View/Open - Scholarly Commons Home

Appendix Two – The Methodology in Action - Page A2-4
bridge at Mostar in former Yugoslavia, and the destruction of the Bamiyan Bhuddas on
the Silk Road by the Taleban regime in Afghanistan.
From consideration of the dynamics of learning communities of staff and students and
of professional associations in psychotherapy, I arrived quite separately at the notion of
identicide, to capture some of the fears and phantasies experienced by many
psychotherapists in training and subsequent practice, and found Meharg’s work when I
started researching the notion. In contrast to Meharg, my own use of this term refers to
the dread amongst psychotherapists and other mental health professionals, rational or
otherwise, that their professional identity will be damaged to the point of destruction in
the course of professional activities, that is, clinical practice, or more particularly,
training. It may be that these fears are stronger in what is a particularly small
professional world, or it may be that professional worlds are always relatively small and
these fears are very widespread. Whatever the case, they serve in particular to inhibit
participants in training events and courses, and can be inhibiting to consultants and
other group facilitators and conductors.
What this construction does is to enable the consideration of primitive phantasy in the
analysis of group processes, again, making use of awareness of both inner and outer
worlds.
Treating Disturbances in Communication as Symptoms
(Diagnostic Use)
I am thinking here of the use of the model to make sense of disturbances in
communication, analogous to the way that, for example, parapraxes in individual
psychotherapy are useful as markers for underlying conflict.