ABSTRACT
The schema of Transition theory, in which a painful “neutral zone” is experienced as a result of resisting a necessary letting go, allows further examination of prospective and beginning clinicians’ cognitions and motivations. The discussion includes autobiographical material. The educator’s task is complicated where student clinicians, in their own development, have achieved first-order change but not second-order change (letting go and completion of transition). The inevitable insufficiencies of beginning clinicians—fantasies, disavowal, “overlooking” and projection—are understandable components of a developmental process of transition from disavowal (and ordinary good intentions) to intentionality. The working hypothesis is expanded: the educator’s task is to develop student clinicians in the Feeling-Sensing Style to balance the effects of the “cultural imperative” in favor of Doing. As she grapples with the neutral zone of the transition to clinician, along with the emergent realization that she is her own first client, the student may be expected to manifest “Bridgesian” symptoms of disengagement, disidentification, disenchantment and disorientation.
