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Chapter Eight – A Consulting Break - Page 267
A key feature of the perspective from a consulting break in a session, be it clinical or
educational, is that it usually takes place in a backstage area, which in turn is a theatrical
notion employed by Goffman (1961) in his classic study of asylums. Such areas provide
contexts that are separate and different in significant ways. There are of course
exceptions to this, for example in some forms of group and family therapy, where the
other participants are allowed to listen in to consultations between co-therapists, but for
the most part, consulting breaks take place away from the scene of the main action and
involve considerable relaxation of constraints on thought and discussion. Clinical
supervision in psychotherapy can be thought of as an example of this.
This is reminiscent of the setting of Tom Stoppard’s play, ‘Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern are Dead’ (1968), which dramatises the experience of two minor
characters from William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet (1623), based in the back stage
area of a theatrical performance of Hamlet. As a result, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
are frequently interrupted by processions of major characters from the stage into their
backstage domain. This motif captures the way that the interaction between Bill and
Judi is subject to pushes and pulls from the interaction in the learning group, which in
turn reflects in part aspects of the pushes and pulls on the learning group of the clinical
session that the presenter has brought.
The students collectively have to struggle with their identities as psychotherapists,
whether or not they think about themselves in that way. This is so in a way that is true
for all therapists, in a way that is so for each of them in particular and for them as a
particular group at this stage of their respective careers. In particular, it is also true for
them as a group of psychotherapists and mental health workers making the transition
towards involving psychoanalytic thinking more consistently in their clinical work.