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Chapter One – An introduction to the study - Page 4
form the staff into more of a team. Previously, it seemed to me as if the content of each
term of teaching (at that time, there were six terms over two years) had been regarded as
the property of the incumbent staff member, and somehow the students had to find
coherence in between the enthusiasms of these individual teachers. I also re-formed the
course from six terms into four semesters, which mirrored changes in the local
university system at that time.
These are issues relating to the structure of the course. The content of the course has
also been an important focus for me. When I assumed responsibility with my colleague
for what had become the semester that integrates theory and practice, I could readily
contribute to refocusing the case discussion forum in a way that invites the evocation of
unconscious processes and exploration of them. This had been a focus of my work over
twenty years, and did feel like something that would make a major contribution to the
learning of our students (and indeed it certainly appeared to). My colleague and I have
refined this method of conducting the case discussion forum since then, by applying our
experience with subsequent intakes. However, I found myself at the time wanting to
look more deeply at the experience that we had in a particular run of this semester, and
to think about how I could apply what I might learn.
What had happened for me by now was that a number of my passions (for groups, for
training and for research) had begun to intersect simultaneously. This project is a chance
to look below the surface and behind the scenes in a group that is structured to help its
members integrate theory and practice in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Having
introduced myself, I need to look at the territory in which I find myself, the gaps in
knowledge.