Psychologists are usually very skilled at separating out what happens inside other people and what they themselves think and feel. This is not easy. When they carry out laboratory experiments they get tangled up in many rhetorical tricks, turns of phrase that refer to the others as the ‘subjects’ when those others are being treated as if they were objects. And in this kind of situation the experimenter, who is really the subject of the narrative – ‘I asked such and such people to perform this task in these different conditions’ – disappears altogether. Although the experimenters did it and write about what they did, they are not allowed to write in the first person. Psychology students learn quickly that there is no place for the ‘I’, for personal experience or reflection on their position in experimental reports, and they are often penalised for making themselves present in essays or any other kind of writing in psychology journals.

Psychologists are usually skilled at avoiding themselves then, but what happens when we try to train them up, to help them to become skilled in acknowledging their position? When the psychology degree was being rewritten at Manchester Polytechnic in the late 1980s, and interpersonal skills workshops were being introduced in the first and second years of the course, it seemed to be an ideal opportunity to change the way psychologists were taught to operate in relation to others.