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Chapter Nine – An Ending – Page 287
(1983) who focussed more on the strengths. I wonder, as an aside, if teaching inevitably
involves a kind of vampiric identification, and hatred of the student for having the
experience that one is facilitating, not least because there is so much to deal with in the
group and there is not the time or the space to do so for the group to fully learn. Some of
this can happen in the Reflective Group, but that can also just make matters worse if it
evokes feelings and then becomes somewhere else that things cannot be dealt with. In
the break in Session Eleven (discussed in Chapter Eight), Judi was able to express what
I take to be envy, which I certainly shared, of the role of Reflective Group conductor.
Together with the experience of shame, which I came to by association with the events
of this session, and which I feel at the outcome of this session and the course, these
various feelings capture a group experience of the end of a training, with some gains but
with some anxieties, regrets and injuries that could not be addressed because they had
not been contextualised as issues of concern.
From a more conventional position as participant-observer, albeit one with the relatively
unconventional benefit of a group-analytic perspective, I wonder if Judi, myself and to
some extent the group were containing experience from various sources that we can
only now begin to put into words.
A table summarising the description, analysis and interpretation of data in this chapter
follows at the end of the chapter on Page 289. Whilst there is some sense of
timelessness in this session, it seems that the predominant characteristic of the
unconscious is the absence of mutual contradiction – it is the end, and yet it is as if it is
not. The group has finished, but we have not really behaved as if it were truly the end.