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I remember being a pupil in secondary school, in that crossing point between the continuing need for the security of the family and the desire for a more autonomous individual identity, at that age when personal growth demanded a more open challenge to parental authority. As symbols of parental authority, teachers were also on the receiving end of such defiance. Some, however, could contain pupils' behaviour better than others, and the class quickly and intuitively gained a sense of their capacity for this. Any hint of weakness was ruthlessly exposed and exploited.
This was particularly so with student teachers on placements. As soon as they were left to cope with the class on their own we would start all manner of testing to see how far the boundaries could be stretched. Tensions would rise and we would begin to see how well this new victim was going to cope with the ordeal - talking out of turn, making jokes, disobeying, complaining about their technique and so on. Their qualities of leadership and for containment of this adolescent, rebellious, antiauthority energy were under scrutiny, and in the weeks that followed both they and we would begin to discover what capacities they could find in themselves for this task.
I now have some idea of what these experiences may have been like for the student teacher. The feeling of being made to feel useless; the cruelty with which one feels one's inadequacies being exposed; the pressure and with it the wish that things could be different, that the pupils could be more reasonable, or that they could see your strength; the fantasy that if you did this or that, the pupils would miraculously respond to your abilities and a respectful working calm would descend.
Some of these feelings confronted me during the first few months of my nine-month placement as Registrar in Psychotherapy at the Cassel Hospital, seeing patients in combined individual and group therapy. It was a mode of therapy that was new to me. It now seems