion that a favourable outcome in terms of individual student achievement almost
certainly includes a growth in the capacity for negative capability, that is, tolerance of
not knowing what is happening in therapeutic interaction. This is hard to bear, and may
represent the intrusion of Basic Assumption (Bion, 1962) modes of operating into what
it seems should be a ‘Work’ experience. It may be that the function of this session is to
allow necessary learning-group maintenance to take place.
Fourth, experientially there was a primitive, almost lethal quality to the experience of
being with this group as a tutor in this session. Maybe this represents an intrusion of
Nitsun’s (1996) notion of the anti-group. Related to this, in some senses people are
beginning to find themselves as clinicians around this point. Although it seems as if
there is much that the tutors fail to grasp consciously, deliberately or explicitly, it may
be that they are inevitably modelling dealing with a challenging, emotional and complex
situation, not least by surviving.
Fifth, this phase of the group life (at least over the course of this semester, so
effectively, of the group working in this manner), may represents Tuckman’s (1965)
classic notion of the developmental stage of the group of Storming (following Forming
and Norming, and prior to Performing and then Ending).
Sixth and finally, all of the questions that the students raise could have been addressed
to the group, with a view to them being explored in the group, and this did not happen.
How to explain countertransference to people who have no idea may be a really