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Chapter Ten – Summary and Conclusions – Page 301
then this perspective will be in the minds of the members as the experience progresses
and ends. Even if feelings and dynamics cannot appropriately be dealt with immediately
in the learning group, students can be encouraged to identify issues that trouble them in
their learning and to bring them back later, or to take those identified issues to settings
such as the adjacent Reflective Group, or to clinical supervision or individual personal
therapy.
SYNTHESISING THE FINDINGS FROM THE THESIS
Introduction to a series of concepts
Together, these concepts that follow link the findings of the study, make up the group-
analytically informed teaching model, and inform research in group-analytic
ethnography. They are: the matrix of the learning group; dynamic administration; the
group as a reflective self; allusion, metonymy and metaphor; Sticky Moments, transfer
of form; and identity in transition.
The thesis has, I would argue, demonstrated that a particular collection of
understandings can be applied to experience in the professional practice of teaching the
clinical method of psychoanalytic psychotherapy, and that the outcome is a detailed
appreciation of the role of the learning group, its actual accomplishments and its further
potential. In ‘elevator conversation’ 2 terms, I am confident I can now look at a learning
group, real or potential, and that as a result I can with much greater certainty than before
make some contribution to how the work of that group (and of the range of participants
and stakeholders in the milieu of which it is a part) can be understood and further
developed.
2 Here I am using ‘elevator conversation’ to refer to the conversation one might have in an elevator with
someone inquiring about the progress of one’s thesis, or more particularly here, what one has learned. The
conversation is, of course, limited by the length of an elevator ride.