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Chapter Ten – Summary and Conclusions – Page 305
expect. Specifically, parents will tend to reproduce in their relationships with their
children the pattern of attachment that they experienced with their own parents. An
intervention that has significant impact on this process is for people to undergo
relationship based psychotherapy. This tends to lead to attachment patterns moving
from a range of ‘Insecure’ classifications towards ‘Secure’.
Being part of a group where there is an opportunity to reflect on one’s impact on the
group and the impact of the group on one’s self is an elegant and effective form of
preparation for relational work with patients and clients. Specifically, features such as
the plasticity of experience that flow from adoption of a group-analytic perspective can
enable individuals to use the resources of the group to enhance their understanding. For
example, at Stratum Two and below of Matte-Blanco’s hierarchy (1988), the body of the
group can come to represent the body of the patient, or the symbiotic fusion of the
patient and therapist, and reflective consideration of positions in relation to that can
greatly expand the understanding that individuals and the group can accomplish through
taking part. Alternately, in clinical practice, for example, the group can come to seem to
be at one’s shoulder or inside one’s mind. All of these possibilities expand the potential
of the reflective self.
Allusion, metonymy and metaphor
The focus on Freud’s characteristics of the unconscious (1915) and their subsequent
elaborations (Matte-Blanco, 1988; Rayner & Tuckett, 1988) has led to an appreciation
of a number of contributions from linguistics, such as the concepts of allusion,
metonymy and metaphor. The matrix created in the learning group can be used to make
sense of these processes taking place between people working together to understand
the process of relational psychotherapy.