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Robert M. Young Online Writings
GROUP THERAPIES AND GROUP DYNAMICS
by Robert M. Young
I have been asked to give a talk about the various approaches to Group
Therapy. I trained as a group therapist using the approach of W. R. Bion and was in
a supervision group with people being trained in group analysis according to the approach
of S. H. Foulkes. I also have considerable experience of the group relations approach
developed from the ideas of Bion by Rice, Turquet, Lawrence and others at the Tavistock
Clinic the so-called Tavistock/Leicester Model. I am going to speak largely about
that, but Ill begin by saying something on the precise topic about which I was asked
to speak.
I have more than a shelf of books on group therapies and am a member of
an email forum which discusses group-psychotherapy. I plumbed these and confirmed my
initial response: it cannot be done in a single lecture. Even if I used the compare
and contrast method I still say it couldnt be done. For example, in the
supervision group I attended someone once said, as if everyone knew it, that the
transference is to the group. I said, believing myself to be correcting a simple blunder,
that surely the transference was to the therapist. Instant gridlock. The matter could not,
in any degree, be discussed. The supervisor took me aside after the meeting and gently
chided me. You have a degree in philosophy; you think anything can be made a topic
for reflective, critical discussion. Most of the people here tonight believe that what
they are taught is the use of certain technical tools. As far as they are concerned, for
you to question any one of them is like saying to a brain surgeon in mid-operation,
Dont use that tool; use this one. It would induce sheer panic.
Dont raise an issue like that again. Thus ended my career as a comparer and
contraster of approaches to group therapy. I have since been told that some approaches
allow the group to meet even if the therapist is not present. I have also been told that
existential therapists do not work in the transference and on another occasion that this
is not true. What follows, therefore, is an outline, followed by some thoughts about
certain approaches to group dynamics and then some genuinely puzzling questions.
First, I will give you a list of group therapies I have compiled. There
are basically three parameters: orientation, participants and setting, as well as some
other variables such as size of the group and duration of the course of meetings. Certain
of these can, of course, be mixed, e.g., a psychoanalytic group for men who commit
domestic violence and are in prison, meeting for, say, fifteen sessions. Here is a useful
summary:
There are many kinds of groups in the group-psychotherapy field. The
techniques used in group-therapy can be verbal, expressive, psychodramatic etc. The
approaches can vary from psychoanalytic to behavioral, gestalt or encounter groups.
Groups vary from classic psychotherapy groups, where process is
emphasized, to psychoeducation, which are closer to a class. Psychoeducation groups
usually focus on the most common areas of concern, notably depression, anxiety,
relationships, anger, stress- management. They are frequently more time-limited (10 to 15
sessions) and thus very appealing in a managed care environment.
Each approach has its advantages and drawbacks, and the participant
should consult the expert which technique matches her/his unique personality.
You will note that many of the matters of orientation reflect the kinds
of individual psychotherapy which are available. Here is my list:
psychoanalytic group therapy
group analysis (in which all interpretations are group interpretations)
humanistic
systemic
existential
gestalt
self psychology
rational emotive
interpersonal
person-centred
psychodrama (Moreno)
drama therapy
group art therapy
behavioural
cognitive-behavioural
couples groups
family therapy
inpatient groups
mens groups
womens groups
groups for children and adolescents
groups for the elderly
domestic violence groups
victim groups - e.g., of crime, rape, incest
group-psychotherapy with addicts
groups for partners/ family of substance abusers
dual diagnosis groups
groups for the medically ill
groups for in-patient psychiatric patients
focal groups
time-limited
experiential groups
staff groups
co-leading
leaderless groups
co-supervision groups
therapeutic communities
very large groups (deMare)
group relations
small groups
large groups
intergroup events
institutional events
application groups
organizational dynamics
Here are some journals: International Journal of Group
Psychotherapy; Group Analysis, GROUP, The Journal of the Eastern Group Psychotherapy
Society; Social Work with Groups; Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice (sponsored
by Division 49 of the American Psychological Association); International Journal of
Action Methods: Psychodrama, Skill Training, and Role Playing; Group & Organization
Management; Human Relations; Free Associations (which I edit and which has a heavy
emphasis on groups & organizations)
I would be glad to supply to anyone interested this list, information
about the email forum, web sites I know about and reading lists.
Now to the heart of my lecture. I have read or heard things about
various of these approaches and have even published books and articles about a few of
them. The truth is, however, that I only know about psychoanalytic groups and group
relations. in any sense which makes it appropriate for me to give a lecture about them. I
am going to reflect now on what I believe to be an important difference in approaches to
these matters based on issues raised by Wilfred Bion. He wrote the founding document of
the Tavistock approach, Experiences in Groups. In much of the book he focuses on
primitive Oedipal conflicts, part-object relations and psychotic anxieties. But by the
time he gets to his concluding summary, he is quite blunt in challenging the traditional
Freudian view of what is happening in groups. You will recall that id, ego and superego
and the Oedipal triangle were believed by Freud to be all you need to figure out anything
in the individual, in groups and in society. Freud said of The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and Its Discontents,
I recognised ever more clearly that the events of human history, the
interactions between human nature, cultural development, and the precipitates of primeval
experience (as whose representative religion pushes to the fore) are only the reflection
of the dynamic conflicts among ego, id, and superego, which psychoanalysis studies in the
individual the same events repeated on a wider stage (quoted in Gay, p. 547).
His biographer, Peter Gay, concludes, 'He could not have stated the
essential unity of his thought any more forcefully' (Ibid.). There is no place in
Freud's thinking for what the social scientists call 'the autonomy of the social', that
is, for social causes operating at a different level from the psychological and deriving
from genuinely social forces, even though they are mediated through the individual psyche.
There is not even relative autonomy. When he wrote about group psychology, the
central dynamic was the ceding of authority and conscience to the group leader, once
again, an Oedipal dynamic.
Bion challenged this quite fundamentally. He wrote, 'Freud's view of
the dynamics of the group seems to me to require supplementing rather than correction'
(Bion, 1955, p. 475). He accepts Freud's claim that the family group is the basis for all
groups but adds that
this view does not go far enough... I think that the central position
in group dynamics is occupied by the more primitive mechanisms which Melanie Klein has
described as peculiar to the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions. In other words, I
feel... that it is not simply a matter of the incompleteness of the illumination provided
by Freud's discovery of the family group as the prototype of all groups, but the fact that
this incompleteness leaves out the source of the main emotional drives of the group (ibid.).
Further investigation shows that each basic assumption contains
features that correspond so closely with extremely primitive part objects that sooner or
later psychotic anxiety, appertaining to these primitive relationships, is released. These
anxieties, and the mechanisms peculiar to them, have already been displayed in
psychoanalysis by Melanie Klein, and her descriptions tally well with the emotional states
of the basic assumption group. Such groups have aims
far different either from the overt task of the group or even from the
tasks that would appear to be appropriate to Freud's view of the group as based on the
family group. But approached from the angle of psychotic anxiety, associated with
phantasies of primitive part object relationships... the basic assumption phenomena appear
far more to have the characteristics of defensive reactions to psychotic anxiety, and to
be not so much at variance with Freud's views as supplementary to them. In my view, it is
necessary to work through both the stresses that appertain to family patterns and the
still more primitive anxieties of part object relationships. In fact I consider the latter
to contain the ultimate sources of all group behaviour (p. 476).
In Bion's view, then, what matters in individual and group behaviour is
more primitive than the Freudian level of explanation. The ultimate sources of our
distress are psychotic anxieties, and much of what happens in individuals and groups is a
result of defences erected against psychotic anxieties, so that we do not have to
endure them consciously. Bion says of the group,
My impression is that the group approximates too closely, in the minds
of the individuals composing it, to very primitive phantasies about the contents of the
mother's body. The attempt to make a rational investigation of the dynamics of the group
is therefore perturbed by fears, and mechanisms for dealing with them, which are
characteristic of the paranoid-schizoid position. The investigation cannot be carried out
without the stimulation and activation of those levels... the elements of the emotional
situation are so closely allied to phantasies of the earliest anxieties that the group is
compelled, whenever the pressure of anxiety becomes too great, to take defensive action
(Bion, 1955, p. 456).
The psychotic anxieties in question involve splitting and projective
identification, part-object relations and punitive guilt feelings which are characteristic
of the paranoid-schizoid position. These alternate with whole-object relations, concern
for the object, and constructive or reparative guilt - which are characteristics of the
depressive position (p. 457). According to Bion, the move from the individual to the group
does not raise new issues about explanation. He says a little further on, 'The apparent
difference between group psychology and individual psychology is an illusion produced by
the fact that the group brings into prominence phenomena which appear alien to an observer
unaccustomed to using the group' (p. 461). This is an important claim, one which I make
sense of by believing that social and other causes operate for Bion via their unconscious
representations.
This passage had a big impact on my
thinking, as did the following one from Joan Riviere's classic Kleinian essay 'On the
Genesis of Psychical Conflict in Early Infancy' (1952):
I wish especially to point out... that from the very beginning of life,
on Freud's own hypothesis, the psyche responds to the reality of its experiences by
interpreting them or rather, misinterpreting them in a subjective
manner that increases its pleasure and preserves it from pain. This act of subjective
interpretation of experience, which it carries out by means of the processes of
introjection and projection, is called by Freud hallucination; and it forms the foundation
of what we mean by phantasy-life. The phantasy-life of the individual is thus the
form in which his real internal and external sensations and perceptions are interpreted
and represented to himself in his mind under the influence of the pleasure-pain principle.
(It seems to me that one has only to consider for a moment to see that, in spite of all
the advances man has made in adaptation of a kind to external reality, this primitive and
elementary function of his psyche to misinterpret his perceptions for his own
satisfaction still retains the upper hands in the minds of the great majority of
even civilized adults.) (Riviere, 1952, p. 41).
In claiming that experience is characteristically misinterpreted at
source and that distortion to the point of hallucination is at the very foundation of
experience, Riviere is saying that there are no uninterpreted experiences, and there is no
neutral observation language in everyday life. You don't start with pure sense data which
then get subjectively distorted. The very act of having experience is coloured by
profoundly irrational processes. Looking more broadly, by the way, the same claim about
there being no neutral observation language is made of science in recent work in the
philosophy of science.
Clearly, if we approach group phenomena and group therapy from this
point of view, we are perpetually immersed in processes which psychiatrists call
psychotic. Bion made the distinction between work groups, roughly speaking, groups which
were getting on with their appointed tasks, and what he called above basic
assumption groups, groups in the grip of a primitive unconscious phantasy. The first
basic assumption is dependency: 'that the group is met in order to be sustained by
a leader on whom it depends for nourishment, material and spiritual, and protection' (p.
444). The second basic assumption of pairing involves a Messianic
hope that something or someone as-yet unborn, not-yet present or not yet in role will save
the group 'from feelings of hatred, destructiveness and despair, of its own or of another
group, but in order to do this, obviously the Messianic hope must never be fulfilled' (pp.
446-8). The third basic assumption is fight or flight: - 'that the group has met to
fight something or run away from it' (p.448), the emotions appropriate to the
physiological emergency response of the sympathetic nervous system, energised by
adrenaline. He contends that 'panic flight and uncontrolled attack are really the same'
(p. 469). Isabel Menzies Lyth comments that 'They have in common massive splitting and
projective identification, loss of individual distinctiveness or depersonalization,
diminution of effective contact with reality, lack of belief in progress and development
through work and suffering' (Menzies Lyth, 1959, p. 21).
Bion stresses that these are in no way voluntary or conscious
reactions: 'Participation in basic assumption activity requires no training, experience or
mental development. It is instantaneous, inevitable and instinctive...' (Bion, 1955, p.
449; cf. p. 458). All of the basic assumptions involve a leader, but this need not be a
person; it could be an idea or inanimate object (p. 450). When the 'leader' is a
person, he or she 'is as much the creature of the basic assumption as any other member of
the group... The "loss of individual distinctiveness" applies to the leader of
the group as much as to anyone else a fact which probably accounts for some of the
posturing to which leading figures are prone' (p. 467).
These defensive actions derive from group processes which lead
individuals to regress. Once again, he places the main emphasis on the primitiveness of
the reactions:
It will be seen from this description that the basic assumptions now
emerge as formations secondary to an extremely early primal scene worked out on a level of
part objects, and associated with psychotic anxiety and mechanisms of splitting and
projective identification... characteristic of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive
positions. Introjection and projection of the group, which is now the feared investigator,
now the feared object of investigation, form an essential part of the picture and help to
add confusion to the scene unless recognised as being very active (p. 457).
Various people have tried to add to Bions list of three basic
assumptions but without making much impact on the received view. I confess that I am less
taken with the particulars of them than I am struck by the underlying claim that groups
are very often quite mad. That is certainly my experience, and until I read Bion I was
pretty sure it was my fault. Now I know that although I am well and truly a contributor, I
am usually not the main problem.
I want to share two sets of thoughts about where this line of thinking
leads. First, it makes groups and institutions, including and especially therapy groups
and institutions for disturbed people, very dangerous places. That has certainly been my
experience. For a long time I would change work settings and soon say, How on earth
did I fall among wackos yet again?, until Bion helped me to see that this is
human nature on the hoof. Second, it means that we are defending ourselves against
anxieties of disintegration, nameless dread and annihilation in much of our lives. I have
at least two patients who exemplify this dramatically. One can practically never speak in
meetings, though he is a tenured official in a major banking institution, and the other
cannot go to them at all, though she is a graphic designer for grand magazines, a job
calling for group consultations on a daily basis.
As some of you will know, there is a thriving tradition and a
considerable literature conducted in the wake of Bions work with groups, even though
he soon left the field and worked exclusively as an individual analyst. In particular,
Elliott Jaques investigated factories and other institutions in this light. He begins his
essay on 'Social Systems as a Defence against Persecutory and Depressive Anxiety' (1955)
by reiterating that 'social phenomena show a striking correspondence with psychotic
processes in individuals', that 'institutions are used by their individual members to
reinforce individual mechanisms of defence against anxiety', and 'that the mechanisms of
projective and introjective identification operate in linking individual and social
behaviour'. He argues the thesis that 'the primary cohesive elements binding individuals
into institutionalised human association is that of defence against psychotic anxiety'
(Jaques, 1955, pp. 478-9). He points out that the projective and introjective processes he
is investigating are basic to even the most complex social processes (p. 481, cf. 481n).
His conclusion is cautionary and points out the conservative
even reactionary consequences of our psychotic anxieties and our group and
institutional defences against them. He suggests that as a result of these reflections on
human nature
...it may become more clear why social change is so difficult to
achieve, and why many social problems are so intractable. From the point of view here
elaborated, changes in social relationships and procedures call for a restructuring of
relationships at the phantasy level, with a consequent demand upon individuals to accept
and tolerate changes in their existing patterns of defences against psychotic anxiety.
Effective social change is likely to require analysis of the common anxieties and
unconscious collusions underlying the social defences determining phantasy social
relationships (p. 498).
The investigator who, in my opinion, has made the most of this
perspective is Isabel Menzies Lyth, who built her research on the shoulders of Bion and
Jaques. She has investigated a number of fraught settings, but the piece of research which
has deservedly made her world-famous is described in a report entitled 'The Functioning of
Social Systems as a Defence against Anxiety' (1959). It is a particularly poignant
document, which addresses the question why people of good will and idealistic motives do
not do what they intend, that is, in this study, why nurses find themselves, to an
astonishing degree, not caring for patients as they had originally wished to do and
leaving the nursing service in droves. The mechanisms she describes are the ones discussed
above, now operating to create routine, to inhibit real human contact, to lead to rigid
and sometimes inhuman rules in hospitals. What is so distressing is that these forces
operate overwhelmingly in a setting which has as its very reason for existence the
provision of sensitivity and care. Yet that setting is full of threats to life itself and
arouses the psychotic anxieties I have outlined. She says,
The objective situation confronting the nurse bears a striking
resemblance to the phantasy situations that exist in every individual in the deepest and
most primitive levels of the mind. The intensity and complexity of the nurse's anxieties
are to be attributed primarily to the peculiar capacity of the objective features of her
work situation to stimulate afresh those early situations and their accompanying emotions
(Menzies Lyth, 1959, pp. 46-7).
The result is the evolution of socially structured defence mechanisms
which take the form of routines and division of tasks which effectively preclude the nurse
relating as a whole person to the patient as a whole person. If you havent already,
I urge you to read it: she explains why the refers to patients as the liver in bed
5 and the spleen in bed 12. 'The implicit aim of such devices, which
operate both structurally and culturally, may be described as a kind of depersonalisation
or elimination of individual distinctiveness in both nurse and patient (pp. 51-2).
She lists and discusses the reifying devices which reduce everyone involved to
part-objects, including insight into why nurses mechanically follow orders in ways that
defy common sense (p. 69), for example, why the nurse wakes you up to give you your
sleeping pill. There is a whole system of overlapping ways of evading the full force of
the anxieties associated with death, the ones which lie at the heart of the mechanisms
which Klein described (pp. 63-64; cf. Riviere, 1952a, p. 43).
Menzies Lyth draws a cautionary conclusion rather like Jaques:
'In general, it may be postulated that resistance to social change is likely to be
greatest in institutions whose social defence systems are dominated by primitive psychic
defence mechanisms, those which have been collectively described by Melanie Klein as the
paranoid-schizoid defences' (Menzies Lyth, 1959, p. 79). In recent reflections on her work
and that of her colleagues, she has reiterated just how refractory to change institutions
are (Menzies Lyth, 1988, pp. 1-42, and personal communications). You wont be
surprised that psychiatric, psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic institutions are among
them, as I shall indicate in a few minutes.
First, however, I want to speak about the Leicester Conferences on
group and organisational behaviour, with particular emphasis on authority and leadership.
They have been held at least once a year since 1957. They are heir to the traditions
discussed above, especially the work of Klein, Bion, Jaques and Menzies Lyth. (Other
influences are mentioned in Miller, 1990, pp. 165-69.) One among several interrelated ways
of characterising the two-week residential conferences is that they are so arranged as to
facilitate experiential learning about the ways in which group processes can generate
psychotic anxieties and institutional defences against them (p. 171). The struggles that
ensue in the members' minds between individuation and incorporation, as a result of the
conference group events, is hard to credit by anyone who has not taken part in a Leicester
Conference or related 'mini-Leicester' events. Similarly, descriptions of events and
feelings are likely to seem odd to anyone not familiar with the sorts of events around
which the conferences are structured. I believe, however, that the relevant emotional
points will be sufficiently clear without a (necessarily) long description of the
conference rubric.
My first experience of a Leicester Conference involved feeling
continually on the edge of disintegration as a result of behaviour in the various group
events (ranging in size from a dozen to more than a hundred people) which I found
appalling and from which there seemed no escape, while efforts to persuade people to
behave well produced flight, sadism, collusive lowering of the stakes or denial. The
potential of the group for uniting around (what was called on occasion) 'cheap
reconciliation' or for cruelty, brought me to the point of leaving on several occasions,
and I frequently had the experience of having to use all my resources to hold myself
together against forces which I experienced as profoundly immoral, amoral or pathetically
conformist. No appeal to standards of group decency was of much avail.
I ended up forming a group in my mind which consisted of all the people
I admired in history and in my lifetime, e.g., Socrates, Lincoln, Gandhi, King,
Bonhoeffer, Marcuse, Mandela, who had stood up to intolerable social forces without
quitting the field or having their spirits broken. I dubbed this The PS ÷D Solidarity Group and, armed
with their mandate (bestowed by one part of my mind onto another), managed to talk my way
into a meeting with the staff, for the purpose of mounting a critique of the rubric of the
so-called institutional event. I felt contained by the inner solidarity
provided by my imagined group, while I was, in truth, actually on my own in the phenomenal
context of the conference events. I had blown out of a group in considerable distress,
because it had utterly failed to live up to its self-designation of advocating and
practising decency and civility among its members and urging such standards on the larger
group of conference members.
Just as I was on the point of sitting down to confront the staff group
in the name of my inner world group (vainly hoping they would show some interest in its
name, membership and values), a representative of the group I had left appeared and
bestowed 'plenipotentiary powers' (the highest of the designated forms of delegation of
authority) on me, freeing me from the dreaded status of 'singleton'. A singleton is a
person with no role status in the large group (see Miller, 1990, p. 179 and Turquet, 1975,
where the plight of the singleton is insightfully and poignantly described). I had felt
unutterably alone, almost totally in the grip of paranoid persecutions, holding on for
dear life to my hallucinated historical group. The bestowal of my conference group's trust
reincorporated me into the social whole on terms I could accept.
My confrontation with the staff group, acting in this exercise as
'Management, was predictably without issue, but I went away feeling
that I had spoken my piece without suffering the humiliation that many others had
experienced. I had offered my analysis of the situation and their role in it, one
dimension of which was that they would as a part of the point of the
exercise continue to behave as they were doing, i. e., act as an immovable object
onto which the groups would project their phantasies about authority and (hopefully) begin
to take responsibility for themselves. I felt that I had done that and negotiated my own
rite of passage just.
Having gone some way toward resolving my own temporary insanity (though
not my omnipotence) I was only able to bask pleasantly in group membership for a few
minutes before members of another group, who had sought a form of security in being
regressed and silly (they had all been to previous conferences and might have been
expected to be street wise, but they took refuge in regression and called themselves 'The
Potty Training Group'), stormed into the room where the staff/Management group were
holding court. The person whom I had considered to be the mildest member of that group
physically attacked a German member of staff with shouts of 'fascist' and other violent
epithets. He was aided and cheered on by other members of his group, until one, a woman I
felt sure was a Jew but I now recollect was probably not but was a German, broke down
sobbing and shouted for all this to stop, which it did.
The descent from work or task-oriented groups to groups in the thrall
of psychotic basic assumptions is, as youll recall Bion pointed out, spontaneous and
inevitable (Bion, 1961, p. 165), even in a situation which all concerned know to be
temporary and 'artificial'. I continue to find this profoundly sobering. I also continue
to ruminate it and am far from having digested the experience, though I have found it
increasingly helpful in my work and related activities.
By this, I, of course, mean to include psychoanalytic group therapy,
where I have found that thinking in terms of psychotic anxieties and defences against them
takes me to the parts which other therapies do not reach (to paraphrase a slogan for
Heineken lager). But I am also thinking today about work groups in my life as an editor,
publisher, professor and member of the psychotherapy profession. It about this last
subculture which I want to invite you to think in my concluding section. I am not going to
propose a solution but share a problem. I cannot say how much you experience it
professionally, but I certainly do. The problem is that these anxieties and splits
characterise the psychotherapy world, the psychoanalytic world and especially the world of
group relations itself. I am a professor in a psychiatry department, and I am sorry to say
that they are there, too.
Bion pioneered this work during the Second World War at a place called
Northfield Hospital in working with military service personnel who would not fight - the
sorts of people who were called shell-shocked in World War I, where he had
himself been a tank commander and was decorated with the Military Cross. A number of
people who became eminent in the world of therapeutic communities and group work were his
colleague. He had dramatically successful results, results which laid the foundations for
the subsequernt group relations tradidion and he was sacked in six weeks. He also
eventually found the environment in London so uncongenial to his creativity that he
emigrated and moved to Los Angeles, where the people who invited him took their time in
sending him enough referrals to make ends meet. Untoward things happened to many of his
colleagues and people inspired by his work. One founded a famous therapeutic community,
but he ran it in a way that meant that no one could come along behind him. The group which
grew up around Bions work at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations blew apart.
One went to America, another to Australia, another to a college in London. Another worked
largely in France, where he had to move on and came back to an institute in London where
the ageing head would not retire, so he moved on quickly, and others soon left, too. The
person left in charge of the Tavistock institute the last man standing, as it were
would not allow a next generation to rise up so that when he belatedly retired a
head hunter had to be hired to create a field of candidates for the directorship. I think
next of the co-authors of a leading book in the field. One was not so long ago removed
from being director of a group relations conference. The other, an eminent clergyman, has
recently been the object of a very public and dramatic example of dubious leadership
involving the Queen and Westminster Abbey in which he was legally vindicated but widely
criticised for dreadful management practices not for the first time. The founder of
a similar institution in Germany was thrown out by his colleagues.
I invite you to conclude that the group relations of the group
relations community for all their putative expertise in understanding primitive
processes leave something to be desired. But this regrettable situation is not
confined to that part of the psychoanalytic field. Yet another prominent figure in both
group relations and psychoanalysis has been an important but unacknowledged leader in
creating a massive split between the psychoanalysts and those deferential to them, on the
one hand and the rest of the psychoanalytic psychotherapy population in Britain, on the
other. In this conflict there have been dreadfully manipulative and autocratic moves,
including, for example, refusing to accede to three successive votes on the part of the
membership of a training organisation, of which he was head, to rejoin the more democratic
an widely based organization. (I have written a number of essays about this saga and
related matters which you can find on the web.) Looking further into psychotherapy
profession, the dynamics within organizations I know about have led to recent acrimonious
splits in at least three of them. There was, of course, the earlier problem of succession
after Freud died and Ernest Jones stepped down in the British Psycho-analytic Society,
known as the Freud-Klein Controversies. The society stayed together but did so
on the basis of a structural compromise which has had and continues to have some sclerotic
consequences. Finally, I am about to publish a book by Douglas Kirsner, entitled Unfree
Asssociations, detailing the histories of four major analytic societies in America
New York, Boston, Chicago and LA involved in prolonged and violent disputes
over who shall be training analysts, who shall rule, what shall be taught and who shall be
in the succession of authority. Kenneth Eisold has written about some of these splits in
the most recent IJPA, especially the New York one, and wrote previously about the
intolerance of diversity in psychoanalytic institutions.
Casting my net more widely, such splits are, of course, the stuff of
novels and thrillers, .e.g., C P Snows The Master,s on Cambridge college
life, of which I have considerable experience which confirms his account. Then there is
John Le Carres well-informed but fictional account of intrigues in the British
Secret Service, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which involves some of the same
dynamics. I am of the opinion that, bad as these splits are, they are not as bad as the
ones in the analytic world. Perhaps I should say that perhaps the splits are sometimes as
bad, but the process of conflict resolution is less potentially irreparable.
The thought with which I want to leave you is a problem about which I
think people interested in psychodynamic approach to groups, institutions and wider social
forces needs to think much harder. How are such matters contained and detoxified in
settings where the structures are not as secure as they are in (most) universities and
stable governments? How can groups, businesses and temporary institutions create
structures which can bear diversity, spread legitimacy and conduct processes of succession
in an orderly and constructive way? Bion, Jaques, Menzies Lyth (each f whom moved on,
youll recall) and the group relations tradition associated with the Tavistock
Institute of Human Relations and the Leicester Conferences have, I submit, posed a problem
which is central to the husbanding of human civility. They have also drawn our attention
to the underlying unconscious forces involved, but they and we are far from solving it,
just as those creative people and other psychoanalytic organizations have yet to do so. It
is, not for the first time, a challenge: Physician, heal thyself! We are right
to look for the answers in group dynamics, and I believe that those inspired by Bion are
right to dig deeper into the unconscious, yet I dont think we are very near to
refining what we have unearthed.
This is the text of a talk delivered to the Department of Psychiatry,
University of Manitoba, 12 January 1999.
Copyright: The Author
Address for correspondence: 26 Freegrove Road, London N7 9RQ
robert@rmy1.demon.co.uk
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