The Use of ‘Here and Now’ Experiences in a Teaching Conference on Psychotherapy as a Means of Gaining Insight into the Nature of the Helping Relationship

“If he is indeed wise, he does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind”.

from ‘The Teacher’ by Kahlil Gibran in ‘The Prophet’.

The question of how to lead others to the threshold of their minds is one that must occupy any teacher in the art of psychotherapy and each one of us has to find his own way of setting about answering it. I have learned most at the Tavistock Clinic, where we have for many years run two basic kinds of seminars for those doing the pre-clinical psychotherapy training: Infant Observation Seminars (first introduced by Dr. Ester Bick), and Work Discussion Seminars. For the former, trainees are required to observe infants in their own homes week by week, and to make detailed reports about their observations. This heightens the student's perception of nonverbal communication and draws his attention to primitive object relationships and character development. Most people who participate in such seminars are astounded at the wealth of understanding that can be gained from attention to the minute details of infant behaviour when it is considered within the context of the infant's developing relationships, The Work Discussion Seminar for members of the “helping professions” (which Mrs. Martha Harris initiated) focuses on the student's work situation. Here the emphasis is on the relationship between client and worker, on the manifestations of transference and counter-transference. The student thus begins to look at himself in a relationship, at the reactions aroused in him by his clients and the effect of his own behaviour on the dynamics of the interaction. The seminar-leader's function in both these instances is to help the student to explore and question what is going on, to encourage him to become more aware in a feeling way of the nature of relationships. Thus, the leader starts from where the student is and enables him to think further. As therapeutic work depends so much on an individual's