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Chapter One – An introduction to the study - Page 16
The intersection of the cultures is there in the research, between the psychoanalytic
culture and the anthropological culture. Here it is too in the theory behind the teaching.
Adult education probably needs little further elaboration. The culture of psychoanalytic
psychotherapy needs more. A key emphasis of the approach is expressed in the notion
of the setting for therapy, which includes all interactions prior to meeting (including
patients reading advertising or receiving recommendations from friends or family
members). As well as the details of the physical setting and the contractual arrangement
(often negotiated only provisionally prior to the first meeting), the setting includes the
range of contributions by the therapist of aspects of their own self, including all of their
understanding and experience, and their approach to the patient that is the expression of
these aspects. This emphasis in a clinical setting is paralleled in the learning group in
the way that the students are regarded throughout their contact with the educational
setting of the agency. Put another way, the two cultures, of psychotherapy and of
education, can be seen side by side, and aspects of one that influence practice (the
attitude of a therapist towards a patient) can be seen in the other (in the attitudes of
teaching staff towards students).
As the theory that underpins individual psychoanalytic psychotherapy shapes the milieu,
so too can the theory that underlies group psychotherapy. This reflects a central theme
of the thesis – that the group lens has been missing in the consideration of training, in
psychotherapy in particular but in all manner of other fields as well. There are
particularly important group-analytic notions such as the matrix and dynamic
administration, but more important than these is the orientation that is central to the
approach, that the individual is not an isolated entity but represents a nodal point in a
network of infinite interconnections between themselves and other individuals and