A View from the Battlefield

What strikes me most about Sam Timimi's paper is the sense of fragility, helplessness, vulnerability and doubt that haunts the neophyte group therapist working in a psychoanalytic setting like the Cassel. Soon after taking up the post here, I too experienced desperate cravings for skill, a sense of mastery and with it a reasonably secure conviction that I was doing good rather than harm - or nothing. All the anxieties that Sam Timimi likens to those experienced by the student teacher crowded in early. I have been particularly prone to that fantasy that if I ‘did this or that’, which a more experienced therapist would surely know immediately to do, then important and live issues would spontaneously emerge, be examined, then worked through by the group and healing would take place. But my neurotic craving for ‘how to do it’ instruction has been systematically frustrated - even from before I took up the position of registrar here. Attending the hospital for a pre job meeting with the consultant and senior nurse on whose team I would be working, I asked for suggestions for useful reading, taking out my notebook and pen in eager anticipation. No such suggestions were forthcoming. Neither was my embarking on a personal analytic psychotherapy mandatory though its value for a therapist new to the analytic approach was acknowledged.

This culture of deferring gratification, tolerating the anxiety rather than feeling compelled to seek immediate relief from it, allowing oneself to discover one's own resources for containment rather than having to be contained by another (supervisor, therapist, published authority), this is the sea that we all swim in here. As intended, this philosophy has come to shape my work with my patients just as it shapes my supervisor's work with me.

Some months before I started at the Cassel a consultant psychotherapist who had recently joined the staff at my previous hospital, and who had worked at the Cassel years before in the very post that Sam Timimi