Discussion on Paper by David Millar and Vega Zagier Roberts
Abstract
Elderly Patients in 'Continuing Care' 61 work? Merely to state the obvious, to say there needs to be change is, as the authors point out, to say that what exists at present is bad, with all the anxieties this produces. David Millar and Vega Roberts address these questions by focusing their attention, highly productively, on the parallel and potentially workable group of the staff, recognizing the depression and rage engendered by working with patients for whom no miracles are possible. Once this group had been enabled to take back some of their projections from the shadow group, energies were released and changes could be initiated by the continuing- care team itself. (I have always suspected the golden rule for working with institutions to be Charles F.G. Masterman's 'You can get anything you want done in this life if you don't mind someone else getting the credit.') Apart from the intrinsic interest of the problem and the sensitivity of the work described in tackling it, this paper has another value for readers of this journal. It gives us the kind of material we need to begin to understand more clearly how and where Foulkesian group analysis links up with