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Chapter Eight
A Consulting Break (The Scrap - Session Eleven)
In which the tutors come to represent and experience, by displacement,
issues otherwise barely articulated in the learning group, via the totality of
their interaction and discussion in the break.
The Transcript of the Consulting Break in Session Eleven is included in this chapter on
Pages 242 to 251, and is referred to throughout the chapter.
Important note
(Changing voice for integrity of meaning,) I am writing about myself and my colleague
and what happens between us in an unguarded conversation in a backstage area. As
such, I take sole and full responsibility for my representation of events, which is just
that, my representation. What is due to my colleague is enormous respect and gratitude
for the experience of working together that we have, and the learning that I am
privileged to accomplish as a result.
Introduction
This Session, Session Eleven, follows next in sequence after the one that contains ‘A
Beginning’ (Up-Bringing - Session Ten), which is discussed in Chapter Five. In Session
Ten, some members of the group began for the first time to talk about difficulties in the
experience of learning on the course as a whole. It is arguable that one way they have
previously displayed these difficulties is by acting them out. 1 This is not to overlook the
1 As noted in previous Chapters, according to Rycroft, (in clinical psychoanalysis) “a patient is said to be
‘acting out’ if he engages in activity which can be interpreted as a substitute for remembering past events.
The essence of the concept is the replacement of thought by action and it implies that either (a) the
impulse being acted out has never acquired verbal representation, or (b) that the impulse is too intense to
be dischargeable in words, or (c) that the patient lacks the capacity for inhibition” (1968, p. 1).