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Chapter Eight – A Consulting Break - Page 260
amazing. This disappears beyond the realms of consideration as the group (of the staff
and the students) reforms.
MORE ANALYSIS
The analysis will continue here, through gathering together some threads from
consideration of the transcript and various researcher responses to it, and through
weaving of those threads into the beginnings of understandings and interpretations.
The rapid and effective conclusion of the break is remarkable, as is the immediate
acceptance by both parties of what Goffman (1961) would see as the return to the stage.
This mutual if unconscious acknowledgement seems to be a representation of what has
just taken place, and what has just been experienced by the two participants, even
though this has not been addressed directly. There has been very little if any direct
process comment on (i.e. comment based on reflection on the process of the interaction
as it happens), or direction of, the events of the break by the two participants.
The use of breaks
Consideration of this break led to consideration of range of uses of a break during
consultations or other interactions with patients, families, groups or classes. Particular
forms of break include the consulting break employed by teams in various types of
family therapy (Andersen, 1987; Palazzoli, Boscolo, Cecchin, & Prata, 1980), as well as
the use of parallel and reflective processes in the post hoc clinical supervision of
individual psychotherapy (Searles, 1955). Although the break in each teaching session
of the semester was clearly an important part of the course, as has been noted above, in
contrast, the role of the break (beyond that of a needed period of recovery) was not
explicitly theorised.