Some brief remarks for the launch of The Art and Science of Working Together

Some brief remarks for the launch at the Freud Museum on 5 July 2019 of The Art and Science of Working Together: Practising Group Analysis in Teams and Organisations
edited by Christine Thornton

It is my pleasure to say a few words in order to help launch this new book The Art and Science of Working Together: Practising Group Analysis in Teams and Organisations, edited by Christine Thornton.  She has also written several chapters of the book, and has collaborated with Gerhard Wilke on others. Gerhard has also contributed his own chapters.

I do want to record that this is the fourth book in the sub-series of the New International Library of Group Analysis (NILGA), formerly published by Karnac Books and now published by Routledge, concerned with the group analysis of organisations.  We started in 2012 with my own book Trauma and Organisations. We followed in 2014 with Gerhard Wilke’s The Art of Group Analysis in Organisations: The Use of Intuitive and Experiential Knowledge. And last month we published Group Analysis: Working with Staff, Teams and Organisations edited by Aleksandra Novakovic and David Vincent, to which many of you here tonight have also contributed.

I have had an opportunity to learn from Christine over the past few years during our consultations about life in organisations.  She has had extensive experience not only as a consultant to a variety of organisations in the private and the public sectors, but also as an executive in them. Christine founded and chaired the Diploma in Reflective Practice in Organisations at the Institute of Group Analysis from 2015- 2018.

I have participated in the development of The Art and Science of Working Together, and have witnessed the energy and enthusiasm which Christine has brought to the project. This can be readily experienced in reading the various contributions to the book.  Energy and enthusiasm are contagious, but they are really the products of sensitive leadership.

Energy and enthusiasm through sensitive leadership are a function of what I would call “creative ambiguity”. Creative ambiguity is both a virtue of a kind and an intellectual/emotional achievement of a kind.  (It reminds me of a set of qualities that my old pal Lionel Kreeger used to call “masterful inactivity”.  I think that this term was coined by James Thurber, the great American humourist and cartoonist).

Creative ambiguity characterises the style of a group analyst when convening a clinical group and especially when taking leadership roles in organisations.  Foulkes’ style of “leadership” was creatively ambiguous.  Admittedly this was partly a function of his working in the English language, with which he was perhaps never entirely at ease, seeming to be slightly hesitant, slightly diffident, slightly tentative, and even slightly confused, at least as I perceived his interventions. For example, I remember when a member of the group that I was in asked him in a frustrated, even irritable way, “Dr Foulkes, do you mean this, or do you mean that?”  Foulkes replied, “Yes, that’s very interesting what you say”. And my fellow patient smiled, indicating that he felt extremely well understood. He left the group feeling that his brilliance was recognised at last.

One of the great problems with creative ambiguity is that it provokes an enormous amount of envy from colleagues who need both personally and professionally to show their conceptual and theoretical precision. Such envy indicates anxiety rather than a commitment to the search for clarity. This often brings closure to discussion and the recognition of problems before the consultation even gets started.  This anxious need for clarity leads to the repetition of what is already known. It is really more productive to risk becoming a bit more open, a bit more vulnerable and perhaps a bit more confused by a new experience.

The envy of creative ambiguity is associated with the fear of “newness”. I have seen this fear of “newness” among group analysts who know relatively little psychoanalysis when they have to work more with personal matrices than with dynamic and foundation matrices; and of course among psychoanalysts who know very little group analysis and its source disciplines of anthropology and sociology when they have to work more with dynamic and foundation matrices. Such group analysts rush to address what they assume is the so-called “social unconscious”, and such psychoanalysts plunge into making interpretations of the so-called “deep personal unconscious”. These fears and defences can be located in a profession, an Institute and/or even a building itself.

The fear of newness is often expressed in contempt and denigration of that which is seemingly “different” and “foreign”, and of what is generally not understood.   I believe that this fear of the strange and the foreign occurred in the reception that more traditional psychoanalysts gave to the work of the founders of the Group Analytic Society and later to the Institute of Group Analysis.  Although some of our founding fathers and mothers were “English”, they were slightly rebellious and slightly marginal and peripheral to main stream psychiatry and psychoanalysis.  Certainly, they personified the introduction of strange and foreign European ideas into the development of English psychoanalysis. The strange and the foreign in general were “located” in group analysis, which found a nurturing matrix in post-World War II in England, but which did not really originate here.

These patterns of envy and fear of all that is strange and foreign are often expressed in contempt, disdain and distaste for the creative ambiguity associated with imperfect conceptualisations and multiple perspectives. This leads, in turn, to a yearning for fundamentalism. In an organisational context fundamentalism means fanaticism, which is a very great mistake within organisational consultation.

The Art and Science of Working Together contains many fecund examples of creative ambiguity. I would like to read a few excerpts from it. Most of the authors of the chapters in this book are here in Freud’s Rose Garden, and I hope that they will not mind if I select only a few of the excerpts from the book that I remembered as I gathered my thoughts together for this launch:

Christine Thornton herself writes in a section called “Tolerance and value of multiple perspectives”:

“One of the strengths of group analysis as a foundation for organisational work is that our theory is fundamentally non-fundamentalist – non-dogmatic and based in pluralism… This multiplicity of perspective has immense value in the complex milieu of the modern organization. A central part of the group analytic approach is bringing these together to co-create a fuller picture. (p.25)

Consider this simple definition of “parallel process” by David Wood in a section entitled “Parallel process redefined”:

“We can now redefine parallel process as the manifestation of fractal self-similarity within the complex non-linear dynamical systems (comprised of coupled extended embodied cognitive systems) that are human organisations”.  (p. 62)

So much for simplicity!

What about this sentence by Dick Blackwell in a section entitled “Containment, the matrix and the shadow system”?

“Creative shadow systems can only develop where staff engage with each other outside the formal system without too much fear for the consequences”.  (p. 75)

It seems to me that we are lucky to have Dick Blackwell held and contained among us.

I particularly like these lines by Raman Kapur in the Conclusion to his chapter called “Another fine mess you’ve gotten me into”:

“For me the hard work of ‘holding and containing’ everyday organisational human relations, internal and external to the agency, minimizes the chance of a ‘mess’ becoming an exploding ‘bomb’. Not unlike working with the psychotic parts of our patients, so much ordinary work is required to manage the patient/staff members view of me (transference), detoxify my own human reactions to this (counter-transference), pick up and connect things together, and manage attacks on the goodness of our professional work”. (p. 105)

Raman and I have been following one another’s contributions to the field for many years, although we have only met each other for the first time tonight.  Raman lives and breathes the challenges presented by the so-called “troubles”, where I have consulted for many years.  I think that Raman and I would agree that as strangers and foreigners of a kind our work in Northern Ireland has been easier than it would have been if we had each originated in Hampstead.

The “Conclusion” of the concluding chapter of the book was written by Gerhard Wilke and Christine Thornton:

“Leaders are boundary workers, not so much at the top, but in the middle, between, above and below, inside and outside. They are also between past, present, and future. They are humble, and they are political. Boundaries keep things out and let them in; in an interconnected world with rapid change, they must be translucent to remain functional. Thinking about and influencing translucent boundaries and relationships across them is central to both leading and consulting work”. (p. 235)

Christine and Gerhard have drawn inspiration from T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, which is one of my most favourite poems, although I am not really sure that the word “poem” quite captures its profundity.  The “Waste Land” provides a unique enquiry into the creative tension between birth and death and into the creative ambiguity of these two interdependent miracles. Therefore, I have no hesitations in going back to the beginning of the book, that is, to my Foreword in which I have written:

Keenly aware of the vicissitudes of organizational trauma, and the consequent regression in the dynamics of large groups, the authors are sensitive to the restraints and constraints of what has come to be called the social unconscious.  This involves an appreciation of the sociality of human nature and the dimensions of the tripartite matrix.  Their goal is to broaden and deepen their understanding of the organization in order to be better able to change it, but not always as they would please. (p. xiv)

It gives me added pleasure to conclude my talk with an invitation to all of you, the contributors to this book and to your friends and families who are with us tonight, to join me in a toast to its success and well-being as it begins to be subjected to the forces and currents of our professional and intellectual seas, which will carry the book and its ideas far and wide to shores and islands as yet unknown, at least to us. Let us raise our glasses to The Art and Science of Working Together: Practising Group Analysis in Teams and Organisations edited by Christine Thornton and written both individually and collectively by a team of colleagues.

Earl Hopper, Ph.D.
Editor of the New International Library of Group Analysis
30th October 2019
earl@drhopper.co.uk