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Chapter Eight – A Consulting Break - Page 265
experience of the patient in the clinical work, there are a range of other issues and
dynamics that are represented in this experience of discussion.
Layered attention – a contribution of psychoanalytic
(particularly group-analytic) theory
In considering these phenomena, as elsewhere in the thesis I believe that there is value
in the notion of a set of levels. These represent a sequence between them, which may be
hierarchical (world, society, family, individual) or not (as in this case, with the
dimension that relates the settings being distance from the experience of the patient in
the clinical work being presented). The clinical session brought by the presenter is the
first abstraction from this, with the reflection that the group is able to manage being at a
second level. A third level is that of the discussion between the staff, as in the transcript,
and the fourth that of this process of research. This study adds the strata of bi-logic as a
range of levels at which the interaction can be considered, as highlighted in the
comments on the transcript.
The matrix that can contain apparent polarisation
A key difference between Judi and Bill, and one which is acknowledged between them,
is their different focus of attention between the individual and the group vertices, and
their resulting view on which should be privileged at a particular points in discussion.
Although their perspectives are not truly polarised, it is as if they each come to stand in
the discussion solely for one of these (for example, see Page 249). I want to argue that
this representation of containment of apparent polarisation is actually a form of
interpretation in action, a modelling of a type of matrix that can contain difference and
conflict.