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Chapter Seven – A Discussion – Page 227
the staff. The staff also know that the students know about them, and a similar mix of
perspectives follows.
Arguably, as in clinical work, there is a challenge about when, what and how much one
says about these phenomena. There is a tightrope between on the one hand merely
ignoring the phenomena, and on the other hand saying too much and making an
interpretation of a transference from a student or the group which is too direct, too
clinical and basically inappropriate. The point of balance would seem to be where
anxiety experienced by students is sufficient to be alerting, but not so great as to risk
disabling fear of exposure and shame, or worse, actual evocation of that outcome.
Achievement of this balance is indicated by a capacity for comfortable-enough 16
reflection
The impossibility of the task
Here I am moving to the first of a series of additional lenses on events and phenomena.
Earlier in this chapter on Page 209, at the beginning of the description of the context of
the session, I mentioned this issue, the impossibility of the task that is set for the group.
This task is to some extent is a version of Freud’s fundamental rule, mentioned in
Chapter Four. As a reminder in his paper ‘On Beginning the Treatment’ Freud
encourages (in his instruction to his patient) a lack of censoring and avoidance of
concern with logic, summarised as:
So say whatever goes through your mind. Act as though, for instance, you were a
traveller sitting next to the window of a railway carriage and describing to
someone inside the carriage the changing views which you see outside. Finally,
never forget that you have promised to be absolutely honest, and never leave
16 Here I am alluding to Winnicott’s (1953, Page 53) notion of the good-enough mother, which is
discussed at more length in Chapter Nine on Page 280. Briefly, Winnicott elaborated an image of
mothering that includes the potential for both illusion and disillusionment, and that is successful not
through perfection but sufficiency.