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Chapter Ten – Summary and Conclusions – Page 312
The model places the group as integral to the teaching and learning, and indeed to the
practice of the clinical approach being taught, alongside an understanding of the
individual, instead of being seen as an afterthought. This is a foundational proposition
of group analysis, reflected here in a clinical teaching environment. This is, however, in
contrast to some models of teaching and practice in psychoanalytic psychotherapy
which do not pay similar attention to the group vertex.
This is a particular perspective on what is happening as people learn in a group. This
perspective can also inform consideration of other aspects of the life of the learning
group. For example, in the recruitment and selection of teachers, the forming of a
teaching partnership, the setting of the curriculum, the recruitment and selection of the
students, the composition of the students into a group, the structuring of the learning
opportunities by allocating responsibility for presentation and discussion of topics, and
in the consideration of issues of power and its impact on the learning, assessment and
graduation process, in all these aspects, the perspective from the ‘group’ vertex gives
breadth and depth to the understanding that is possible and to the actions and other
responses to events that can flow from that understanding. Hence, these aspects
represent and articulate what Bernstein (1996) construed as Curriculum (what counts as
knowledge), Transmission (how learning takes place) and Evaluation (what counts as a
legitimate display of learning).
This model includes Foulkes’s notion of level (from Current through Transference to
Projective and Primordial Levels), and also of the social unconscious, elaborated by
Elias, Dalal, Hopper and others (Dalal, 1998, 2001; Elias, 1994; Hopper, 2003a). It also
acknowledges Matte-Blanco’s (1975) notion of bi-logic (that is, two logics,