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Chapter Seven – A Discussion – Page 216
doubt. This was the first time that anyone, staff or student, had presented work with a
child. Another aspect of the sense of challenge, with hindsight, may be a result of the
group facing the task of understanding what had been proposed in this current session.
Some of this may be due to Bill’s clumsy instructions. Also, the group gets into a mode
more representative of bringing the Semester to an end. One way of looking at either or
both of these factors is that they in turn result from turbulent unconscious dynamics to
do with ending. Bill wants to avoid it, so he doesn’t help the group to finish well, and
the group want to avoid it so they muddle their task and get caught up in clarifying that
(or not) with Bill.
Changing voice, as I write now, I can see that these twin concerns, that of the clinical
material and that of the group (including the tutors) and its task, intertwine in this
session. The boy in Kelly’s work was very anxious about his future, and discussing the
material in the class the previous week seemed more than in any previous session to
have had a major impact on the group and on individual members, evoking an
identification of the members of the group with the boy client. At the same time,
looking at the difficulty that the group seems to experience getting to the overt task in
this session, it is as if the members of the group and the group as a whole are
determined to begin to end the semester. One interpretation of this constellation is that
the clinical material of the previous week has indeed engaged people in a way that has
not happened before, both because of the nature of the material but also because the
group has developed and people are becoming more engaged themselves, with each
other, with the overt task, and with the implicit possibilities of such a situation. There is
a welcoming of the learning (and some acceptance of the pain involved), but also a
simultaneous hatred of the experience, as elaborated by Bion (1959, 1962a), and
described in Chapter Two Part Two on Page 55. There is also a wish to avoid the grief