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Chapter Eight – A Consulting Break - Page 259
staff group, the student group, this dyad of Judi and Bill, or Bill, or Judi. In Bill’s first
draft comments on the transcript (prior to the PFGAE 16 methodology), he notes ‘I
wonder who is lost’. In his second draft (with the benefit of the methodology), he writes
‘I feel lost. Judi doesn’t seem lost to me, here (i.e. at the point of first writing this text),
but I do wonder now (i.e. at the time of writing this second draft).
Bill’s response to the end of the break is to launch into a complaint at the demands of
his role, pausing only to defend against Judi’s attempt to help him to contain rather than
respond to requests. Bill returns to the idea of R, looking again for a third, perhaps in
the intensity of this dyad. This suggests a representational overload. 17
Interestingly, Bill’s holding of his ground, however defensively, seems again to offer
permission to Judi, who (on Page 251) acknowledges that, ‘a lot of stuff is coming
towards me at the moment’. Bill symmetrises this with his own concerns. However,
when he attempts to voice the difference in his experience of teaching (or directing) to
that of therapy, that these comparison experiences are more discontinuous compared to
the continuity of alertness required for therapy, this is anticipated by Judi, but she does
this in her assertion of the impossibility of anticipation.
The break concludes on Page 250 and 251 with Bill’s apparently unaware and
generalised description that, ‘one can be a colleague, you can be quite chummy with
people and then sort of suddenly you get kind of whoosh, impaled by something’. Judi
agrees twice in quick succession, and acknowledges that this is indeed absolutely
16 Post-Foulkesian Group-Analytic Ethnography
17 By representational overload, I am referring to the idea that a group, or indeed one or more individuals
can become overwhelmed, for example with the sheer intensity of projective processes as well as the
other phenomena that Nitsun (1996) has characterised as ‘the anti-group’.