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Neither psychotherapy nor psychoanalysis are spectator sports. Any attempt to show them televisually suffers from the need to dramatize and narrate what is essentially an untidy process involving at one moment the search for understanding, at another the tolerance for confusion, at another the ability to track the nuance of feeling, the scrutinizing of transference-countertransference dynamics and what, to the untrained
eye, would be the almost imperceptible changes in consciousness. Television audiences are not educated to observe such processes: they expect story, drama or explication, and yet, of course, what the analyst and therapist looking at the series are most caught up in is precisely that question of process: ‘how did the therapist conduct herself and what were its effects?’
In this television screening of extracts of four sessions between Jan Gale and Caroline Garland in which the material has been edited and pauses inserted, therapists, patients and the public are exposed to far more of an individual therapist's work than is usually possible. Therapy sessions, despite supervision and clinical seminars, are extremely private matters and, much as one may have experience of colleagues in professional settings, one's inability to eavesdrop on sessions, to see, hear and feel the words, the particular ambience, the physical movements of the participants, the way the words, the pauses, the affects, the bodies play between them and so on limits one's sense of what actually transpires between two people. Thus, it is quite a paradox that a first glimpse at the inside of a session from the Trauma Unit at the Tavistock comes from one made for a million people. Parenthetically, it raises interesting questions about the profession's reticence to film unedited sessions for training purposes.
One strand of Caroline Garland's work with Jan Gale is her focus on thinking and her view that he has been avoiding it. Her specialized neo-Kleinian use of a word, which has a very