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Chapter One – An introduction to the study - Page 10
and in their learning within it. To an extent, this was reflected in the very minimal
reading required as part of the semester. Students were given only three items, in
contrast to earlier semesters, including on this occasion classic papers by Casement
(1985) and Searles (1955) on making use of experience in the clinical or supervisory
situation, and by Guntrip (1975) on the personal experience of undergoing
psychoanalyses with two iconic but different analysts.
Other parts of the attitudinal disposition include the awareness of the need to create an
ambience where what Haley (1963) has termed “dead serious play”, and all that this
entails, can take place. Haley is, I believe, attempting to capture the paradox whereby
some of the most serious of human dilemmas and issues require a creative response.
This involves differentiating the work of the semester from didactic teaching, from
student-led presentations, from supervision, from personal therapy and from group
psychotherapy. In relation to the work of the semester, the staff had in mind the
established notion in educational psychology (Smith, 1984) that groups of children
learning with or without play had similar outcomes, but that those children who had
learned more in the context of play were able to generalise their learning more flexibly
as well as more readily. Hence they wanted to do what they could to maximise the
outcomes for their students by the way they constructed the context of their experience.
A lot of the requirements for this to happen seem to involve absences rather than
presences, such as the absence (or reduction) of anxiety about performance or criticism,
rather than the presence of any explicit facilitatory resource.
It remains to elaborate the process of the semester, and to sketch some of the planned or
rather hoped-for outcomes as well as some of the issues that arose.