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Ferenczi's
"Confusion of Tongues between adults and the child" (1933)
reformulated prevailing Freudian ideas on symbolic material, or fantasies,
in ways that remind me of Lawrence's (1999) reformulation of dreaming
as a social experience. For purpose of stimulating our discussion today,
I will first describe social dreaming in the context of contemporary
relational psychoanalytic theory and suggest that the idea of intersubjectivity
can best be viewed socially from a cross-cultural analysis of individual
versus collectivist views of the self. After this I will provide some
organizational examples of the application of social dreaming from my
work with Marc Maltz. Finally, I will conclude with the dream narrative
from a social dreaming matrix held 2 weeks after 9/11/2001 coincidentally
at a location equidistant from the three major events of that terrorist
attack on the United States and invite you to share your own associations
to this material.
Social
Dreaming and Contemporary Psychoanalysis
In "The Confusion of Tongues," Ferenczi challenged the idea
that childhood images of abuse were fantasies and that transference
was simply the "replay of infantile and childhood conflict."
(Zaslow, 1988, p.213) Ferenczi suggested that, in both cases, these
were based on events in a person's lived experience of the world. He
departed from Freud's seduction theory by insisting on Frued's earlier
theory that memories of sexual abuse were based on real experiences,
and also proposed that transference included a …" commentary on
the experienced person of the analyst." (p.213) Finally, he suggested
that the exploration of sexual abuse and transference in psychoanalysis
revealed inattended links between self and other both inside and outside
the consulting room.
So what is the confusion of dreams? Lawrence's (1999) proposed social
role for dreams defines their significance beyond exclusively individual,
intrapsychic, domains of interpretation. Building on his idea that dreams
reflect elements of shared experiences of the world, I propose that
the dreams of a social aggregate also reveal inattended links and interconnections
between individuals, extending beyond the dyadic realms addressed in
psychoanalysis that have been reviewed by Lippmann. (2001)
During social dreaming matrices over the past 12 years, I have observed
that an aggregation of the dreams of different people engaged in the
activity of freely sharing dreams and associations to dreams, function
as a window into an "interpsychic"(Poland, 2000,p.29) space
which links people with each other, reveals interconnections between
thought processes belonging to different people, and fosters the emergence
of new thinking (Lawrence, 2000, Maltz and Walker, 2003) Another important
element in the social theory of dreams is Lawrence's (2000) adoption
for groups of Bion's notion of the "infinite" to describe
what would have previously been called the unconscious. This permits
the creation of a social context for emergent thinking that saves participants
in Social Dreaming matrices from the pitfall of prematurely assigning
"meaning" to dreams. Again drawing from contemporary psychoanalysis…"Only
if we are not preoccupied with the question of the 'correct' interpretation
of dreams can we begin to appreciate the[ir] extraordinary richness…."
(Lippmann, 1998,p.219
The observation that dreams of a social aggregate dreaming socially
reveals inattended links between individuals parallels the contemporary
psychoanalytic idea that the unconscious does not exist in a polarized
relationship with the "conscious," but refers to the way that
within the analytic situation there exists the possibility of discovering
how two individuals give rise to their relatedness to each other. (Mitchell,
2000, for review) "The road to the patient's unconscious (read;
the real data about what is actually going on in the analytic situation)
is created nonlinearly by the analysts own unconscious participation
in its construction while he is consciously engaged in looking for it."
(Bromberg, 2000, p.686) With this statement, Bromberg sums up the arrival
of psychoanalysis to a Heisenbergian universe that H. S. Sullivan had
hinted at with his insistence on the participant-observer stance of
the analyst. (1936)
Insert Elliot Jacques
Social dreaming demonstrates that the "real data" about what
is actually going on in a social situation arises from the co-participation
of dreams and associations which are allowed to surface by listeners
who share them, and who allow themselves to associate freely to both
dreams and associations. This then becomes a social equivalent to the
non-linear creation of the road to the patient's unconscious by the
participation of an analyst who is unconsciously co-constructing that
which she is consciously engaged in looking for. (Bromberg, 2000)
To summarize up to this point, I am here making the case for understanding
how social dreaming occurs in a space between the self and the other.
Bion's "Experiences in Groups," gave rise to an entire literature
about group and institutional phenomena by describing the operation
of that space, but unfortunately theorizing about it has been limited
to the application of Melanie Klein's developmental model. There have
been few attempts to apply Bion's own original psychoanalytic insights
to it, not to mention other perspectives such as those presented today.
Elaborating on that is beyond the scope of this paper, but I believe
that one of Gordon Lawrence's great contributions has been to rescue
those unique aspects of Bion's work that are present in contemporary
psychoanalysis and apply them to thinking about groups.
Social Dreaming Between the Self and the Other.
Lawrence (1999) has also previously noted anthropological references
to dreaming socially in cultures around the world, but in order explore
the space for dreaming that arises between the self and the other I
will briefly describe two cross cultural models which apply here. The
first is known as indigenous psychologies of the self (Sampson, 1988)
and the second is drawn from rabbinic views of the self that have been
overshadowed by the prevailing Greco-Christian traditions of our culture.
(Sampson, 2000)
Examining a cross-cultural view of the self requires a standard set
of parameters which defines individuality in terms of boundaries, locus
of control…. meaning the sense of agency that derive from either inside
our outside of the self, and inclusiveness versus exclusiveness, or
that which is intrinsic versus that which is extrinsic to the self.
(Heelas and Lock, 1981, Sampson, 1988) Cultures that emphasize firm
boundaries and high personal control tend to view the self as exclusionary
or "self contained." Fluid boundary, strong field control
cultures, view the self as "ensembled," meaning that the self
is inclusive of other individuals. While "self contained"
individualism is indigenous to the United States and to the European
countries from which its dominant ethnic groups draw their roots, "ensembled"
individualism is far more prevalent as a percentage of all known cultures.
(Sampson) Ensembled individualism is also indigenous to Aboriginal,
Native American, Senoi and other cultures that are widely known to use
dreams for social purposes.
The structural characteristic of the social dreaming matrix resembles
ensembled individualism cultures in terms of the permeability of its
boundaries, locus of control, and self-other relationships. Its boundaries
are purposely fluid, particularly in contrast to traditional psychoanalytic
settings. The role of matrix conveners or "hosts" is limited
to creating a supportive environment for sharing and associating to
dreams, as well a noticing links between them. My own suggestion of
renaming the role from that of "taker" or consultant to "host"
has been taken up in order to emphasize Lawrence's notion that the authority
to "understand" dreams in a matrix is located in the un-orchestrated
aggregate of multiple participant's associations, and not in the mind
of an authority figure. Lawrence (2001) This de-emphasis of "expert"
opinions results in strong field control - versus internal control -
that is characteristic of ensembled individualism cultures. Finally,
the focus on the interpsychic content of dreams neutralizes the exclusive-of-others
nature of traditional dream interpretation and thus mimics the inclusive-self
characteristic of ensembled individualism as well.
The fact that the social dreaming matrix is, in itself, a cultural framework
that differs significantly from traditional psychoanalytic settings
and the prevailing "self contained" cultural milieu, exerts
a powerful selection process on the dreams themselves. Social context
has always had this effect on dreams and on the experience of telling
and hearing them. (Lippmann, 1998, 2000) From a "contained self"
perspective, one may not initially accept the possibility that the content
of one's own dreams are social, however, when participating in a dream
matrix that extends itself over several days with intervening periods
of sleep and dreams, one inevitably dreams about the dreams and associations
being shared, and about the social aggregate in which one has been telling
and hearing them. Dreams that are experienced "within" the
self, but a not "of" the self, allow for an experience of
ensembled individualism that is rare within the prevailing Western culture
of our society.
By describing these anthropological and psychoanalytic views of the
self-other boundary I hope to provide a framework for understanding
why dreams taken up in institutional/political settings illuminates
a shift in the formal definitions of authority over what is "real."
Another cross-cultural view of individualism vrs. collectivism is embodied
in rabbinic traditions that have been harnessed to illustrate contemporary
psychoanalytic perspectives by Edgar Levenson's 2001 paper "Freud's
Dilemma: Thinking Jewish and Writing Greek," among others. The
roots of rabbinic thinking are found in holy texts which differ significantly
from the Bible in that they were composed of "fundamentally open
ended and indeterminate discussions… where no finalized meaning or single
interpretation was either possible of felt to be desirable," (Sampson,
2000, p. 1429) Both modern rabbinic and psychoanalytic extensions of
this tradition suggest that the self cannot exist in the absence of
a lived dialogue with others, and that what is most essential about
the self can be found neither individually nor in the dyad but in a
third sphere that Buber (1965) referred to as "the between."
(in Sampson) In a slightly different description of this third sphere
in psychoanalysis, Poland (2000) states that the rabbinic tradition
"emphasized a constant feeling of strangeness…[a strangeness] that
is the sense of the universe in which any individual comes into being,
[where] the self is always opening in awareness of otherness as an irreducible
aspect of being." (p.31) Going back to Buber, social dreaming gives
rise to his "third sphere" by locating the meaning making
capacity of dreams between the un-orchestrated aggregate of multiple
participants' associations, thus invoking socially Bion's concept of
the "infinite" to define the unconscious dynamics of groups.
Social
Dreams @ Work
So far, I have provided a theoretical perspective on social dreaming.
Switching to organizational consultation, I will also describe how Marc
Maltz and I have used dream work to reveal inattended aspects of organizational
life . (Maltz and Walker, 1998, 2003) The following two case examples
drawn from my consulting and writing with Marc Maltz (Maltz and Walker,
2003) show how the development of a Social Dreaming network had a dramatic
impact on the capacity of two large organizations to innovate and to
change in reaction to environmental factors that threatened their existence.
The first is a large entertainment media-manufacturing firm that was
encumbered by obsolete production methods and the second is a financial
services firm that was located in the World Trade Center when it was
destroyed in September 2001.
Case
1 - During a complex restructuring of a multi-national manufacturing
company, in which manufacturing processes were being radically redesigned
to improve efficiency and profitability, dreams were shared among the
internal and external consultants charged with making the changes necessary
for success. In these dreams, the consultants became aware that workers
were fearing that the change would cost them their jobs and that the
system would be radically changed forever, disrupting 17 years of full
employment, caring management and an atmosphere of family first. The
external consultants were alarmed by these dreams and the understanding
associated with them. They used this data to confront management about
the unspoken, unknown dilemmas that the management faced. This breakthrough
allowed the management to rethink their strategy and realize that not
only was the new production system unable to sustain more than 50% of
the current workforce. More importantly, the new system under development
would not sustain the current management structure. Six months later,
only six of the 21 executives in the leadership team and 1,500 of the
nearly 4,000 employees remained, and the son of the founder of the business
retired to be replaced by the first non-family CEO. Radical change that
the organization could not face or come to terms with was exposed in
the dreams of those charged with planning the transition and, once shared,
enabled the organization to smoothly transition to a new way of life.
Case
2 - The following is a dream from a consultation with a firm after the
September 11th attacks killed one-third of its employees.
The Dream - "I am in my office and my [dead] colleague is alive
and asking me what has been happening. I feel socially awkward with
him. He feels reserved, cautious, not sure that he can trust me. We
have a short and uncomfortable interaction. I am confused by our lack
of rapport and find myself unable to say so to him." This dream
came to be seen by others as the dream of the firm as a whole at this
particular point in time. How do they integrate the memories and recapture
the institutional learning of those that are now gone? How do they build
on the internalized experience and knowledge of those they have lost
and become whole again? These and other questions had been difficult
if not impossible to raise and discuss in the immediate aftermath of
the trauma experienced by all. The telling of this dream allowed a management
group to begin the conversation of what and who was missing and how
to rebuild.
Without these dream images being shared and associated to, the dreams
would have remained in the realm of the forgotten fragment of dream.
Once shared, they functioned as an integral part of the development
of new organizational intelligence that helped to heal the grief by
opening up discussion that portended survival for the firm as a whole.
A
Social Dreaming Narrative
To conclude this paper, I will go back to my original thesis and try
to demonstrate what this "confusion" of dreams actually looks
like. Let us examine dream material from a social dreaming matrix held
in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (U.S.A.), at a location roughly equidistant
from the three unprecedented events that occurred 2 weeks earlier on
September 11th, 2001. (PCOD, 2001) These were the destruction of the
World Trade Center, an attack on the Pentagon, and the airliner likely
brought down by its own passengers in western Pennsylvania. What follows
is the content of 27 dreams reported among 22 individuals during 90
minutes that opened a two and half day dreaming matrix.
" I had jumped out of an airplane at 40 thousand feet and the parachute
opened. I was clinging on to a very dear friend from high school whom
I had not seen in 25 years and I suddenly realized I was clinging more
to him, than he to me. I saw the face of my only brother, but he was
dead and I was at the funeral. I was driving with a friend down a broad
open street very fast at dusk and the road became very narrow. There
were all these people on it and I was honking to get them out of the
way. I kept driving very fast and the road narrowed until the car started
running on rails, faster and faster. The rails were made of marble and
it turned out we were on a grave, ricocheting along in a city of the
dead. There were tall sarcophagi like buildings. I was racing away from
headstones and banging on the car, but my knuckles were hitting a coffin
instead. I reversed suddenly and flew out of there. I was surrounded
by the smell of clowns, rather than the smell of the flag. I was in
the city among these extraordinarily tall, very dark buildings. I saw
the St. Louis Arch, the enormous landmark to the Midwest of the U.S.,
with two horses hanging from it. The horses had been skinned and were
still alive, somehow trying to stay on the arches. I started driving
in a Black Cadillac down a very narrow dirt road with tremendous amounts
of rocks My destination was an area with a lot of flagpoles where an
acquaintance was having a dedication in his honor. My tires sank in
the dirt, but I wanted to get out and say hello. Trying to re-park the
car, I told my friend, who was now driving, not to spin the wheels.
Then I walked towards a bridge in Philadelphia through some very high
gates and arrived at a room in which there was an old man in a faded
suite. There was a brass plaque in front of him like a monument. He
started toddling along like he could hardly walk, and then tumbled down
like a 2 year old. He got up quickly as if to show he was all right
and I looked around to see if my acquaintance that was being honored
had left."
As I continue to read, you may be able to avail yourself of some aspect
of the actual experience of participating in a social dreaming matrix
by imagining that you are listening to this narrative as a dream from
a single source.
"I'm in the air flying. I had taken off and though I usually go
up in recurrent flying dreams, this time I decide to fly down. I flew
right into a house and was ashamed and very puzzled to discover that
I had become naked. I was standing holding my infant son who had a bad
fall but landed face up. His eyes were closed and I thought maybe I
should take him to the hospital but I resisted, claiming that there
was nothing wrong with him. I got a phone call from a woman who asked
me to facilitate a workshop with Gordon Lawrence, the leader of this
social dreaming matrix. I agreed to do it but couldn't find a location
for it because it had to be at a place beginning with the letter 'P.'
I found myself traveling around to organize adventure trips in the Sierra
Nevada. It was raining and the program stated specifically that one
was not to study Italian grammar. Suddenly there was a huge torrent
of red bloody water. I saw an airplane on a golf course whose underbelly
was completely transparent. It was behaving erratically, rolling violently
in a manner that shifted the contents inside and then it crashed. I
ran over to a large crater where a man is pulling out a survivor. All
the people are naked and huddled. One particular woman is cowering,
naked and ashamed. I pull her out of the hole and cover her with a sheet.
When I get her to the hospital a young doctor tells me vaguely that
she has been treated incorrectly and had been x-rayed too many times
in the face. I thought at that moment that I was actually in some sort
of Science Park where experimentation with humans was going on. I was
eating from a plate of vegetables. They looked very unappealing but
I realized I had to eat for what lies ahead. Looking around I saw that
I was in a cafeteria where all the food was extremely peculiar."
Reflecting on this narrative, we can see that themes of teaching, blood,
injured people and food were added to the previously recurring episodes
of flying, falling, relatives, airplanes, and death. Also present was
a golf course that happened to be what surrounded the building in which
this matrix took place. Earlier references to speeding automobiles,
buildings and landmarks are not mentioned again so far, but will recur
in the material that follows.
"It was after 9/11 and there were fences being built. I noticed
that the old fences that had been built before had been turned into
hedgerows for jumping over.
There was a long windy road that a friend and I were taking a walk together
on. We were gliding along at 30 miles an hour and came back to a large
stone mansion with flames coming from a tower. The whole house was on
fire and there was a body inside.
I was waiting for I.D. photos with 20 other people because we were told
we had to have them. I filled out a sheet of paper and a roll of film
was casually shot to get pictures in order to attend this conference
on dreams. Mine was the only picture that turned out, but it showed
only 2 ghostly black and white images that looked like ectoplasm. I
needed a photo I.D. card so I stopped off at the passport shop to get
2 clear pictures Those photos came out nicely in color, but they showed
me sitting next to a beautiful woman. I was standing in a jungle forest
in Indonesia looking at a stone carving of a religious figure that belonged
to all cultures. The figures right eye was sown shut. Later, I was standing
at the ocean with a man/shark whose eye was also sown shut and I felt
this must be the leader. I was supposed to be teaching a new class that
President George Bush was attending as a new student, but I had to race
home to get the teaching notes that I had left behind. I was in England
in the living room of friends. They are explaining that they want to
live in the United States. I'm stunned and ask why they would want to
do such a thing but after awhile said, "O.K., come and stay in
the empty rooms of my home." I went on to Oxford because I had
been a student there and had been called back to discuss my orals. Strangely,
I discovered I was actually in Venice, Italy and I couldn't get back
to Oxford."
Carefully rereading this segment as well, we see a newly recurring theme
of fences and I.D. photos that meld the public security measures that
had transformed American life with participation in the dream matrix
itself. This invokes the issue of locus of control by raising the question
of who is in control of what, which reverberates through the image of
a body burning inside the house, to a universal "leader" with
one eye sewn shut, and to the President of the United States as the
new kid in class.
"My husband and I are arriving at a colorful, verdant, farm where
we are going to get some vegetables. It was very safe and pleasant.
A field opened up in front of us to reveal vegetables that were suddenly
all autumn colored and larger than life.
I though: 'Why not get some strawberries.' I got some beautiful fruit
and felt very fortunate, but I ended up in a tractor that got stuck
in the mud. I was on an old truck that driving through circuitous overpasses
in Rome. I got separated from my husband. I was with a group on an island
where there were demonstrators protesting. My son was in charge of the
protestors, but for some reason he wasn't there. There was a gathering
with a lot of people. One woman had all these registration materials
filled out and there was a large card on the door to the room. Her name
was Hope and she was waiting for others to come in. I was with my 10-year
old daughter, who was going to get chemotherapy. Her eyes were closed,
but I saw her open them and said: 'Mom.' She turned on her side and
became a spiraling light that looked like a womb. I knew then that she
would die from the cancer. I was left in a hall that had pews like a
church with an academic friend and a War Lord from the story 'Dune.'
There were dark winds and the back of the church looked like an x ray
of the contents of a suitcase. Then there was another image being projected
on the wall that was the color of dawn, and then a blue/black image.
I urgently told a woman to look, saying: 'There's the answer!' The black
spirit winds were blowing across her face when she looked back at me
and said: 'You will see nothing outside the church.'"
This narrative provides convincing evidence that the dreams involved
individuals sharing in a social reality that revealed previously unacknowledged
links between them and an emerging social reality which characterized
a new world we were all suddenly living in after the events of September
11th.
On close examination, it lays down a consistent set of patterns surrounding
issues of flying, falling, danger, airplane and building disasters,
security issues, personal loss, and learning groups that make obvious
references to the both the wider and immediate social context in which
the matrix takes place, right down to the golf course. The result is
the experience of a reality co-created by the participants in a manner
analogous to the contemporary psychoanalytic position that the analyst
is unconsciously co-constructing that which she is consciously engaged
in looking for. The radical nature of Lawrence's contribution to thinking
about group phenomena parallels a process now familiar to contemporary
psychoanalysts and provides a window onto the social creation of consensus
reality that binds the present, the past, and the future, for a particular
group of people at a particular point in time.
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