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David Armstrong The idea of this paper dates back 18 months, when I first read John Steiner’s book ‘Psychic Retreats: pathological organisations in psychotic, neurotic and borderline patients’.1
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| John
Steiner is a Kleinian analyst who works in private practice and was also,
until recently, a consultant psychiatrist at the Tavistock Clinic. His
book sets out to describe and understand clinical experiences with groups
of patients who are "difficult-to-reach"2 and "make
meaningful contact with ".3 The term ‘psychic retreat’
is introduced to refer to ways in which the patient can withdraw from
such contact into states which are "often experienced spatially as
if they were places in which the patient could hide".4
Such states may appear, consciously or in unconscious phantasy, as literal spaces: a house, cave, fortress, desert. But they may also take an "inter-personal form, usually as an organisation of objects or part objects which offer to provide security (and which) may be represented as a business organisation, as a boarding school, as a religious sect, as a totalitarian government or a Mafia gang".5 The patient appears, as it were, to be in liege to this organisation, which may be simultaneously feared and idealised. In his book, Steiner seeks to trace the origin of such states of mind in the patient’s attempts to ward off or gain relief from intense anxieties and dread associated with either the paranoid-schizoid or depressive positions, driven by powerful innate destructiveness, or the impact of external trauma or the intolerance of separation, loss and inability to mourn. In more severely disturbed patients such anxieties may lead to a more or less permanent residence in the retreat, where all contact with the analyst or with external reality appears to be lost. But a retreat may also emerge in the treatment of less disturbed patients, at times when external or internal situations threaten "the limits of (their) capacity"6 to contain mental pain. Steiner examines and explores with great sensitivity the particular challenges which patients inhabiting or inhabited by such states of mind present to analytic work and the various ways in which one can get drawn into enacting a role within the pathological organisation in which the patient is living. For example:
This quotation can serve to illustrate the impact of Steiner’s writing on someone coming to his book from a very different experience of emotional work with clients. For it is hard not to read this statement without hearing echoes from one’s own struggle, on occasion, to make contact with the world presented, either by individuals or by groups, within organisational consultancy. In fact, I think this metaphor of "echoing" captures a good deal of what passes between psycho-analytic and group or organisational work. But it also has risks. Is it just one’s own voice one is hearing back, or is it another’s that can help one locate one’s own? For a non-analyst, Steiner’s book is not always easy to read. It demands a level of acquaintance with the analytic and especially Kleinian literature well beyond an amateur’s reach. More importantly, the close, detailed attention to the texture of the individual case resists generalisation and occasionally one has the impression that the formulation of ‘psychic retreats’ is being used to carry more freight than it can handle. I am not qualified to, nor would I wish to comment in detail on Steiners’ argument here. My interest is rather first, in what that argument suggests about the flow of interaction between or the inter-penetration of individual and organisational worlds; second, in what the idea of ‘psychic retreats’ may add to our understanding of organisational dynamics in the face of radical environmental or contextual change. Having said that, to get this paper off the ground, I need at least to try and capture something of what Steiner means by "pathological organisation". For it is this phrase which both gives depth and substance to the concept of the ‘psychic retreat’ and which, in Steiner’s usage, evokes the most direct echoes to experiences with groups and organisations. In fact, Steiner uses the term in two linked senses. On the one hand it refers to "the organised nature of the process" through which the particular system of defenses characteristic of the psychic retreat is constructed. On the other hand, as indicated in the quotation cited earlier, it refers to a concrete and personalised phantasy of an organisation in the mind, made up of objects and part objects in relation to each other. Steiner’s account runs, approximately, as follows. The origin of these states of mind lies in "the universal problem of dealing with primitive destructiveness"9, which threatens the integrity of the individual "unless it is adequately contained". Defensive organisations in general "serve to bind, to neutralise and to contain primitive destructiveness whatever its source and are a universal feature of the defensive make up of all individuals". Where problems relating to such destructiveness are particularly prominent, the defensive organisation "comes to dominate the psyche". Less disturbing versions however can also be identified "in neurotic and normal individuals". Such organisations "function as a kind of compromise and are as much an expression of the destructiveness as a defense against it. Because of this compromise they are always pathological, even though they may serve an adaptive purpose and provide an area of relief and transient protection … In normal individuals they are brought into play when anxiety exceeds tolerable limits and are relinquished once more when the crisis is over. Nevertheless they remain potentially available and can serve to take the patient out of contact and give rise to a stuck period of analysis if the analytic work touches on issues at the edge of what is tolerable". Steiner sees the structure of the defensive organisation as linked to the operation of ‘projective identification’. This mechanism of defense was first identified by Melanie Klein in a famous and hugely influential paper published in 194610 and further elaborated by her colleagues and most notably Wilfred Bion.11 At the simplest level, projective identification refers to the splitting off and projection of a part of the self into an object. "The object relationship which results is then not with a person truly seen as separate, but with the self projected into another person and related to as if it were someone else". In itself projective identification is not a pathological mechanism. It forms the basis of "all empathic communication. We project into others to understand better what it feels like to be in their shoes and an inability or reluctance to do this profoundly affects object relations". This ego-syntonic aspect of projective identification, however, depends on "being able to use it in a flexible and reversible way and thus be able to withdraw projections and to observe and interact with others from a position firmly based in our own identity". Bion’s seminal introduction of the concept of container and contained12, and his model of the mother’s mental act of revery in holding and, as it were, ‘minding’ her baby’s distress, provided an imaginative formulation of how in normal circumstances this process can serve and enrich development. Under internal or external pressure, however, "such reversibility is obstructed and the patient is unable to regain parts of the self lost through projective identification, and consequently loses touch with aspects of his personality, which permanently reside in objects with whom they become identified. Any attribute such as intelligence, warmth, masculinity, aggression and so on, can be projected and disowned in this way and when reversibility is blocked, results in a depletion of the ego, which has no access to the lost parts of the self. At the same time, the object is distorted by having attributed to it the split off and denied parts of the self". The outcome can be confusional states where differentiation between the self and the other is lost or unstable. Steiner suggests that this can happen when normal processes of splitting break down. You may recall that in Klein’s view development in earliest life depends on processes whereby the infant splits its object into good and bad, each associated with different constellations of experience and feeling. This splitting of the object is accompanied by a corresponding split in the ego. A ‘good’ part of the self in relationship with a good object is kept separate in this way from a ‘bad’ part of the self in relation to a bad object. If this split is successfully maintained, good and bad "are kept so separate that no interaction between them takes place", but if it threatens to break down, the individual may try to preserve his equilibrium by turning to the protection of the good object and good parts of the self against the bad object and bad parts of the self. If such measures also fail to maintain an equilibrium, even more drastic means may be resorted to". It is important in reading the above to keep in mind, firstly, that what is being described is part of a more extended process i.e. splitting as described here is not the end but the beginning of a story, the prelude to the challenges of the ‘depressive position’, in which split off parts of the object and the self can be brought together and acknowledged in a more integrated way. Secondly, one needs to remember that this developmental trajectory is not simply time related, that is it is not ever achieved or passed through once for all. Rather it recurs wherever and whenever we confront new internal or external disturbances or challenges for which we are mentally unprepared. What is being described is a dynamic that runs throughout our mental life, though, hopefully, earlier experiences if adequately negotiated, may help us better to sustain the shock of the new. It is at this point in Steiner’s account that the richness and subtlety of his conception of the ‘pathological organisation’ begins to come more clearly into view. In 1957, Bion13, in a paper on the differentiation of psychotic and non-psychotic personalities, drew attention to a form of pathological splitting which may occur when, for internal or external reasons, other defenses against paranoid/schizoid anxiety break down. In this situation, both object and self, including the individual’s mental apparatus are subjected to fragmentation and forcibly expelled "in a more violent and primitive form of projective identification". To put this another way, it is as if the self and its object are dismantled and spread across the whole psychic field in innumerable bits, each of which contains one not easily identifiable element: a world of what Bion referred to as "bizarre objects" and later as Beta elements.14 "Pathological organisations may then evolve to collect the fragments, and the result may once again give the impression of a protective good object kept separate from bad ones. Now, however, what appears as a relatively straightforward split between good and bad is in fact the result of a splitting of the personality into several elements, each projected into objects and reassembled in a manner which simulates the containing function of an object. The organisation may present itself as a good object protecting the individual from destructive attacks, but in fact its structure is made up of good and bad elements derived from the self and the objects which have been projected into and used as building blocks for the resultant extremely complex organisation". One aspect of this complexity is the ensuing relation between what Steiner refers to as the "dependent self" and this organisation in the mind. For although at times the self may appear as dominated by or a victim of this organisation, he or she is also in identification with and a participant within it. It is not clear to me how far Steiner’s account is bound to the more extreme forms of psychotic processes that Bion and others have described. Certainly in his book he describes how pathological organisations may surface from time to time in less gravely disturbed patients. For the present I am inclined to the view, or at least wish to entertain the view, that what he is describing is a process latent and as it were realisable in any and everyone. To return to Steiner’s text, the pathological organisation can be seen as the resultant of a process through which "projective identification is not confined to a single object, but, instead, groups of objects are used which are themselves in a relationship". These objects, usually in fact part objects, are constructed out of experiences with people found in the patients’ early environment. The fantastic figures of the patients’ inner world are sometimes based on actual experiences with bad objects and sometimes represent distortions and misrepresentations of early experience … What becomes apparent in the here and now of the analysis is that these objects, whether they are chosen from those which pre-exist in the environment or created by the individual, are used for specific defensive purposes to bind destructive elements in the personality". I suggest that this formulation significantly adds to our understanding of what might be termed the social construction of the internal world, although it is not a particularly comforting perspective. I will suggest later that it may equally illuminate aspects of our engagements and enactments in the actual social worlds we live and work in. But Steiner goes on to make another move, which opens up a more specifically organisational domain. And this is where the second sense of ‘pathological organisation’ I referred to earlier comes into its own. Drawing on previous studies by Herbert Rosenfeld and Donald Meltzer15, Steiner describes how the collection or groups of objects into which destructive impulses have been projected are "often assembled into a ‘gang’ which is held together by cruel and violent means. These powerfully structured groups of individuals are represented in the patients’ inner world (for example as an internal Mafia) and appear in dreams as an inter-personal version of the retreat. The place of safety is provided by the group who offer protection from persecution and guilt as long as the patient doesn’t threaten (their) domination. The result … is to create a complex network of object relations, each object containing split off parts of the self and the group held together in complex ways characteristic of a particular organisation (emphases, DA). The organisation ‘contains’ the anxiety by offering itself as a protector, and it does so in a perverse way very different from that seen in the case of normal containment". The organisation becomes "personified": controlling, sanctioning and protecting as long as it remains unchallenged. Correspondingly the individual becomes locked into the organisation and in a way that makes it difficult to regain, reassemble and move beyond the fragmentation of the self. "It is not possible to let any single object go, mourn it, and in the process withdraw projections from it, because it does not operate in isolation but has powerful links which bind it to other members of the organisation. These links are often ruthlessly maintained, with the primary aim of keeping the organisation intact. In fact the individuals are often experienced as bound inextricably to each other and the containment is felt to be provided by a group of objects treated as if it were a single object; namely, the organisation" (emphases, DA). Steiner argues that where a patient is living in this state of mind it is not possible or helpful for the analyst "to try to confront or combat the organisation head on … (but) if it can be recognised as one of the facts of life making up the reality of the patients’ inner world, then gradually it may become possible to understand it better and as a result to reduce the hold it has on the personality". Later, Steiner adds that "it is important not only to describe the mental mechanism which operate at any particular moment but also to discuss their function: that is not only what is happening but why it is happening - in this instance to try to understand what it is that the patient fears would result if he emerged from the retreat". But he also notes how precarious this move can be. "Some patients depend on the organisation to protect them from primitive states of fragmentation and persecution, and they fear that extreme anxiety would overwhelm them if they were to emerge from the retreat. Others have been able to develop a greater degree of integration but are unable to face the depressive pain and guilt which arise as contact with internal and external reality increases. In either case emergence to make contact with the analyst may lead to a rapid withdrawal to the retreat and an attempt to regain the previously held equilibrium". In summarising Steiner’s description of pathological organisations and its links to Kleinian theory, I have tried to keep as close as possible to his actual text, although I am well aware that I may have missed elements he would place more emphasis on or elided, or perhaps misrepresented one or other aspect. More seriously, no theoretical account of this kind can do justice to its grounding in clinical experience. In fact Steiner’s book is full of clinical illustrations which are his primary focus of interest. I do not think it is possible, however, for a third party adequately to convey the texture of such material, even if time permitted and I can only point those of you who feel interested to the book itself. I hope I have said enough, nonetheless, to indicate why it is that I believe Steiner’s work has something to offer, directly and indirectly, to our enterprise: the psycho-analytic study of organisations. To use the metaphors of the Symposium title, this enterprise is itself a venture in ‘Drawing Boundaries and Crossing Bridges’: between two areas of enquiry which, in my view, share in common the exploration and understanding of emotional worlds. Steiner’s focus is on the emotional world of the individual and the ways in which the individual manages, fails to manage and can be helped to manage experiences, fundamentally of mental pain. Our focus, or perhaps I should restrict this to the focus of my colleagues and myself at the Tavistock Consultancy Service, is rather on the emotional world of the group and/or the organisation. What is it then that Steiner’s work seems to me to illuminate and contribute to across this bridge? First of all, in reading this book I sometimes experienced an uncanny feeling of listening to myself as a member of groups or in the presence of a group. I am referring partly to the experience of anonymity or of being unable either to locate oneself or others in a way that confirms integrity. Also, to the great difficulty one has at times as a consultant in making contact with ‘the group’, which links in my mind to what Steiner has to say about the position of the analyst facing the patient’s group or organisation in the mind. This, of course, is territory which Bion described in Experiences in Groups, and led him to his formulations of group mentality and the differentiation of work group and basic assumption functioning. But I think Steiner’s descriptions of the role the group plays in the inner world of the individual and what drives this role may add significantly to these formulations. In particular it suggests that we may need to pay more attention than in my experience is customary to the fine grain of basic assumptions as these are mobilised in groups and what is driving them; to seek ways of gaining access to the underlying phantasies and the ways in which roles are distributed and inter-locked in the service of non-development. All groups function as ‘psychic retreats’. This is implicit in Steiner’s account of groups in the internal world. But one can also see evidence that every external ‘group’ potentially functions as an arena which our latent groupishness in Steiner’s sense can "cathect", occupy, as it were collectively. You may recall that in the introduction to Experiences in Groups, Bion states that his "present work", by which I take it he is referring to his individual analytic practice, "convinces me of the central importance of the Kleinian theories of projective identification and the interplay between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions … Without the aid of those two sets of theories I doubt the possibility of any advance in the study of group phenomena". I think Steiner’s and other Kleinian contributions take this project some way forward, as indeed did Bion’s later work. But they have not as far as I know been intensively drawn on even by many Group Relations practitioners, perhaps because the number of those with direct experience of analytic and group work is relatively small. (One signal exception to this is a paper on ‘The Fifth Basic Assumption’, written by Gordon Lawrence, Alastair Bain and Larry Gould and published in 1996,17 which I refer to later. It is worth noting however that much of the response to this paper has been driven by a rather sterile debate along the lines of ‘how basic is this basic assumption?’, as if somehow Bion’s triad was set in tablets of stone). Secondly, Steiner’s characterisation of the "personalised" organisation in the patient’s inner world and the way in which this functions as an illusory container of anxiety, which offers protection at the expense of development and the evolution of meaning, seems to me a very powerful contribution to our understanding of the ‘organisation-in-the-mind’. I think this phrase was first used by Pierre Turquet with reference to experience in the Institutional Event in Group Relations conferences. I have drawn on it myself as, in slightly different ways, have colleagues at the Grubb Institute to refer either to peoples’ conscious or unconscious mental constructs of the external organisation they are members of, or to the resonance in individual role holders, especially those operating on the boundary of the organisation as a whole, of emotional currents which are a property of the organisation as a whole and may relate either to the emotional demands of its task, or its structuring, or its relation to the external context or all three.18 Steiner’s formulation of the ‘organisation’ and its formation and function in the internal world has strong echoes with independently arrived at formulations of the ways in which real life organisations can function as defenses against anxiety. Consider, for example, Isabel Menzies-Lyth’s account of work in this tradition, offered in a review of psychoanalytic perspectives on social institutions first published some ten years ago.19 She is writing of the ways in which the presenting symptoms in an assignment may appear discrepant with the emotional charge that accompanies them and that has led the organisation to seek consultancy in the first place.20
All the elements in this account: the presence of a focus of deep anxiety and distress accompanied by feelings (conscious or unconscious) of despair; fragmentation of the problem so that it cannot be reflectively held; projection of these fragments as it were across the psychic field of the organisation; personalisation in terms of an establishment (the authorities) accompanied by a splitting of aspects of one’s mental apparatus (responsibility); are strikingly congruent with Steiner’s description of the patient’s internal organisation. At the same time I think Steiner’s work adds something to this picture. For example, his rooting of the internal problem in the issue of dealing with primitive destructiveness, draws attention to and helps make sense of the strong undertow of hostility, punitiveness, resentment and grievance that often accompany defensive states in organisations and which may be simultaneously and collusively mobilised in a way that makes it difficult to disentangle victim and oppressor. His conception of the illusory container draws attention to the underlying fear of and attack on meaning and helps to account for the difficulty consultants can face in working in this field, as Isabel Menzies-Lyth was to experience herself in her original nursing study. Indeed this difficulty is compounded in working with actual organisations since the defensive system, spread across the whole structure of roles and relations, can be very hard to bring into focus. (In my own view this is somewhat less true where the immediate client is a senior executive post holder, or at least where one has access to such a post holder, although I am not sure colleagues in the field would necessarily agree). In what follows I shall use the term ‘inner world organisation’ to refer to Steiner’s formulation and ‘organisation-in-the-mind’ to refer to what we encounter in real life organisations. The consonance between Steiner’s inner world organisation and organisation-in-the-mind raises some intriguing and ticklish questions. Is what is happening in external organisations an enactment of an internal state, or is it rather that external organisations, if I may coin a handy neologism, in-act, or make active an internal repertoire of response to anxiety? This is somewhat similar to a question that can be asked of Elliott Jacques’ early work on Social systems as a Defense against Anxiety.21 I incline to the latter position, though at the end of the day I am not sure what difference it really makes. Another question that arises is what happens in a person’s internal world if he or she is also a participant in a collusively structured external organisation. This could probably only be answered by practising analysts with experience in both domains. Leaving these questions aside, I want to propose the following:
Over the past two or three years, a number of practitioners in the field have challenged or questioned the so called ‘Tavistock paradigm’ in organisational consultancy.23 [I say "so called", because I do not think there is one such paradigm, but rather a variety of rather loosely linked conceptual approaches: psychoanalytic, socio-technical, open systems, systemic or psycho-systemic etc.] It is suggested that the emphasis on defensive processes and their mode of operation limits the attention paid to the particular challenges which organisations are currently facing, which increasingly concern questions of re-defining the nature and consequently the "requisite structure" of the enterprise (to borrow Elliott Jacques’ phrase24) under conditions of radical technological and environmental change. Larry Hirschhorn’s introduction of the concept of "primary risk", and his recent venture into the worlds of Lacanian analysis and the links between ‘desire’ and mental ‘flow’, is one among a number of examples. And certainly it is true that increasingly we ourselves, in the Tavistock Consultancy Service, are being asked to work with clients on more strategic themes of ‘re-visioning’ the business or working on ‘core values’, or bringing about ‘transformational change’. Yet, paradoxically, Steiner’s concept of the ‘psychic retreat’ would suggest that it is precisely in such circumstances that the pull towards pathology and the tendency to mobilise latent defensive constellations of response is most likely to be in evidence. Moreover, in so far as one consequence of technological and environmental change has been to challenge our tacit assumptions about boundaries (of task, technology, territory and time), it is not only our ‘rational’, paradigms of organisation that are challenged. But also as it were the unconscious investments which those paradigms can elicit: the shadow side of conventional wisdom. This is wonderfully well illustrated by Larry Hirschhorn himself in his recent book on Reworking Authority: Leading and Following in the Post-Modern Organisation.25 Hirschhorn’s central concern is with what might be termed the ‘psychic costs’ of the evolution of what he describes as a "culture of openness", characterised by the apparent suspension or relaxation of organisational boundaries, the attenuation of hierarchy and the search for more flexible and potentially creative patterns of relationship between role holders. "The post modern organisation requires that individuals at all levels make themselves more open to one another - how else can it draw on the individual creativity of all its members? - but faces the stark reality that people don’t wish to look incompetent or feel ashamed".26 Much of the book consists of examples of the various stratagems thought which members of the organisation unconsciously seek to ward off these psychic costs of development. One such stratagem for example, familiar enough in other organisational settings, turns on the ritualisation of meetings:
I would see this example as an instance of the mobilisation of an available form of ‘psychic retreat’ built in to the unconscious structuring of the organisation. The retreat offers ‘containment’, but in an illusory form that forecloses rather than releases development. Later in the book Hirschhorn suggests how the "modern organisation" (presumably in contrast to the post-modern version), when "it functioned well", could contain potentially destabilising feelings (aroused by real or phantasied dependence) by depersonalising them. Individuals experienced dominance and submission as artifacts of their role relationships. They might, consequently, take a "political" view of their situation, e.g. that they were participating in the drama of "labour versus capital", or they might develop a moral of normative stance (e.g. "one should obey ones superiors"). Similarly, factory supervisors who disciplined workers could protect themselves from feelings of guilt and anxiety by ascribing their harshness to the roles they occupied. While never completely resolving the tension between person and role, the modern organisation, by favouring the role, created a paradoxically helpful climate of depersonalisation".28 Elsewhere, Hirschhorn describes what can happen to such unconscious stratagems where and when, for whatever reason, the gradient of risk increases beyond the capacity of what a particular management finds tolerable. Instead of relying on the role structure to delegate authority management comes to "rely on ‘technical’ fixes and disorganising politics. They try to use technically developed procedures or rules as substitutes for roles and they employ the political principle of checks and balances to orchestrate inter-divisional relationships. Checks and balances replace unity of command, rules replace roles, and politics ultimately drives out teamwork. We create a bureaucracy (and) this suggests that bureaucracy, particularly in high risk settings, is usefully interpreted not as a rational form of organisation but as a regressed form of hierarchy".29 To my mind this is a most persuasive description both of how what I am terming a ‘psychic retreat’ can be mobilised, under developmental anxiety, within the organisation and of how the form of this retreat, as it were, borrows from but simultaneously parodies and perverts the very organisational forms that hitherto have served to sustain ‘good enough’ work. Every element of organisational life, I suggest, is subject to this kind of unconscious manoevre, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that this kind of manoevre is a latent potential in the repertoire of all organisational behaviour. There is something about the organisational (or indeed the societal) domain that elicits it. I think this "something" links to Steiner’s account of the function of the organisation in the internal world which, under the pressure of uncertainty - the not known - real life organisations collectively cathect. This is still, for me, the territory in which psychoanalytically informed consultancy has a distinctive contribution to make. I am not wholly convinced that we have much to offer in contributing directly to the creative challenges that organisations are facing. (If we did then surely that would be where we would choose to work). But I think we have a great deal to offer in helping organisations facing such challenges to avoid the misrepresentations, the illusory investments, which such challenges inevitably evoke. With patience and with sympathy. Postscript As a postscript to this paper I want, tentatively, to describe a rather different version of a ‘psychic retreat’ which I think is beginning to emerge in response to the pressures which Larry Hirschhorn and others have described as characteristic of the ‘post-modern organisation’. This has some links to the constellation which Gordon Lawrence and his co-authors have identified as Basic Assumption Me-Ness in the paper I cited earlier. This they describe as a "temporary cultural phenomenon, salient at this time in history … In particular we are putting forward the idea that as living in contemporary, turbulent societies becomes more risky, so the individual is pressed more and more into his or her own inner reality in order to exclude and deny the perceived disturbing realities that are of the outer environment. The inner world becomes thus a comforting one offering succour … Our working hypothesis is that BaM occurs when people, meeting to do something in a group, work on the tacit unconscious assumption that the group is to be a non-group. Only the people present are there to be related to because their shared construct in the mind of ‘group’ is of an undifferentiated mass. They therefore act as if the group had no existence, because if it did exist it would be the source of persecuting experiences"30 Later in the paper, Lawrence et al suggest that this assumption, although serving a defensive purpose can have its "temporary uses … There is a sense in which BaM can be viewed as a dependency on oneself and one’s own resources in order to have a basis of dependability to participate in and hearken to the realities of the environment".31 In my view, however, this "sophisticated" use, as with the other basic assumptions, is at best precarious. (One can compare this with what Steiner has to say about Donald Winnicott’s work on transitional objects and transitional spaces32: "there are many similarities between transitional spaces and psychic retreats but also some central differences. In particular is the value given by Winnicott to the transitional area, which he sees as a place of cultural and personal development. In my approach, I emphasise them as areas of retreat from reality where no realistic development can take place. In my view, the retreat often serves as a resting place and provides relief from anxiety and pain but it is only as the patient emerges from the retreat that real progress can occur"). The experience which prompted the line of thought I want to describe happened to occur around the time that I first began reading Steiner’s book. It took place in the context of a five day programme entitled ‘Understanding and Working with Groups’, which was one of a series designed and led by the Tavistock Consultancy Service for a number of years and sponsored by a large multi-national IT organisation. Members attending these programmes came from the sponsoring company and a variety of other organisations including large consultancy firms. What stimulated the establishment of the series was the sponsoring company’s felt need to develop a more consultancy based approach to the development and delivery of IT services to client organisations. The aim of the programme was twofold: to develop skills of facilitation in working with groups and teams and to explore the dynamics of groups and teams in an organisational setting. The method of work owed something to Harold Bridger’s conception of the ‘double task’ in working conferences. Thus the core event of the programme was a Study Group that had the task, firstly, of designing a programme of sessions in which each member would have an opportunity to work as a ‘facilitator’ to the group; secondly of taking ‘time out’, usually towards the end of each session, to review and comment on the group ‘process’ as different members were experiencing this. Each group met with a consultant present, whose primary focus was on this second task. In addition to these Study Groups there were Consultancy Syndicates where members gave and received individual consultancy to and from each other, in the presence of observers. There were also, on this occasion, large group meetings which all members and staff attended. These were referred to as Whole System Meetings, with the task of "studying the current dynamics of the whole workshop through an exploration of one’s actual experience in the here and now". Staff worked in these meetings as consultants to this task, which was seen as opening up a more organisational dimension that might illuminate and suggest links to the external organisational worlds members brought in with them. For some time the Tavistock staff working on these programmes had been aware of a number of recurring experiences. These included the tendency of members to invest emotional energy in the Study Groups, while apparently appearing quite listless, fractious and skeptical in any larger group setting (plenaries, whole system meetings). More significantly, it had become apparent that much of the learning which members felt and said they derived from the programmes was ‘personalised’ i.e. they felt they had learned important things about themselves as persons, rather than, for example, as role holders, members of groups or organisations etc. Over time this had led to a covert ‘institutionalising’ of an unplanned event towards the end of each cycle of Study Groups, where members "gave feedback" to each other on how they perceived them. These sessions were often extraordinarily intense, almost cathartic, as if they were the culmination of something that had a flavour of personal exposure, of opening up and inviting feelings of vulnerability in oneself and others. They became part of the ‘myth’ surrounding the programmes, passed on in elusive hints to intending future applicants. Within the staff group involved in the programmes there was considerable, sometimes conflictual, discussion about this development and its legitimacy. The occasion which set me puzzling was the penultimate session of a Study Group I had been working with and that had followed much the same pattern I described above. Members were reviewing what they felt they had each gained from their experience. The youngest member of the group, who held a position of considerable responsibility in his company, began talking about how the course had raised for him the question of what was his "true self". (This was not a term that had been used hitherto, nor was there any evidence of familiarity on the part of any member with its more technical origins and use). He said that it was as if he were in a room which had a glass floor. Beneath this floor was his true self. He felt that there had been a thick carpet on the floor which prevented him seeing and having access to his true self. During the Workshop he said, this carpet had begun to be partly rolled back. The other members of the group, including myself, seemed intensely moved by this image. It set the tone for everything the others said, which had to do with their experience of coming to acknowledge feelings and emotions they had not hitherto allowed themselves fully to recognise or use in the presence of others. These included positive feelings of warmth, concern, generosity and negative feelings of anger, hostility and shame. But these feelings, made public to each other now, were seen as an essentially private matter, that had little of nothing to say about members engagement in the public and organisational worlds they lived in. There was no sense of members feeling they could take this discovery back into the working world, but only into the world of more intimate relations, within the family or with partners. It was as if, it seemed to me, nothing was to be allowed to disturb or mitigate the very negative, persecutory construction of the organisational world which had emerged in much of the material elsewhere in the Workshop. This was presented as a world driven by a survivalist mentality, a world of political manoevering, disregard of the human costs of change, which spoke the language of development but was unable truly to act on it. It then occurred to me that what one might be experiencing, indeed participating in, was a kind of splitting of the personal and the organisational, which, however important in recovering a fuller sense of self, itself represented a strategy of survival rather than development: a kind of psychic retreat in reverse, that is a privileging of the self which leaves the self-in-the-organisation exactly where it is. In his book, The Claustrum, published in 1992, Donald Meltzer, in the course of a rather doleful account of the part played by group mentality in mental life nonetheless makes the point that we would be deceiving ourselves if we thought it possible to carry on an activity with others without participating in the communal aspect, for "there is always a community. And since there is a community, there are problems of organisation and communication where the borderland between friendly and hostile, communication and action, governing and ruling, opposing and sabotaging becomes obscure".33 We can perhaps retreat psychically from this borderland, but only at the cost of organisational or communal health. References 1. Steiner, J. (1993) Psychic Retreats: pathological organisations in psychotic, neurotic and borderline patients, The New Library of Psychoanalysis 19, Routledge, London and New York. 2. Schafer, R. (1993) in his foreword to Steiner’s book, op cit p ix 3. Steiner, J. (1993) op cit, p 1 4. Steiner, J. (1993) op cit, p xi 5. Steiner, J. (1993) op cit p2 6. Steiner, J. (1993) op cit p5 7. Steiner, J. (1993) op cit p9
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