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The process of the semester
Chapter One – An introduction to the study - Page 11
In accordance with the aim of enabling play, some thought was given to setting up the
semester. Tutors came routinely to attend the beginning of the penultimate session of
the previous semester (taught by another team of two colleagues), in order to form a
relationship with the students, to remind them that they would need to bring tape
recordings of their clinical work to the following semester, and to prepare them to meet
this requirement. The first session of the semester itself, some four weeks after the
tutors and students first met, was spent in orientation to the teaching method, by the
tutors elaborating each student’s learning edges (points of challenge for them in the
application of what they have been learning in their clinical practice), and their
questions with which they personally had been left by the previous teaching. The tutors
felt a need to balance the power relationship between tutor and student. They also
wanted to acknowledge the impact in the group of members bringing such a clear
demonstration of their work for the first time, and hence to share in the vulnerability by
bringing their own work first.
What the semester is aimed to accomplish
The course went through a process of formalisation during the time of this delivery, and
amongst other roles, the researcher had lead responsibility for this process as Course
Director and also Head of Training. This process resulted in the articulation of
‘Learning Outcomes’ as well as ‘Standards of Practice for Psychotherapy’, together
with other course documents. Fundamentally, though, the aim of the course was (and
remains following the formalisation) to enable students to progress in their development
as psychoanalytic psychotherapists. One way of viewing this is to imagine the following
figure: