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Robert B. French Senior Lecturer in Organizational Behaviour
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LETTER 1 Dear Peter, A while ago, I remember, you suggested I write about friendship as if writing to a friend. And I’ve decided to take you up on the idea. For the ISPSO Symposium, I shall experiment by writing to you rather than putting together the usual conference paper. It seems quite appropriate really, as the tradition of exploring and developing one’s thought by writing to one’s friend is a good deal older than that of the modern academic ‘paper’! (I do also have a fair ‘lump’ of references and quotations in mind, but I’ll put them separately at the end, so that you can just follow the argument itself if you want to.[1]) My anxiety is that there’s so much to say, I’m afraid the point will get lost. But as I write that, I remember clearly the way you look as you ask (again!), "What’s the ‘one idea’ you want to communicate?"... The trouble is that it’s both simple and difficult. What I’d like to get across is that our society - modern, late modern, post-modern, call it what you like! - has missed the point about friendship. We’ve cut it down to our size and can therefore only see it in terms of feelings or as an ‘interpersonal relationship’. So what are we to make of the idea that friendship is a fundamental disposition towards self and other - and even the universe? Of course it is inter-personal, but it’s also - maybe even primarily - systemic. And yet that’s the ‘simple’ bit. We’ve got used to thinking systemically and being aware of the organizational implications of individual actions and emotions. But, as you put it the other day, friendship links the human and the divine. That’s what I mean by ‘difficult’. It pushes up against the certainties of our everday categories, the points at which we use models and theories to keep ‘un-’ at bay - un-certainty, un-pleasantness and un-knowing: O! O! Stick with K! I was surprised to find, for example, that some philosophers have argued friendship may not even require another living person to relate to[2] - although in religious language the idea was more familiar, as in ‘the communion of saints’ or the words of the Wesleyian hymn: ‘He wants not friends that hath Thy love’. Anyway, the point I’ve reached so far is a particular definition of friendship - as a mature form of the capacity to contain. In the language of the Symposium (ISPSO, that is, not PLATO!), I have rephrased this as the human capacity for drawing boundaries and crossing bridges. As you know, I believe that this notion of ‘capacities’ is central to human development. In other words, development is not linear or step-by-step, but expansive, elastic, more and more inclusive of and able to contain experience and emotion, both one’s own and that of others[3]. That’s why I’ve used the word in my definition. Rather than being a feeling or a process or something like that, friendship is a capacity - a state of mind or disposition underpinning all relating, a whole way of orienting oneself to the world. What I want to do in these letters is to explore the psychoanalytic understanding of friendship, so that I can also look at the importance of friendship for the conference themes and for ISPSO practitioners. I know psychoanalysis[4] and the friendship tradition in Western Europe seem to belong to different worlds, but my own sense is that they both address the same level of human experience, possibility and need. In some ways, I’ve come to see psychoanalysis as an unconscious re-emergence of the friendship tradition, which got dropped from the official ‘maps’ around the 14th or 15th century[5]. I do feel awkward though. In a way I feel ought not to draw attention to friendship like this. I rather agree with Ivan Illich’s and Barry Sanders’ description of it as ‘the one silent space that remains open in our examined lives’[6]. But only a decade after they wrote that, it seems to me it’s already too late. For example, my younger son’s first job after leaving school last Summer was in a shop where the management had put up two large signs - which the customers, of course, could not see. The first read ‘Treat the customer as a friend’, the second - right on the boundary between back-of-shop and customer - ‘You are now going on stage’. The sub-text was pretty straightforward. All goods were rated according to the % commission earned from each sale - from the highest ‘mega’ band, through ‘AA’ to the ‘Z’ band which was worth nothing to the salesmen. (Yes, they were all men.) So the sales staff were being ‘disciplined’[7] to act friendship, not only so the customers were happy with the service and the goods they received, but also so the staff could earn as much as possible. Their basic salary was, of course, kept low as a stimulus. And the sub-sub-text was to produce maximum income for the company. Not quite the ancient view of friendship as ‘the crown of life and the school of virtue’[8]! Ironically, this manipulative modern (mis-)use of friendship does parallel - though in a distorted form - the ancient view of it not just as a private, interpersonal ‘relationship’, but also as a social and political event. Look at the story of David and Jonathan[9]! I remember J.P. Stern[10] saying that the Nazis used to split up their SS units every three weeks or so. They certainly recognised that in the context of friendship people can dare to think different and unguarded - and therefore potentially subversive - thoughts[11]. The reality is that friendship is one of the hardest things for those in power to control - either to create or to prevent. That’s why I believe friendship is an important theme for the Symposium and am worried about the way it’s beginning to creep into the management literature, for example, as an alternative to military metaphors of leadership: the leader as friend[12]! Some of our critical theorist colleagues would - I think quite rightly - see this too as a disguised attempt to relocate control within the individual[13]. After all, the military themselves have always known - at least from the Spartans onwards - that for the sake of a friend men will expose themselves to dangers they would not otherwise contemplate. "Greater love...etc." - the context may be different, but the idea’s the same. More anon. Robert. LETTER 2 Dear Peter, Why on earth hasn’t friendship been a central topic in psychoanalysis? After all it’s fundamental to most people’s lives, and psychoanalysis is such an obvious places to look for an understanding of its dynamics - such as intimacy and distance, envy and desire, trust, loyalty and betrayal. And yet I have only found three papers by analysts specifically on friendship[14]! - although in other fields, from poetry to social psychology, it must have stimulated a vaster, more subtle, diverse and complex literature than any field of human relations other than love itself - or war. What really makes this ‘silence’ stunning is that it was Freud’s ‘crucial friendship’ with Fliess which provided the experiential context for Freud’s own self-analysis - and hence both the inspiration or ‘catalyst’ and also the model for the whole method of psychoanalysis[15]. It really does seem to be as simple and as stark as that! It is almost as though Freud unconsciously picked up Aristotle’s notion that ‘a friend is an other self’[16], and found a way to re-vision the idea. I’m sure Freud himself didn’t see it this way. It would have been obscured from him by several things. First of all there was the actual dynamic (and eventual ending) of his friendship with Fliess. But there was also Freud’s drive to present psychoanalysis as ‘scientifically’[17] valid in order to get it accepted in an age where key ideas, such as leisure, virtue, happiness, politics, and the function and possibilities of the present moment, that underpinned Aristotle’s scheme of life, had (still have!) all but lost their meaning. I’m convinced that one way to understand the method of psychoanalysis would be as the reactivation of exactly those aspects of human interaction - so highly valued by the ancients[18]: leisure, virtue, happiness, politics, and the function and possibilities of the present moment. And with them, as both cause and outcome, friendship. The fact that so little energy has been devoted to the exploration of friendship from a psychoanalytic perspective suggests there is something ‘unspeakable’ about it. I was going to say that, in the light of Freud’s experience, the gap was ‘ironic’, but I think unspeakable may be nearer the truth. It bears all the hallmarks of a ‘slip of the mind’[19] - maybe a defence against the ‘danger’ of confusing the psychotherapeutic relationship with a more ‘normal’ friend-to-friend relationship. (Teachers, managers, consultants, social workers, priests, doctors - many roles have their own version of this fear.) However, I think that at this point it will actually be more dangerous for society if psychoanalytic thinkers go on ignoring the theme and leave the field open for the social psychologists (who tend to see it as a set of skills to be mastered and stages to be gone through[20]) or - Heaven forbid! - to the organization behaviourists and management theorists. The Freud-Fliess friendship is said not to have lasted. Seen another way, it ‘only’ lasted 15 years or so. It is clear that the nature of the transference and projection involved, and the differences between them both in terms of age and of ability, were almost certainly too great a burden for the easy continuation into possible ordinariness of such an intense relationship: ‘the freight must be proportioned to the groove’[21]. What has lasted, however, - in Freud’s method - is his discovery-from-within that friendship as an object-relationship offers the facilitating context for quite extraordinary learning and change - emotional and intellectual, personal and systemic-political. I must stop for now, but I’ll write again soon. I’m enclosing James Grotstein’s paper on ‘the role of friendship in intimacy’. I mentioned it in an earlier letter and it’s a fascinating read. As you’ll see, he rates friendship pretty highly - ‘the quintessence of shared experience ... deeper than love’ - because, as every psychoanalyst and psychotherapist knows, ‘it takes at least two persons to lead a life’. I can send you the Rangell paper too, if you want, but as it focusses mostly on Freud’s views, I thought this would be more appropriate. Grotstein goes much further - into the object relations perspective, projective identification and so on, bonding and attachment in contrast to drive theory, and friendship as a developmental line. Must go. Robert. LETTER 3 Dear Peter, I’m glad you enjoyed the paper by Grotstein. Because Winnicott and Bion have both been central to my own quest to understand friendship, I agree that I’d have been interested to hear a bit more from him about them. I was already caught up with the friendship theme - for the usual mix of personal and professional reasons that stimulate most research, I guess - when I came across one of those tantalising hints that Winnicott had such a talent for dropping into his writing. Describing the development of one of his key measures of maturity - the achievement of ‘the capacity to be alone’ - he argued that we learn to be alone in someone else’s presence. And he saw the infant-mother relationship as the coping stone, as it were, not only specifically for learning to be alone, but for the whole edifice of development. It’s in the midst of all this that he dropped in the following: ‘It will be seen that I attach great importance to this relationship, as I consider that it is the stuff out of which friendship is made. It may turn out to be the matrix of transference’[22]. He doesn’t develop these associations explicitly here or elsewhere, and nor do other writers, as far as I know[23]. But the triple ‘family resemblance’ that is implied is truly remarkable[24]: mother-infant, analyst-patient, friend-friend - all made of the same experiential ‘stuff’. As soon as I read it, it made immediate sense to me: two apparently contradictory capacities - the capacity to be alone and the capacity to be together - are actually linked at the most intimate level. They are two aspects of one complex or one system. (You might say one complex system...!) However much people may argue about the aims of psychoanalytic psychotherapy[25], in the end they can work. They really can help people who’ve been damaged to make up ground and live fuller and more satisfactory lives. To free themselves from the grip of some of their demons! And the method is basically very simple. It just involves a playful re-enactment in the transference, where fault lines can be mended or at least bridged. It’s like being given a second chance to be alone in the presence of someone, having not got it the first time round. So what Winnicott’s hint actually suggests is that the repair and good enough re-enactment which can occur in the analytic relationship can also occur in friendship[26]. He might have been describing Freud-Fliess! One of the problems with the word ‘psychoanalysis’ - any word, I suppose, once it’s become or stands for a model[27] - is that it sounds like a single perspective. Clearly it isn’t[28], and Winnicott’s valuation of friendship is a good example, because it is in such striking contrast to that of Freud. Freud saw friendship as an expression of ‘aim-inhibited sexuality or aim-inhibited love’[29] - which he more or less explicitly linked (maybe unsruprisingly if you think of the age he lived in) to same gender friendship and to homosexuality. [Gender is only a side issue for this paper, but could be as important for the general themes of the Symposium as it is for the specific issue of friendship. Also, much of the impetus over the last couple of decades for looking at friendship in new ways has come from the feminist re-assessment of female friendship/s.][30] A handy summary of all this would be to say that friendship belongs to that family or class of relationships which are characterised by what Winnicott called ‘holding’ and what Bion included in his ‘container-contained’ model. Not that their schemes are identical[31]. It’s just that they both saw the particular quality of the mother’s state of mind - as in Bion’s reverie and alpha function - as central to human development.[32] In my opinion, however, there is a missing bit in the standard description of the holding-containing relationship, and it is very significant in relation to friendship, because it is the notion of mutuality. The way the container-contained model is often described makes it seem as though the active elements are only on the mother’s side with everything determined by her capacities, rather than including too the infant’s personality and innate capacities (although Bion himself does include the infant’s ‘capacity to tolerate frustration’[33]). It seems to me that there are two central capacities and they must exist on both sides of the relationship: first, the capacity to put aspects of the self into another, but then also the capacity of the other to receive them - even if in the infant they only exist, as do all capacities, in rudimentary or ‘archetypal’ form until stimulated by experience[34]. I chose the title for this paper because I think the symposium metaphor of ‘crossing bridges’ could be used to summarize this whole theme of friendship as a manifestation of the capacity to contain or hold. It is not just that friendship can provide a unique type of bridge between people. There is also something special about its load-bearing capacity. A bridge [friendship] across deep or fast-flowing water [the emotions and the unconscious] must reach both banks - and the bank on both sides must be stable enough to hold the tensions. The bridge must also allow access in both directions and must not charge a toll which those using it cannot afford to pay. The psychoanalytic perspective really allows us to get to grips with some of the less obvious aspects of bridge-crossing, especially the anxieties: the anxiety of being alone; the anxiety of even setting out towards the other, when strong ‘cross’-winds may be blowing and the rushing water beneath can be clearly heard - even seen through the slats under one’s feet; the anxiety over a possible fall; and, even more frightening to some, anxiety over the impact of meeting if the crossing succeeds: what awaits me ‘on the other side’? Please write if you have any thoughts. Robert. P.S. I’ve just read the letter through again and realised that I’ve mentioned but understated one central concept which seems to me to link psychoanalysis and the friendship tradition. It’s the idea that what matters in human development is a state of mind or disposition - primarily the mother’s state of mind in relation to her infant[35]. Winicott and Bion go to some lengths to emphasize that mere physical holding is not enough for successful development[36]. The child that is physically handled may not feel ‘held’ and if s/he is held but not loved may be caught in a double bind from which there is ultimately no escape other than into severely disturbed mental states. Each time an infant is not handled with love or doesn’t feel kept in mind, s/he dies a little and, if the experience is frequent, extended or severe enough, may never recover. So the key point for both of them was that all human development - physical, emotional, relational, political and aesthetic or spiritual - depends on a state of mind or disposition. In the eyes, arms and mind, as well as at the breast of the good enough mother, we learn that the universe too is adequate. (If you remember, mother, matter and matrix all share the same root.) As a result, we can allow ourselves to exist. As you’ve probably guessed by now, I haven’t chosen the terms ‘disposition’ and ‘state of mind’ at random. They have a semi-technical meaning, as the usual translations for Aristotle’s word hexis.[37] He used the term to indicate basic human orientations to the world, to society and to others, certain forms of relationship and relatedness which meant much more than the modern term ‘mind set’, or even Weltanschauung. The best known example is probably his description of one particular hexis, namely his belief that we are ‘political animals’. This has very little to do with modern meanings of ‘political’. Instead, it refers to the polis, the Greek city state, such as the Athens of his own day where, according to Aristotle each citizen should be able to know all others by sight![38] To say we are ‘political animals’ meant that we are ideally ‘disposed’ - we might say pre-disposed (or even ‘programmed’, though I’d rather not) - to live in a state of that size and type. In other words, in his view, the polis represented the social-political arrangement where we are most likely to achieve our full potential as human beings. Our state of mind - hexis - disposes us to live and relate under such conditions. What I’ve come to believe is that in identifying ‘reverie’ and ‘primary maternal preoccupation’, Winnicott and Bion were describing a hexis, a peculiarly human disposition - not a fixed position or a taking-of-a-position, but a dis-position which is simply there, a given, a basic condition or requirement. Humans are disposed to live in the polis; ‘mothers’ are disposed to ‘hold’ children, and children to ‘be held’. I already knew that something was going on when I realised that ‘hold’ and ‘contain’ are synonyms (con-tain is from the Latin tenere = ‘to hold’). ‘Capacity’ too! because the Latin capax means ‘able to hold much’. Then I was told that, in its turn, hexis is from the Greek verb ‘to hold’... Of course linguistic coincidences of this kind can be enormously overdone or misleading, but I must say I found this one helpful. First, I got stuck in the apparent tautology: if the capacity to contain is a hexis, then to hold is to hold is to hold! But another way to look at it is as a kind of measure of the extent or expansive nature of the capacity for holding. Humans are ‘disposed’ to hold parts of each other - physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. A well developed ‘capacity to contain’ - as described, for example, by Klein in terms of the depressive position - means the ability to hold enough to be able to hold something for another as well as for oneself. I’m afraid this P.S. is turning out to be almost as long as than the letter itself! What I’ve been building up to is that the notion of a basic disposition or state of mind - a hexis - is important for understanding friendship, not least because (you’d probably guessed already) Aristotle described friendship as a hexis. So what I’ve learned from two directions - from psychoanalysis and from the friendship tradition - is that the ‘bridge’ we call friendship is a state of mind or disposition towards self and other, towards the world. I don’t know whether I’m making heavy weather of this, but it’s taken me a while to get hold of the idea. I think that’s partly because of our modern obsession with thinking about learning in terms of skill acquisition, competencies, targets and pre-determined goals and objectives with measurable achievement levels[39]. I’ll bet there are people at this very moment working out a set of teachable ‘competencies’ for parent, therapist/analyst and friend - in fact I know they are - so that parenting and friendship can be taught in schools and various bodies can define the ‘skills’ required of the therapist. No wonder it’s hard instead to think of things like teaching, managing or friendship in terms of capacities and states of mind or dispositions. P.P.S. - Only joking! LETTER 4 Dear Peter, Thanks for your letter. You’re quite right that ‘holding’ and ‘containment’ aren’t the whole story - not the only ‘stuff’ of friendship. It also needs salt to flavour the whole thing! The friendship tradition is unequivocal about this. Blake was typically direct: ‘Opposition is true friendship’[40]. Emerson too did not want friendships treated daintily, but ‘with roughest courage’, believing that - when they are real - ‘they are not glass threads or frostwork, but the solidest thing we know’[41]. It reminds me about the opening definition I gave in my first letter of friendship as ‘a mature form of the capacity to contain’. It hinges on what is meant by ‘maturity’[42]. ‘Mature containment’ goes beyond seeing friendship as the careful-not-to-hurt-their-feelings kind of relationship of the primary school playground[43]. It has to include the possibility of opposition and challenge too - or, in terms of the Symposium’s second metaphor, the readiness to ‘set boundaries’. Boundary-setting is, after all, a form of containment. So the ‘mature’ element of friendship as containment implies having the capacity to be challenged and to challenge. It really doesn’t fit with the way friendship is generally seen today. We focus on self-disclosure as the route to trust - the kind of stuff we see all the time in group work with managers and in the role of ‘facilitator’ (under the influence of humanistic psychology and counselling. I guess). The ancients emphasized a quite different kind of frankness, based on challenging your friend if s/he does something which you can’t go along with[44]. There’s a Hasidic story which captures the idea well. The Seer of Lublin said: "I prefer a passionate opponent to a lukewarm adherent. For the passionate opponent might still turn to you with all of his passion. But from a lukewarm adherent there is nothing more to be hoped"[45]. So this is another dimension of the hexis of friendship. I began to understand this better when I read how Ivan Illich uses friendship as a working method. He says that when he comes across some idea that challenges one of our unexplored contemporary assumptions, he always does the same thing: gathers a group of friends to discuss the question[46]. He clearly doesn’t want to be ‘looked after’ or sufficiently reassured to be able to ‘share his feelings’. He wants to be challenged. That’s why he specifically chooses the matrix of friendship, where one’s ideas can be considered, modified, expanded or dropped without, as it were, losing face. Challenge seems to be both the condition for real friendship and an outcome of it. I am reminded of what Bion says about the origins of the capacity for thinking and thought. They evolve somewhere in the tensions and spaces between two of the infant’s key experiences of the mother: being looked after and not being looked after. The former comes both from actual feeding and from her capacity for alpha functioning - which means that infants know from experience that their most disturbing ‘bits’ can be dealt with; the latter from the experience of ‘no breast’, which throws them nack on their own resources, so they have to learn to think for themselves. The ‘no-breast’ experience presents the infant with the fundamental question of human existence - especially since ‘the discovery of the individual’[47]: are we together or alone, connected or separate? The psychoanalytic perspective seems to me to offer a modern way of getting our heads round the ancient paradox that both are true - in contemporary terms, both wave and particle, depending on how you look, where from and what for! What I find so helpful about psychoanalysis in understanding friendship - in addition to the holding-containment model - is that it describes so clearly the way we move from being the centre of our own universe to recognising that there are others out there too whose needs compete with our own. It maps out the route we all need to take to reach another place, where co-existence and con-viviality and com-panionship are possible - a ‘third position’[48][49]. I emphasize the prefix co-/con-/com- because it always means ‘with’. If you look at how it’s used, you can see that it captures the reality of ‘with-ness’ very clearly - the fact that it’s always double-edged: there’s no co-laboration and no com-panionship with out com-petition. The ‘problem’ is simple: how to be, do, live with other people. The ‘-laboration’, ‘-panionship’ and ‘-petition’ bits just specify the activity (work, eat, enquire). It’s the ‘com-’ they have in common. No wonder Klein called it the ‘depressive’ position. It is depressing to have our omnipotent fantasies challenged and desires thwarted! Winnicott was very specific that the conflict-ridden, challenging, oedipal route-into-depressive-position is also part of the stuff of friendship. Without it, the maturity which the capacity for friendship demands is not possible. So, with one patient who could not develop and sustain friendships, Winnicott recognised that his in-capacity was based on a form of deprivation. He had never met his father as a rival, a man to hate and fear. By being deprived of what Winnicott called ‘the enjoyment of rivalry’, he was also denied the friendship that comes out of rivalry with men (in his example - I’ve heard exactly the same point made by women). ....I can feel my initial anxiety back again - as though I’m trying to make too many connections here and running the danger of giving you indigestion! What holds all this together for me is still the hexis idea: friendship is a disposition which is both containing and challenging. It’s based on the experience of having one’s own demands ‘met’ in both senses - that is, they must be held (the bridge must be crossed for meeting to occur, adaptation to need must be good enough), but also stood up to (the boundaries set). And ‘meetings’ of this kind can only occur in play - play with the mother, or on one’s own in her presence, rivalrous play with the father, play of both kinds with other children and adults. But if any of these is lacking or fails in some way, the experience can be made up, as it were, in the ‘play’ of transference in analysis[50] - or in the ‘play’ of friendship. There’s something important here about context. Our conversations have been among the most remarkable of my life. It’s as though our friendship creates a context where thoughts and feelings and knowing of all kinds - including not-knowing - can come together and shift, sometimes in leaps and sometimes as gentle nudgings. But it hasn’t happened by chance. We’ve worked hard to create and maintain the necessary space - physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, political, temporal, personal, professional, even economic and nutritional! We’ve known from early on that we needed to create that context within the broader context of other friendships, of our families and, especially, of the Business School. Very quickly - and particularly when there were three of us, all men - we saw the impact of our friendship and work together on those ‘outside’, in the envy that was stimulated and in something verging on paranoia in relation to our perceived ‘power’. For me, it was an important insight into another aspect of the context issue, that is into the nature and strength of the tensions that can be set up between interpersonal friendship and organizational dynamics - though I suppose Romeo and Juliet could have taught me a thing or two! It reminds me of the way we often used deliberately to split up friendship groups in the schools I’ve taught in. They were definitely perceived as a threat if they had so much as a whiff of resistance about them (and they often did!). I think even friendships among staff were unsettling. They tended either to be sexualised (which they sometimes were) or perceived as counter-cultural or disruptive (which they could also be). One aspect that you and I have only ever touched on is the impact of the ‘macro-context’ of society as a whole. Certain elements of contemporary culture seem to me to be anathema the challenging aspect of the hexis of friendship. The main one is what - in the UK, at least - I’d call the culture of denial or of in-authenticity. We tend always to look for positive interpretations and experiences and for rational explanations and solutions - whether in relation to technology, medicine, social conditions, education, democracy, agriculture or relationships - but to avoid looking into the shadows. Fill the prisons, in order to protect society, but do not on any account ask what kind of society it is that needs such a huge prison population... I find psychoanalysis refreshing precisely because it provides a way of looking at the shadow side of human nature without being blinded by it. It offers frameworks for understanding, relating to and intervening in the dark and disconcerting areas we prefer to ignore. In terms of friendship, this means acknowledging the competitiveness, rivalry and envy, and the potential for destructiveness which are bound to be there in friendship just as they are in any meeting of humans.[51]
LETTER 5 Dear Peter, I’ve come to the end of this series of letters, and I’d like to finish by speculating on some possible organizational implications of the understanding of friendship that I’ve been outlining. In some ways, this is obviously the most practically oriented aspect of the subject. I feel as though I’m faced with the question we should really have had embossed on the Research Unit’s headed paper (if we had any!): "So what?"! Can friendship actually work as an organizing principle? To what extent could we organize ourselves at the Business School (or away from it) according to the principles of friendship? In theory, a ‘culture of friendship’ might develop if the hexis of friendship could be shared within a group or organization, or if a leader were to be guided by its principles as a way of working and relating. Indeed, there are classic examples of organizations that had friendship as their organizing principle, such as Rievaulx Abbey under the abbacy of St. Aelred[52], or Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Academy in Florence[53], and probably CIDOC as set up by Illich and Borremans[54]. This idea of friendship as an organizing principle seemed strange to me at first, yet it’s pretty obvious in the ‘unofficial’ texture of organizations - the after-hours drinking ‘clubs’, the organizational ‘mafia’, the nepotism that can occur as a result of old boys’ networks, and even in relationships between political leaders at an international level, sometimes reflected in ‘special relationships’ between nations. I gather there have also been times when friendship was a part of the ‘official’ texture of organizing. For example, there were highly developed rituals of friendship between political leaders in medieval Europe. These rituals allowed for the creation and maintenance of alliances that could stand alongside kinship in relations between states, but they were largely political arrangements and tended to lack the affective dimension which we associate with companionship[55]. I guess the biggest blockage to even noticing the impact of friendship in organizations may be the way the private-public divide is experienced today[56]. For us, friendship is an essentially private affair - and as such seems to be a constant target for media attention (alongside actual ‘affairs’) in the crusade to use the ‘private’ to undermine the ‘public’ persona. To set up organizations that try to work in a different way with the private-public, including friendship, is thought to be ‘impossible’[57]. We’ve lost the notion that friendship has political value. By contrast, it was central for the ancients and powerfully - and to us rather confusingly - stated by Aristotle in his well-known phrase, ‘friendship would seem to hold cities together’[58]. It was only when Patrick introduced me to Ficino and the Platonic Academy in Florence that I really saw the systemic importance of friendship for the first time. What struck me was that because everyone ‘knows’ what an ‘academy’ is, it took several centuries (till around 1950s) for anyone to realise that it was simply friendship that held Ficino’s academy together, not ‘academic’ structures such as students, lectures or certificates[59]. What the organizational context of friendship allowed was an extraordinarily creative meeting of ideas and people - they included politicians, business men, philosophers, musicians, poets, artists, doctors, writers, theologians, architects[60]. But once I’d seen that friendship can be an organizing principle of a particularly creative kind, I could see it in all kinds of places. I recognised its influence in the most intense and effective periods of learning and teaching in my own life, but also in the creation of all sorts of ‘organizations’, from the Frankfurt Institute[61] to the Impressionist ‘school’ of painting, and from the English school system[62] to Monty Python! Without our realising it, you and I have evolved rituals around eating, drinking and conversation[63] which belong to a tradition of rituals of friendship that goes back a few thousand years. They occur in Plato’s Symposium (= ‘drinking party’ - ISPSO take note!), in the activities of Ficino’s Academy, in the practice of confession among the Epicureans[64], in St. Alered’s Rievaulx where the spiritual dimension of friendship was, of course, underpinned by the sharing of the eucharistic meal as well as of their ‘daily bread’, in the structure and activities of Methodist ‘classes’[65], and in the meal followed by drinks and cigars of Freud’s ‘Wednesday Circle’. I have no evidence for this, but I would hazard a working (or in this case perhaps a ‘playing’) hypothesis that ISPSO itself emerged out of and has been sustained by existing friendships and the desire for new friendships and alliances. It is a rich and enriching mixture when the mutuality, selflessness and generosity of friendship are combined with personal, professional and even political and economic concerns, ambitions and self-interest. No wonder new organizations and even organizational forms can result, when the shared hexis of friendship evolves into a matrix of friendship[66] and expresses itself in the praxis of friendship[67]. At the end of this, I’m left with a whole lot of new questions. Two stand out in particular, both about aspects of sustainability. The first is about the ‘descent’ from creativity to institutionalisation or ordinariness. It seems clear to me that when friendship is the organizing principle or working method a great deal of energy, excitement and creativity can be released in relation to a common goal or interest. But I’ve seen here at work, and elsewhere, how that initial impetus can be lost when the friendship group expands and, as a result, becomes formalised. It’s almost as if friendship as a disposition represents a kind of ‘work assumption’ rather than basic assumption, because it can contain the fragmentation that strong emotions can evoke, so that the whole can be looked at and assumptions held up for scrutiny. Or maybe, again in Bion’s terms, it’s a container that is flexible enough to absorb the destructive impact of a new idea. Maybe the potentially explosive impact of the genius or messiah who brings something new to the fixed ‘establishment’ can be mitigated or integrated via the medium of friendship? In general, I’m sure that the psycholoanalytic perspective - especially in combination with the political and systemic insights of group relations - has a crucial contribution to make in helping us understand the destructive or repressive forces that may be stimulated alongside flexibility and creativity when friendship is used as a method or or principle for organizing. The friendship tradition already worked at some of the questions: for example, Aristotle’s ‘he who has friends can have no friend’ raises the issue of numbers. They also addressed the question of whether friendship can exist between those who are not equals, and whether there is a moral pre-requisite - can ‘real’ friendship only exist between the good, and is there a substantial difference between friendship that is based on pleasure and/or utility and disinterested friendship[68]. The other question about the sustainability of friendship as an organizing principle is at a more immediately personal or interpersonal level. It has to do with what you might call the ‘ecology’ of friendship. As with most micro-climates, friendship is both remarkably stable and resilient, and extremely fragile and vulnerable. And, as with most eco-systems, we are remarkably careless and ignorant about it. We simply did not know that killing off the dodo meant the end too of a species of tree whose seed would only germinate after passing through the dodo’s gut! - and if we had known, would we have cared? Some friendships survive and evolve as friendships, others develpinto sexual relationships, while others end - either fizzle out, or implode under the pressure of intense competitiveness or uneven development, or explode in a betrayal of trust[69]. You and I have seen all of these just at the Business School! And it is the last, the betrayal of trust, which seems to have the most serious consequences at the systemic level. We need to understand more about the - potentially pernicious - effects of a situation where friendship ends but colleague-ship remains. Anyway, I’ll stop for now. I need to send this off for the Symposium, so that anyone who wants to can read it beforehand. Thanks for co-operating! Robert. Notes [1]’The medieval storteller in many ways interrupts his story to tell us what he is doing: He gives a bird’s-eye view of what he will be telling, tries to make people curious, insists on the importance of the subject he will deal with. He refers to authorities that make him believable. Gets himself into the act. He is not afraid of preaching and being didactic. He praises his heroes, is sympathetic with them, berates them. ... Nothing of the kind happens in the novel. To find a comparison we must turn today to a scientific paper. There the author tells us how important and unsolved the problem is, gives a summary, indicates connections, puts authorities into footnotes, thanks the teachers and colleagues...’ Uwe Pörksen (1971) Der Erzähler im mittelhochdeutschen Epos. Formen seines Hervortretens bei Lamprecht, Konrad, Hartmann, in Wolframs Willehalm und in den "Spielmannseper"’. Berlin: Schmidt. Quoted in Illich and Sanders 1988: 156-7. [2]For a summary of the ‘pre-Christian polemic about the theory and praxis of friendship’, see Hyatte 1994, chapter 1 (pp. 1-41). [3]See French forthcoming. [4]I am aware of using the term psychoanalysis somewhat loosely, to indicate psychodynamic theory and psychodnamic psychotherapy as well as ‘psychoanalysis proper’ (Holmes IJPA) [5]For the idea of philosophical ‘maps’ see Schumacher 1977; on maps or charts in psychoanalysis see Sandler 1983; 1993: 1097-1099; Sandler and Sandler 1994; on the dropping of friendship from our ‘maps’ see Fraisse 1974; Illich 1993: 26-28; and most specifically McGuire 1996, who identifies the late 14th century as a key turning point in Western Society, when - for the first time - it was argued that individuals might reach heaven on their own and that, once there, they would remain on their own. This is an extraordinary contrast with earlier views of friendship and salvation as essentially interdependent, culminating in the company of all the saints in heaven. Perhaps the necessity for the object relations perspective was laid down from the moment Gerson described heaven as ‘a deserted place’, a place of ‘great solitude’? [6]Illich and Sanders 1988: 127. [7]I am using the word in the Foucauldian sense of being bullied and controlled in such a way that external control becomes re-located within the individual, ideally without her or his awareness. As the word ‘friend’ is related in its derivation to the word ‘free’, it is hardly an appropriate vehicle for disciplinary control. [8]Lewis 1960: 69. For analyses of this ‘the commercialization of human feeling’ see Hochschild 1983; also Fineman 1993. [9]’There is a political dimension in the friendship of David and Jonathan. The involvement of Jonathan’s father, King Saul, his jealousy of David, and his determination to make sure that Jonathan and not David is his successor: all these factors complicate the personal bond and make for a political triange of jealousy/love. ... The personal story is set in the context of the development of the kingdom of Israel, which at the same time is the story of the salvation of the people of God, whose leader in his envy turns away from God and has to be punished.’ (McGuire 1988: xviii) [10]J.P. Stern was Professor of German at University College, London. [11]’to dare to think unguarded thoughts’ - the phrase is from Theodor Adorno, echoing Kant’s use of Horace:‘Sapere aude. [Dare to be wise.] Have courage to use your own understanding’ in ‘What is Enlightenment?’. See Adorno and Becker forthcoming. [12]Perrault 1991; also ‘critical friend’ in education [13]See, for example, Willmott 1993. [14]Grotstein 1989; Khan 1970; Rangell 1963. See also Little 1989, 1993. [15]Quotes from Khan 1970; Prokhoris (1995: 10) describes their friendship as being ‘a strange bond forged amid all the fervor and trembling of love’. The differences in the way their friendship is evaluated in the literature (for example, Kohut (1978); Mcgrath (1986); Robert 1966) seem to reflect differences in understanding of the nature of friendship itself as much as what ‘actually happened’. For example, the Spring 1997 ‘Events’ brochure from the Institute of Psycho-Analysis had a brief introductory article on the question ‘What is the Self?’. In it, the writer stated that ‘Despite Freud’s own success at his self-analysis, he came to the conclusion that to "know thyself" is to be known by another’. Khan suggests exactly the opposite of this ‘despite’ and turns the sentence round: As a result of his friendship with Fliess, through which he discovered at the deepest level that to "know thyself" is to be known by another, Freud was able to complete his own self-analysis successfully. The same dramatic contrast to Khan’s view is given by Robert(1966: 91), who stated that ‘Freud only broke free [of the ‘magic spell’ of Fliess ... so strong that every countermeasure was ineffective] by risking the boldest measure a man has ever tried on himself - self-analysis’. Maybe the confusion is caused in part by the two possible interpretations of ‘self’ in ‘self-analysis’. In an age of D-I-Y, ‘self-analysis’ may simply sound like doing-analysis-to-oneself-on-one’s-own, and lose the sense that it is the self that is analysed. [16]Aristotle Nichomachean Ethics, Book 9, Chapter 4, 1166a 30-32. See Stern-Gillet 1995; also Pakaluk 1991; Schollmeier; 1994. [17]There is a tension between views of science and scientific method in Freud’s work. To have his ideas accepted was problematic, both because they were counter-intuitive in the medical scientific world and because of the dominant anti-Semitism of the day. This has led to an underestimate of two elements of his thought: its relation to the mystical tradition (Bakan 1990; Eigen 1998) - which has always been intricately linked to the friendship tradition - and its roots in Goethe’s scientific world view (Arden 1997, 1998; Bettelheim 1983; Hadot 1995; Prokhoris 1995; Stephenson 1995). [18]See Hadot 1995; O’Loughlin 1978; Pieper 1965. Goethe’s passionate plea to his contemporaries to live in the present (see Hadot chapter 8: ‘"Only the present is our happiness": The value of the present instant in Goethe and ancient philosophy’) seems to have been heard today by the disciples of Goethe’s disciple, Freud - that is by psychoanalytic psychotherapists who have come to emphasize the centrality of work in the here-and-now of the transference and countertransference (Sandler 1993; Sandler and Sandler 1984), and by group analysts and group relations ‘teachers’ who create opportunities for ‘learning in the here-and-now’. [19]A parapraxis - a Fehlleistung, literally ‘failed achievement’. It is an achievement for psychoanalysis to ignore or avoid friendship so successfully, when all around the rest of the world is living for it, because it makes it so obvious that it must be of great - maybe even central - importance. The achievement is ‘botched’, however, because it has worked so well that hardly anyone has noticed. [20]The socio-psychological literature is too extensive to try to review here, but see, for example, Argyle and Henderson 1990; Blieszner and Adams 1992; Duck 1994; the Sage Publications series Understanding Relationship Processes, ed. Steve Duck. The social sciences more generally have also turned more recently to the theme of friendship. See Allan 1989; Giddens 1992; Jamieson 1998; Lopata and Maines 1981; Nardi 1992; Porter and Tomaselli 1989. [21]Emily Dickinson, poem no. 1765 in The Complete Poems (Dickinson 1975, 714):
[22]Winnicott 1958: 33, his italics. [23]There are brief discussions in Abram 1996: 322-324, and Newman 1995: 203-204. [24]For the merits of Wittgenstein’s method of ‘family resemblances’ over categorical rules, see Bambrough 1968; Stern 1992: 296-297; Wittgenstein 1963. Hinshelwood (1991: 248) is essentially using the method of family resemblances when he suggests, in his entry on ‘containint’, that ‘The analyst is certainly one container, and mother is another, but the theory does not stop there. As is clear, anyone with a maternal aspect to their character who can listen could function in this way [see REVERIE]’. James Hillman (1964) is in similar territory when he classes together as situations of primal trust (‘the temenos, the analytic vessel, the mother-child symbiosis’) love, friendship, analysis, parenting and marriage/partnering. [25]Holmes 1998; Sandler and Dreher 1996. [26]I am grateful to James Grotstein for sending me the ‘addendum’ he wrote to his 1989 paper. In it, he encapsulates the family resemblance between friendship and psychoanalysis in the telling phrase, ‘the friendship of psychoanalytic intersubjectivity’. That is the context and the method, but it can also be seen as the aim: ‘a major analytic goal is to get the patient to become friends with the previously unacceptable parts of himself’ (Sandler and Sandler 1983, quoted in Sandler and Sandler 1984: 368-9). [27]Hence Bion’s statement that ‘Models are expendable; theories are not’ (1990: 16; see also Bion 1962). [28]Sandler 1983. [29]Quoted in Rangell (1963: 5). This shift of perspective on friendship mirrors the shift from Freud’s drive-instinct theory to the object-relations emphasis on the centrality of relationships in development and in psychotherapy. [30]See, for example, Acker, Barry and Esseveld 1981; Bologh 1990; Daly 1979, 1984; Faderman 1985; Ferguson 1984; Gouldner and Symonds Strong 1987; Hey 1997; Hunt 1991; O’Connor 1992; Raymond 1986, 1990; Smith-Rosenberg 1975; Stansell 1976; Wood 1995. [31]Hinshelwood 1991; James 1994. There is a delightful counter-blast to the centuries-old emphasis on male friendships in The Dictionary of Feminist Theory (Humm 1995), where friendship is defined as ‘A form of women’s emotional bonding’. The entry points out that ‘The historical phenomenon of long-lived intimate loving friendships between two women is the focus of much feminist history and historiographical studies have helped revise androcentric versions of women’s contribution to history.’ [32]As I wrote this paragraph, I found myself musing on other relationships that might be included in the ‘containing’ family - such as teacher, priest, wise woman/man, parent, elder - and was shocked to realise first how important this whole class of relationships has always been for the maintenance of social bonds and, second, that they could also be seen as constituting a class of relationships that has either disappeared, been devalued or is under attack from all directions. [33]Bion 1962. [34]See Dehing 1994. [35] Winnicott’s (and, to a lesser extent, Bion’s) easy and virtually unquestioning emphasis in the role of the mother clearly belongs to a different age, both ideologically and in terms of social reality. In the context of present social conditions and arrangements, it might be more helpful to talk in terms of ‘maternal’ and ‘paternal’ elements to parenting than to ‘mother’ and ‘father’. We really do not know to what extent the mother is not only biologically adapted to feed her infant but also uniquely disposed to understand and respond to her/him in other ways - as Winnicott suggested when he stated that a baby can be ‘held’ perfectly, ‘and it often is, since mothers know just how to do it’ (Winnicott, 1988: 119). There is enough evidencs of psychic change among those growing up in our ‘fatherless society’ for the phenomenon to have been given a name: ‘vagina man’ (Mitchell 1998; Limentani 1989). [36]’the mother holds the infant, sometimes physically, and all the time figuratively’ (Winnicott 1960: 145). [37]I am grateful to Lee Hoinacki, close friend of Ivan Illich, who introduced me to the word hexis for the first time, when he wrote that ‘the concept hexis might be close to the way Illich would characterize friendship - i.e. in distinction from "process".’ (Letter November, 1994.) I am also grateful to Thomas Johansen of Bristol University Classics Department for his help with understanding what Aristotle meant by hexis. [38]Exact figures are hard to come by. They depend on how one calculates the size of families and the number of slaves and foreigners. A more reliable ‘statistic’, which brings home the contrast with the modern world, concerns geography or territory. There seems to be some agreement that for a state to be of the right physical proportions, one should be able to cross it on foot from one border to the other in a single day’s walk. (See Kitto 1951: 65-66.) [39]See French 1997. [40]Blake 1972 ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’. He also wrote (though I cannot locate the source of the quotation): I looked for my Soul; my Soul I could not find. I looked for my God; my God I could not see. I looked for my Friend - and then I found all three. [41]Emerson 1976: 109. [42]Kant’s theme was maturity - Mündigkeit - and its vicissitudes. He began his famous and influential treatise, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, by asking what it was that kept people in a state of Unmündigkeit - i.e. immaturity and irresponsibility, usually translated as ‘tutelage’. For a discussion of Mündigkeit and Unmündigkeit, see French and Thomas (forthcoming). [43]It is important, however, not to caricature young children’s friendships. Anna Freud (1962: 350) described evidence as early as the nursery school of what I am calling ‘maturity’ in relation to friendship: ‘the fourth stage, when the other child is valued, not only as a playmate but as a person in his own right: somebody to be loved, hated, admired, competed with, chosen for friendship. ... What is interesting to me is that you can no more make a child in stage two, where other children are treated as toys, behave like the child in stage three or four than you can do the opposite.’ [44]The tensions between flattery and frankness of speech and their impact on friendship were key themes for the Ancients (Fitzgerald 1996); e.g. Themistius (4th century A.D.): ‘For a friend is nowhere near a flatterer, and is furthest removed in this, that the one praises everything, while the other would not go along with you when you are erring’ (quoted in Konstan 1996: 16-17). In his later years, Michel Foucault became interested in just these issues. As Miller (1993: 328) puts it - in terms that explicitly pick up themes from the Symposium: ‘’For the first time in his life, "friendship" became one of his explicit concerns. On more than one occasion, in interviews and composed texts, he returned to the theoretical possibility that two people, in spite of differences in age, status, and calling, might nevertheless be able to bridge the gaps between them through a reinvented "art" of friendship. By speaking frankly with someone who was neither a sycophant nor a coward, neither a lover nor a student, one might expand the reach of one’s feelings, and test the value of one’s own opinions, in the process confiding a part of who one was to the care of another.’ (See also Foucault 1989 and 1990, where his idea of friendship as a ‘mode of life’ or ‘way of life’ is very close to the concept of hexis.) I am grateful to Christopher Grey for pointing out the Miller quotation to me. [45] Buber, quoted by Friedman (1992: 189); c.f. God’s message to the church in Laodicea: ‘since you are neither hot nor cold, but only lukeward, I will spit you out of my mouth’ (Revelation 3: 14-16). [46]Cayley 1992: 91. [47]Morris 1987. ‘Individuality’ is a ‘fact’ in both the new and the original meanings of the word. The new one is clear: a fact is a fact. The original meaning is exactly the opposite: the Latin factum means ‘made up’, as in ‘factory’ - a place where things are made. (See Bohm 1983: 41-46.) [48]Britton 1989. [49]Winnicott 1989: 76-77. [50]Winnicott believed that ‘on the basis of playing is built the whole of man’s experiential existence’ (1974: 75). It is, therefore, not surprising that he identified it as the key mechanism not only for the development of the capacity to be alone (1958), but also for the ‘work’ of analysis (1974: 44), and for the development of friendships in childhood (1964: 144-145). (For a feminist perspective on play, see Abrams 1997.) [51]The symposium metaphor of crossing bridges is a useful way into this aspect of friendship - although it does mean a slightly wild digression into word derivations, based on questionin the experience of being on the bank before crossing the bridge. The Latin for ‘bank’ is ripa (French rive). So, originally, ‘rivals’ were simply those who lived on the opposite bank of the stream (rivus). But of course, as long as ‘they’ are ‘on the other bank’, we can split something off from inside ourselves, whether hated or desired and see it in our ‘rivals’ who are ‘opposite’. (In German there used to be a slang phrase for homosexual - now both derogatory and objectionable - which was ‘from the other bank’.) Actual events can, however, take such projection in different directions. If we stay on our own bank or meet in the middle of the stream, we are likely really to remain rivals for its resources. On the other hand, if we actually make it over the bridge to the other bank - ad ripam: à la rive: arrive - the experience may bring us face-to-face with our projections. It may be projection and transference that first bring people together, but friendship can only be ‘real’ if work is done on precisely those aspects of relatedness which the relationship highlights. [52]Aelred 1977; McGuire 1988, 1994. [53]Chastel 1954; Hankins 1990; Kristeller 1964, 1990; Moore 1982; Trinkaus 1986. [54]Cayley 1992. [55]See Althoff 1996; c.f. Douglass Roby (Introduction to Aelred 1977: 5) - ‘It was the custom of the first feudal age that sons of good family should receive at least a part of their training in the homes of other members of the upper class. This custom of fosterage was designed both to train the young in the manners appropriate to their station and also to provide the links of acquaintance and friendship which were so vital to the exercise of power and responsibility.’ The modern-day equivalent still exists (in the UK, at least) in terms of choice of school and university. [56]Arendt 1959; O’Loughlin 1978; Swanson 1992. [57]Stryjan 1989. [58]Aristotle 1985: 208; friendship, in Fraisse’s view has become a ‘problème perdu’ partly because we have lost sight of the ancient view that it ‘has political value’ Fraisse 1974: 168-9. [59]’L’unité du groupe ne tient nullement à la structure précise d’une institution mais aux liens d’amitié et aux préoccupations communes’ [The unity of the group did not depend in any way on the well-defined structure of an institution but rather on the ties of friendship and on their shared interests’] (Chastel 1954: 7). [60]Hillman 1973; Sphinx 6 1994. [61]see French and Thomas forthcoming [62]Especially via the influence of Ficino on John Colet, Dean of St Paul’s and founder of St Paul’s School, which became the model for English schools for several centuries (Gleason 1989; Jayne 1963; Miles 1962). [63]Conversation: ‘the practice and consummation of friendship’ (Emerson 1876: 88). [64]Hadot 1995: 89. [65]I am very grateful to the Rev. Dr. John Newton for his help in understanding the history of the Methodist Church and the importance of friendship in its theology and organizational structure. [66]’The matrix is the hypothetical web of communication and relationship in a given group. It is the common shared ground which ultimately determines the meaning and significance of all events and upon which all communications verbal and non verbal rest.’ (Foulkes 1964, quoted in Roberts 1993: 92-93) [67] Freire 1972: 60. [68] Aristotle 1985, Books 8 & 9; Blum 1980; Bolotin 1979; Stern-Gillett; 1995; Wilson 1995. [69]See Hillman 1964. 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