The changing face of organisational life

Organisations have become increasingly complex. They are no longer closed but open systems having to interface and interrelate with other systems and continuously subject to environmental changes. They have less control over their working environment and what they do. There is a constant threat of restructuring, closure and redundancy. What was once familiar and known may no longer be so - power and authority is no longer clearly identifiable. Information technology and the internet are eroding personal relationships. Work is no longer viewed as a source of identity or a means of self-validation. Professionals find it difficult to adhere to their own values and ways of working. They are pushed to their limits personally, in their role and by the organisation. Organisations, like other institutions within our society no longer act as containers of anxiety or meet needs for dependency or reparation (Miller). These changes have led to an increase in anxiety, leaving many feeling insecure, vulnerable and preoccupied with their own survival.

Accounts of group dynamic processes tend to describe destructive processes and present a rather negative view of organisations. They are experienced as persecuting entities where psychotic thinking, paranoia and feelings of annihilation are common place. Members may feel dehumanised, lose their sense of self and identity, and become the object of attack. This in itself can make it particularly difficult to function, to take on roles or even to reflect on the nature of the task. The question may be one simply of survival. Bion (1961) always regarded the relationship between the individual and the group (organisation) as highly problematic. " The individual is a group animal at war, not simply with the group but with himself for being a group animal and with those aspects of his personality that constitute his groupishness." This view underlines his theory of basic assumptions in which he suggests that the work group gets caught up in a level of emotionality and unconscious processes which takes it away from the task and reality. Turquet, De Mare, Kreeger point similarly to regressive and psychotic processes that are experienced in large groups.

Jacques (although he has now reneged on his position) and Menzies Lythe describe how organisations establish social defenses (routinisation of procedures) to contain the anxiety generated by the work. Hirschhorn, Kernberg and others have written about the tendency towards splitting, projection, projective identification, collusion, scapegoating, denial and idealisation in organisations, attempts to contain these anxieties. Jacques, more recently, in attempting to differentiate between structural features of organisations and individual psychology and psychopathology that induces malfunctioning, makes a distinction between what he calls "requisite" and "paranoiagenic" organisations. The former are structurally sound, authority and accountability are matched and there are the right number of people for the right task at the right time. These are organisations with a functional administrative structure and "people relate to one another with confidence and rule out suspicion and mistrust." Paranoiagenic organisations are those where "it is impossible for individuals to have normal relationships of confidence and trust. Therefore social interactions ...arouse suspicion, envy, hostile rivalry and anxiety and put a break on human relationships regardless of how much good will there is." This may be due to a breakdown in the task system of the organisation, scarcity of resources, politicizing, unclear authority structures or faulty leadership. The above presents a somewhat pessimistic view of the nature of organisational life but of course groups and organisations can and do work through and resolve some of these difficulties, reaching a higher level of understanding, integration, creativity and learning.

``Me-ness"

A second trend is a growing concern with the "self". This has been described by Lash in his book the "Culture of Narcissism" in which he describes the growing preoccupation with the "self "as opposed to the "other" - hence the growth of counselling services and psychotherapy. There is less sense of community and a lack of desire to engage with either group, social or organisational life. Indeed narcissistic disorders have now become one of the more common clinical conditions. (Lawrence, Bain & Gould) maintain that there is an increased preoccupation with "me-ness" which they see as a new cultural phenomena, a fourth basic assumption, BAM(basic assumption me-ness) underpinning individual action. They write about the "individual retreating from a persecutory environment into himself", of "losing faith and trust in any structure whether good or bad that is greater than the individual.", and of a resistance "to differentiate roles and authority in order to work on the task, . so BAM culture takes the form of withdrawal and passive aggression. . There is a mental absence in the group and members take up a spectator's role." As Lawrence suggests "it is better to be in a state of ignorance than to have to engage in either co-operative or conflictual relationships. " The implication of these somewhat narcissistic if not schizoid responses makes it very difficult for organisations to meet the challenges demanded of them. Analogies have also been made with Steiner's concept of the "psychic retreat" which, used in a metaphorical sense, suggest that organisations as well as their members may adopt a form of "psychic retreat" withdrawing into themselves to contain the psychotic and anxiety provoking feelings induced by the tenuousness of organisational life. The retreat, unlike Winnicott's transitonal space provides no opportunity for working through - it is something cut off and dissociated and only when the individual disengages from the "retreat" is there a possibility of reparative work.

This increased sense of vulnerability and reluctance to engage with organisational life, and by that I mean being able to engage with the task, roles and appropriate relationships were also highlighted for me in a series of workshops on Professional Dilemmas at Work which are mini two and a half day conferences based on the extended Harold Bridger Working Conference. Participants included psychologists, social workers, psychotherapists, group analysts as well as management consultants and managers. The purpose of running these programmes at the Institute of Group Analysis which is a clinical training Institute was to enable group analysts who worked in or with organisations to further their understanding and experience of working in the organisational context. The design provided a variety of learning situations which enabled participants to experience the dynamics of an institution, both conscious and unconscious in different settings and also an opportunity to relate learning directly to current work and life issues. We found that members feared taking on leadership, testing boundaries, using their authority, being visible, envied, taking responsibility and being accountable. There was a wish to avoid differences and differentiation and a tendency to engage in basic assumption "as if" behaviour (Bion) to avoid engaging with the work. Several of the members reported feeling confused, persecuted, scapegoated and impotent in their own organisations and said that they were now working in different contexts in which they had less control. New values, behaviours, ways of thinking and acting were required which created anxiety, resentment and paranoia. There was also concern about how to manage career, work role as well as personal and family life. This is evident in the case material to follow.

My role of the consultant

Having to work with organisations has necessitated a shift in my orientation from working as a group analyst and being mainly concerned with individual and group

dynamic processes, to holding an organisation in mind, its task, roles and reflecting on the tensions induced by the task on both the individual and the group. The case material reflects this transition. The aim is to understand where the client is coming from and to be able to empathise with him and work in the most appropriate way. This implies not only using group analytical but also psychoanalytical and systemic ideas as well different frames of reference and holding different types of questions in mind to clarify what is going on. As a colleague once said " depending on which torch and where you shine it, you will see different things." (Palmer. The consultation provides an " illusionary" or "transitional space " (Winnicott) in which new patterns of behaviour can be learnt and old ones unlearnt in the process of having to deal with the realities of every day life. It also helps clarify "the me and not me" - or as Rice suggests the boundaries between self and role as well as providing a container (Bion) for projective processes and anxiety. At the same time, the purpose of the organisation and relationships between members has to be continuously reviewed - the double task (Bridger)

Some of the Foulkesian ideas are useful namely seeing the individual and organisation in terms of figure and ground Behaviour is understood in terms of the context or the group matrix, a hypothetical construct consisting of thoughts, feelings and actions that are part of the dynamic history of the group or organisation (organisational matrix). The group is also analysed in terms of family dynamics in which Oedipal relationships are played out. Communication and analysis takes place at different levels - in the here and now, the transference, the projective and primordial level.

More recently I have been thinking about questions of knowledge, authority and control. If we think of anxiety as being related to three domains, the individual personality, his role, and relationship to the organisation, we can hypothesise that anxiety and uncertainty will be heightened at the boundary at which the individual feels out of control or does not understand. My aim would be to help the client review, reassess and push boundaries further so that more knowledge and control is made available to help raise the level of tolerance for the individual/group as well as increasing understanding of the complexities of what is going on. This also entails a shift from working at a latent or unconscious level to a conscious level in order to question existing assumptions about the nature of work, practice, strategy and control. These ideas link up with those of Boxer who suggests that there is a "ceiling" below which things are known but above which there are secrets which are held as if within the family." The task of the consultant may be to help raise the level of the "ceiling" and in so doing to widen the client's understanding and control of organisational processes. Boxer relates this idea to different types of organisational control which I discuss later in the paper. To illustrate:

I was recently working with the Chief Executive of a National Health Service Trust and his team as well as the managers of the various hospital directorates -pathology, psychiatry, surgery orthopaedics etc. The Chief Executive said he was frustrated by the manager's inability to be creative and proactive, to manage budgets and meet deadlines. He said they did not speak up at executive meetings. The managers felt that the executive Team would undermine and infantalise them, doing things behind their back. They said they were not trusted and were not given enough information to enable them to make decisions. They said they did not have a sense of the whole ( constant changes made this a near impossibility) and wanted to have more influence in the decision making process. They were effectively asking for the "ceiling" to be raised.

The Case Material

The vignettes are examples of three organisations which operated as a group of colleagues or friends who found it very difficult to engage with the tasks and roles that were required of them. Each tended to see themselves as a "family" which created a high level of dependency. They had been "traumatised " and responded by acting out and repeating behaviour that made it difficult for the organisation to develop in a coherent and consistent way. (I am using the term " traumatised " in a very lose and non clinical sense.) The respective consultations enabled the organisations to shift from being relatively "closed" to open systems, attentive to internal organisational demands as well as to those from the external environment. The implications of a change in a working context are also discussed.

Front family to organisation - the psychotherapy association

Kets De Vries has written about the impact of family dynamics on family businesses and ( Spero) on healthy and dysfunctional organisations . Small organisations or those based on friendship ,often replicate family dynamics with members taking on different familial roles. There are inadequate structures, roles and procedures. Sibling rivalry is rife, members become the object of projections, secrets and collusion resulting in splitting. Psychopathology and neurotic behaviour may be played out and unless worked through, will impede the functioning of the organisation. The case material illustrates the difficulties of separation and individuation (Mahler) as well as the rivalry between the staff

I was asked to help a psychotherapy institute clarify its task and roles. My client was quite explicit about what she wanted. Having carried out a series of interview I made recommendations, which although agreed to, were not put into practice. I was then asked to continue working with the staff as there were difficulties between them. We met monthly initially and then every two weeks for one hour an a half over a period of 18months.

They were friends - a married couple, three men and a woman. All had been trained in "Tans", a regressive form of therapy (three were psychologists and one an art therapist coming from the USA and Europe). They had met in Rome where they had been trained by X the founder of "Tam" who proved to be a sham, cheat and womaniser - they told me that they had been encouraged to go out with their patients - it was seen to be part of the therapy. They felt very ashamed and said "that his house (the Institute), in a very affluent street in Rome was a facade...there was nothing inside." They told me that it had been raided and closed down by the police. However X was at the same time idealised by the group - the two women would say...."he would always have time for us....he was like the ideal father". They had felt honoured to be part of his "family" and to have been chosen as staff, and yet they were also very disillusioned.

They decided to come to England to set up their own organisation and training institute. The "family" was re-created. The married couple took on the role of mother and father, organising and managing the running of the new Institute, the rest rivalrous and squabbling, acted out Oedipal conflicts. Sam the married man, considered as the founder's "crown prince" was envied by the three men. The therapy based on "the abused child within" used regressive techniques which involved working on pillows on the floor and having physical contact with clients. The behaviour of the staff was highly sexualised, if not psychotic. I was told that two of the staff had had an affair, another with one of his patients and another was currently having an affair with the au pair of the married couple . (Little Oedipus trying to get into the parental bed.) I began to see the organisation as a dysfunctional "abused" family mirroring the relationships of the original Institute with the staff acting out their own psycho-pathology. There were constant fights and the various alliances between them blurred boundaries and cut across the marital relationship. Tom, the "the deprived child" in the group would attempt to sabotage any work that was done. He would obstruct decisions, turn up late to meetings and leave early which would infuriate the rest of the staff. His narcissistic behaviour dominated many of the sessions and in my counter transference I would feel his rage and intrusiveness . Whatever interventions I made would be rebuffed. He would tell me that I was picking on him all the time. The same destructive patterns of behaviour would be repeated week after week. I saw him as the container for aggressive feelings in the group and realised that in many respects I was being used as a "family therapist" to sort out their relationships. They persistently avoided working on any organisational issues.

However in time Tom's destructive behaviour began to diminish and roles and functions began to be differentiated. As an organisation it could no longer remain inward looking and a closed system. It had to face external pressures and reality issues. Client and student numbers had diminished. There were financial constraints. Questions were raised as to whether the Institute should be a training institute or simply a therapy centre. Pressures were exerted to upgrade the training programme to meet the standards of the UKCP - the UK registering body for psychotherapists. There was a need to promote the Institute. This meant creating . clear vision of what they were doing and who they were as well as identifying a market. The staff decided to run a series of lectures in the local library and to start publishing their work.

The founder, envious of their "success" in the UK began to make legal claims against them for usurping his ideas . They took appropriate legal advice. Their task was now very explicit In response to external pressure, the organisation and staff had become far more professional. Each now had a psychoanalyst as supervisor and had decided to enrol in a different psychoanalytic -psychotherapeutic training. There was a need to separate and individuate, to develop their own identities as part of their own developmental process. They began to develop their own therapeutic styles, skills and identity and in so doing were able to separate from and mourn their founder.

Staff relationships shifted from being based on friendships to working relationships where roles were more clearly defined. Sam became Director but only after the group were willing to symbolically "kill off" the founder of the movement. There were several sessions exploring their feelings of guilt as well as remorse which enabled them to eventually authorise Sam's position. They had indeed begun to think and act very differently and to respond to the demands that were now being placed upon them. They had transformed, not only their body of skills and knowledge but also their way of organising and had finally engaged with the organisation.

Reflecting on my own role, I realised that I had colluded with the staff by being drawn into analysing their relationships and the group process. I had recently qualified as a group analyst and was more concerned with process than task. and essentially needed to shift in my orientation and practice. However perhaps the case material also suggests that the separation/individuation process - the need to differentiate before being able to integrate in order to work as an organisation, was facilitated by having a more analytical position.

The therapeutic community - group or organisation

The following vignette illustrates how the idealisation of a therapeutic community and its ways of working, left the organisation unable to think of itself as an open system and to adapt to the new demands and crises that it faced. Klein saw idealisation as a defense against the destructive instincts in which there is a split between the good (ever ready, inexhaustible maternal breast) and bad object whose persecutory traits are just as extreme. In this case the community was seen as the good mother, the bad parts having been split off making it very difficult to accept the reality of what was happening.. The case material illustrates how these split off parts began to be reincorporated enabling the community to deal with organisational issues that needed to be faced.

For the past nine months I have been running an away day for a therapeutic community PAC which meets every three months. This is the only time that all the staff met together (night and day staffs and was seen as an opportunity for staff to reflect on feelings and working relationships. There were 24 staff at our first meeting and the numbers have since dropped to 15. The director had taken a years leave to have a baby. The day had historically been run as a large group to reflect on group processes and was divided into three sessions. I decided to continue with that design initially.

PAC was established some 30 years ago and is one of the very few remaining therapeutic communities in which the overriding ethos is to use the full potential of both staff and residents to create an environment conducive to personal development. Residents are encouraged to have a say in the day to day running of the community. Prior to starting, I asked to meet with the consultant who was about to take maternity leave to find out a little more about PAC but was told that she did not feel it was necessary. I have since tried to attend a visitors day and this has not been agreed to. Other than being given a handbook and an article about PAC written by the director, I know very little about the administrative structure of the organisation and its relationship with the Hospital Trust and Local Health Authority other than what I gleaned from the sessions with the staff.

1 was struck by the fact that several of the staff had been with the community for over 10 years and many for three years which in my experience seemed to be a long time. I realised that the community was seen as a family by many of the staff meeting their dependency needs and as a source of reparation to heal their own pain as is so often the case in mental health institutions. As the senior registrar commented "it was often difficult to differentiate between the staff and the residents" in this respect. However several of the staff had left the organisation during the summer - the director, the senior nurse manager and my predecessor who had facilitated the away day for the past five years.

On the first away day three more staff announced that they would be leaving later in the year. After a long silence they spoke about the death of a patient that had happened three weeks earlier. The staff involved said that they had not discussed it with anyone other than having a 30 minute debriefing session with the new Director who from what was said, appeared to be more concerned that correct procedures had been followed than with the feelings of the staff. Although the patient had died from natural causes, the staff said they felt guilty and incompetent. Another resident was threatening suicide and another cutting her wrists. It was too frightening to talk about the violence. The group was very silent and felt very uncomfortable. Things would be said and not responded to or someone would be attacked. I was told that the group was always like this . They said they felt parent less, abandoned and un-cared for. The director brought a dream in which she feared that no one would turn up to the away day - this was her first large group. I felt she was expressing her aggressive feelings towards the staff and was finding it very difficult to think or to understand what was happening. In the last session of the day, one of the nurses questioned whether the community was doing the right thing saying that "we idealise PAC too much. No one ever questions what we are doing." She said that PAC was not outward looking nor practical enough. There were not enough referrals and it was becoming difficult to fill beds. The previous director, T. was told had played a more active part making links with the external community. The new director said very little. It was as if the group was leaderless. However she did acknowledge that she had felt anxious about her new appointment and also said that she had been well looked after by the staff. Who was caring for whom? The group felt very unsafe. Was the staff group the container for the organisation or the organisation the container for the staff? It was not clear.

Reflecting on the day, I realised that the large group, like the community was idealised and used as a support/therapy group " to care for the staff" and was perhaps not dissimilar to the large group that they ran for their patients.

I was unclear as to how this away day fitted in with the objectives of the organisation. In a telephone conversation with the director I suggested that we met together prior to each meeting to discuss her role and any problems she may have in relation to the management structure as well as to the staff. I had effectively negotiated a new contract for myself and was also aware that I might be changing the culture. We met in a small room adjacent to the large group room but she preferred to use the time to fill me in on what had happened. She told me that management was making decisions without including her. The large group followed and the staff were very angry that we had had a "secret" meeting. " "Had we been talking about them... everything that needs to be said should be said in the group" said a nurse." I explained why we had decided to meet and then asked several questions. What was the purpose of the away day - how did it relate to the objectives of PAC? What was PAC's task? I received an angry response saying that "if we ask those sort of questions things would have to change. " The nurse concerned seemed quite paranoid. The group was furious with me and had echoes of Jacques paranoiagenic organisation. The intervention, however enabled members to reflect later that the community was in fact too inward looking - there was not enough patient flow and relationships with the psychiatric unit in the main hospital were likewise poor. Responding to the question of the task, they were unsure as to whether their role was to provide therapy or social skills. No one had asked this before. The question posed a dilemma because it became clear that the nurses were more interested in practicing psycho- therapy and developing their own skills in the area than they were in thinking about the needs of the residents or the task of the organisation . (Me-ness?) The objective of getting residents back into the community did not seem to be particularly of concern. In fact the director said that she was reluctant for anyone to leave (for numbers to be reduced ) as funding would be cut.

There were more reports of violent incidents during the night, which left the night nurses feeling terrified. There were fewer staff on night duty and these tended to be the least experienced and most vulnerable of the nurses. They felt isolated and not part of the community. The nurse involved said she could not speak about what had happened as she said it would be like reliving the trauma. These events were beginning to have an impact on the residents . They no longer wanted to stay over on weekends and were becoming anxious and more agitated during the nights. Management had agreed to reorganise rotas but nothing has been done. It became clear that the night nurses were holding all the violent and destructive feelings for the community, the split off parts which the day staff, as I pointed out were not interested in addressing.

Prior to our next meeting, I once again agreed to meet with the director, but this time she decided not to meet in a separate room "because of what had happened last time" so we met in the large group room - and of course staff came in so we could not talk. However she did tell me that two residents had committed suicide in the past three weeks. The meeting commenced with the staff saying that the place was falling apart, it was not safe, they were doing something wrong - there were not enough staff. They were furious with the second suicide - he had killed himself just before their away day - "he knew what he was doing - he was getting back at us. "

They were very distressed. After a long silence the conversation shifted to organisational issues - "what were they supposed to be doing why had there been two suicides - are we doing something wrong...we don't know when patients are ready to leave we are accepting forensic patients we have no boundaries its no wonder the residents do not feel safe." This was to open up the whole discussion and the group began to reflect on what their task was and to raise questions as to whether psychotherapy was appropriate for patients on heavy medication "perhaps they needed to do more socio-therapy where was the management in all of this where was our director in this Lit has felt less safe since our previous director left she was far more directive"and so the comments went on. It seemed to me as if I had taken over the management role -one member of staff saw me as the "saviour" of the community. ( The director, after the away day, later told me that she recognised that she lacked authority in herself and was sorry she had not explored that with me.) She was about to leave the PAC and seemed disengaged.

The staff now began to realise that they needed to review the work of this idealised community. Was it such a "good mother "after all? Their client base had changed and they began to question what they were doing, their task, and roles and how much authority and power they had? Questions were raised about their relationships with other parts of the hospital trust and community, as well as the need for clearer structures and procedures. " If they had a clearer structure and felt safer" they said, "then the residents would feel safe". It seemed to me that the staff group were beginning to challenge the assumptions on which PAC was organised and to question the nature of their practice.. what they were doing, why, how and for whom ? The community was no longer enmeshed in the defensive dynamics of idealisation but was beginning to reconsider the reality of their daily lives and to reengage with the organisation. The nature of the Away Day had changed from one preoccupied with process to one that reflected on task and process - the double task. My contract therefore needs to be re-negotiated with the new director. Perhaps my way of working will not be what is desired as it will mean continuing questioning the assumptions on which PAC is based.

Leadership and Authority

The following vignette illustrates how difficulties with personal authority and sibling rivalry impeded a small organisation from restructuring and reviewing its task. Psychotherapy and counselling organisations are well known for their difficulty in dealing with hierarchical issues, questions of authority and leadership. There is a wish to deny difference and an assumption of equality and that we are all the same. Clearly this is not the case. Many have been organised along collective lines in which there is a joint decision making process, everyone has "equal authority" to avoid hierarchical differences. Concerns about envy, jealousy, rivalry and difference can thus be denied. Obholzer differentiates between authority that is given by the organisation and authority in oneself illustrating how persecutory relationships with past authority figures can be re-enacted in the organisational setting, impairing individual effectiveness and functioning. The individual is unable to take up the authority delegated to him/her by the organisation. This will be illustrated in the case material. I feel that this whole area of personal authority and discretion has become increasingly important as the structure and nature of organisational authority and power has become less clear. In order to deal with risks and uncertainty, management are faced with using their own authority and discretion, making themselves more vulnerable on the one hand -perhaps subject to failure, shame and loss of self esteem, and on the other hand giving them greater opportunity to use their own creativity and ingenuity. The working conference referred to at the beginning of the paper also points to the personal fears and difficulties in taking up authority.

Maribel, a centre to promote the rights of women, was about to move premises. It had developed a very successful counselling service of which Anne was co-ordinator She requested a consultation with me saying that she feared that her colleague, Mary the founder of the organisation would take over the accommodation and use the grant money they had received to her own advantage. We explored the context and in the process I began to realise that the organisation had very little structure. Roles and boundaries were not clear and nor was the organisational task. Maribel did not have a director. Anne was very distressed. I arranged to meet with the founder of the organisation and the rest of the staff to review and discuss the situation and to brief them on my earlier meeting. Mary described how she had set up the organisation and her anxieties that the counselling service now had a higher profile than her own activities. She spoke of her difficulties of working with Anne. There were no reporting lines. Anne said that she could not tolerate the idea of Mary being her line manager. They were colleagues and friends and she saw no need for things to be changed. They always made decisions together. Mary said that she didn't want to manage Anne although she realised that if she were Director she would be better placed to raise funds. Several times she told me that Anne was very large and she would feel engulfed by her. She said that I was small like her. It was not appropriate to make any interpretation but just to hold this information in mind. However she said she did not wish to see herself as Director and then went on to reveal that she had been the care taker in her family. Her mother had been ill during most of her childhood and it felt like directorship would mean taking care of everyone again. In response Anne said she had had a very intrusive mother who was always on her back and that she couldn't handle authority. Indeed she became increasingly envious and attacking towards me - I realised that I was being experienced as the persecuting and intrusive mother. My efforts to help both women to focus on the needs of the organisation were continuously thwarted by their own paranoia. No decisions were made. Four months later, I received the annual report which was divided into two - the counselling services and the umbrella organisation, each signed by the two women who had elevated themselves to managers.

I was then asked to put forward proposals for funding my Consultancy! In my report I laid out once again the need to restructure and to appoint a director. I heard nothing. Six months later I was asked to attend a further meeting - they had now moved to new premises. It turned out that Anne's husband owned the property to which they had moved. Nothing had changed between the two women. There had not been any restructuring. Boundaries were still an issue. Anne had raised £30,000 and wanted to use the money just for her counselling services. There was no central financial function or responsibility for this role. Each woman did as they pleased. The two women were still in a state of impasse.

To date the Management Committee (MC) had not been involved in any of our thinking. I was aware of this absence and assumed that if the MC was to be more involved, Mary's and Anne's control would be undermined. Anne would experience this as an intrusion. A meeting was arranged with Anne and Mary, the Chair and a Member of the MC. Anne then said that they would have to decide whether they wanted to work with me. Having spent two hours travelling up from London, I pointed out that that was the very reason that I was there - we continued with the work. I once again emphasised that Maribel needed to clarify its task and structure and to appoint a director which was accepted by the Chair. The Chair went on to say that it was important to fit any new structure and roles around the personalities of the current staff rather than to think in terms of functional roles. Mary and Anne then announced that they wanted to work part time. They both feared that they would lose control and be subject to too much interference by the MC. The reality was that the MC was very ambivalent and had no sense of purpose or mission. They had "just let Mary get on with it." Once again no decisions were made - agreement could not be reached. The question of power and authority, it seemed could not be dealt with and at any level. Six months later I received a letter from Mary saying that she was now Director - by default. She had applied for lottery funding and had had to sign herself as director . Anne had become Clinical Director ....the same but different. The pain of taking on these roles had been extraordinary. I later heard that both were working in a part time capacity, pursuing other interests and balancing their lives more satisfactorily. Their rivalry and paranoid phantasies had led to an impasse within the organisation. Change was experienced as an intrusive and abusive act. It was only after 18months and four interventions that Maribel was able to re-structure.

Working in a new context

Changes in knowledge, practice and the working context can create anxiety and feelings of dissonance. Lawrence suggests that when realities are challenged and experience no longer fits with existing thought and practice this could be experienced as chaos and considered as a shift in working paradigm.

Many more professionals find themselves working in organisational contexts in which their control and autonomy has diminished. This has been equated with a process of de-professionalisation. ( Turner). Palmer, writing about psychologists in the NHS points to different modes of organisational strategy and control. These are: a. professional - when the psychologist is able to control his relationship with his client and the nature of the work - the psychologist can to a certain point determine his relationship with the NHS, b. positional - when the NHS, a third party dictates what the task is and how it should be done and the psychologist is restricted in how he can respond to the client's needs, and c. relational when there is an exchange between the institution and the client system in trying to identify the nature of the demand. As Palmer suggests this latter relationship is more akin to the professional relationship in terms of being open to client needs. Each position challenges the existing assumptions of thinking, practice and organising - perhaps the paradigm shift that Lawrence is talking about. Anxiety is increased, organisational life becomes more complex. In Boxer's words the "ceiling is raised"

As an example, the relationship of PAC and the NHS had radically altered over the past few years leaving the community less autonomous and more accountable to the NHS Trust. The Trust and Local Health Authority are more directive. This is evident in the increased "mass of paper work" the anxiety about "following the right procedures". PAC's budget has been cut reducing staffing and flexibility. These restrictions have impinged in particular on staff training resulting in rivalry and competition to share the small allocation of funding. The Local Health Authority has more say in the selection of new patients - PAC is increasingly being seen as a place of last resort hence the growth in numbers of forensic cases which does not fit in with its ethos. Relationships with the local psychiatric services have deteriorated and the Community feel less well supported - all of which suggests that there has been a shift in the nature of power and control, a shift from professional control to positional control. This raises fundamental questions about the Community and its work.

The Psychotherapy Institute also illustrates how a change in context can challenge existing assumptions on which ideas and practice are based. I am not only thinking of the shift in the therapist's practice from Tam to psychodynamic therapy but also in the shift of having to think "organisation". Similar comments are relevant to the staff of Maribel and can also be addressed to psychotherapists / psychoanalysts / group analysts wanting to work in the organisational setting. Clinical training is aimed at the development of professional identity based on a specific body of knowledge and skills at both a conscious and unconscious level. The work is focused inwards on inter and intra psychic processes and on the development of the self or ego, whereas in the organisational setting, the focus shifts to how psychic o. group processes are affected by the nature of task, roles and relationships. Bion clearly illustrates this position in his theory of basic assumptions. Eisold makes the point that one of the reasons that analysts have difficulties working with organisations is that primary identification during training is always with the training analyst and supervisor as opposed to the Institution. Bollas suggests that psychoanalysts/psychotherapists are trained to used their counter-transference in a particular way. Having to work in a new environment creates a different set of demands and tensions, necessitating new ways of thinking and acting. This was also apparent in the Professional Dilemmas workshops where psychotherapists and group analysts had greater difficulty engaging with the task compared to those in management or Consultancy positions.

The following is a further example of working in a new context; I am currently mentoring several senior executives in a pensions and insurance company in the UK. Over the past three years substantial numbers of non company people have been recruited. A year ago, when the organisation became a PLC, ethos and culture began to change. From being a mutual society, a non profit organisation, in which staff and members were taken care of, it is now profit and business orientated. My client the head actuary and his subordinate, commented on how traditional ways of thinking and acting were being questioned. They had to liase with the project manager responsible for the implementation of the new IT systems who like them was concerned about the nature of the risk. His notion of business risk was diametrically opposed to that of the actuaries. He saw it in terms of operationalising the systems in time whereas the actuaries defined the risk in terms of actuarial risk. (The lawyers would see this in terms of legal risk.) It became clear to me that they were both using two different discursive practices and that to avoid this incongruence, the actuaries, beginning to feel quite disillusioned had began to think of opting out and setting up as independent consultants

Conclusions

I have attempted to explore some of the difficulties experienced by groups and organisations in engaging and in organisational life. The case material represents the diversity of some of these experiences. I have tried to show from a group as opposed to an individual perspective that what is going on at a dynamic level can either impede or facilitate an organisation's ability to function as an organisation. In particular family dynamics, defensive behaviour and unresolved Oedipal conflicts tend to get in the way. The more complex the organisation, the greater the level of personal anxiety, and the greater the likelihood of an organisation getting stuck into a particular pattern of defensive behaviour. There is a need to work through these behaviours and perhaps to enter into another discursive practice and raise the "ceiling" so that more can be known and feelings of anxiety diminished. In addition an organisation needs to review and assess what it is doing, how, why and for whom - namely to question the existing assumptions on which thinking, acting and organising are based.

References

Bion W. Experiences in Groups, Tavistock Publications, 1951

Boxer P and Wensley R., Performative Organisation: Learning to Design or Designing to Learn - unpublished paper 1996

Bridger H., Courses and Working Conferences on Transitional Learning in Trist E. & Murray H. The Social Engagement of Social Sciences, Vol 1, The Social Psychological Perspective, Free Associations, 1990 London

De Mare Koinonia, Karnac Books, London 1991

Eisold K, "The Intolerance of Diversity in Psychoanalytic Institutes", International Journal of Psychoanalysis 75, 785-80O, 1994

Foukes, SH. An Introduciton to Group Analytical Psychotherapy, Maresfeld Publications 1948

Hirschhorn L, The Workplace Within, Psychodynamics of Organisational Life, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachuesetts, 1988

Hirschhorn, L., Reworking Authority: Leading and Following in he Post-Modern Organisation, MIT Press, 1997

Jaques, E., Social Systems as a Defence against Persecutory and Depressive Anxiety, in New Directions in Psycho-Analysis, ed. K. Klein, et al New York Basic Books, 1955

Jacques, E., A General Theory of Bureaucracy, New York, Halstead, 1976

Lasch C., The Culture of Narcissism, New York, Norton, 1978

Lawrence W G., Centring on the Sphinx - ISPSO 1997

Lawrence W.G, Bain A and Gould, The Fifth Basic Assumption, Free Associations, Vol 6, Part 1, 1996

Klein, M, "A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic Depressive States" International Journal of Psycho-Anal. 16: 145-74, 1935

Kreeger 1, The Large Group, Dynamics and Therapy, Constable, London 1975

Krets De Vries, M., Family Business, International Thomson Business Press, 1966

Menzies Lyth I. Containing Anxiety in Institutions, Free Associations 1988

Miller E. From Dependency to Autonomy - Studies in Organisations and Change - Free Associations 1993

Mahler,M. On Human Symbiosis and the Vicissitudes of Individuation New York, International Universities Press, 1968

Nitsun M., The Anti Group - Destructive Forces in Groups and their Creative Potential, RKP, London 1996

Obholzer A. & Roberts V, The Unconscious at Work., Routledge, 1994

Palmer B. The Tavistock Paradigm: Inside, Outside and Beyond in Institutions, Anxieties and Defence, ed Hinshelwood R and Chiesa M, (to be published)

Rice, A.K, Individual, Intergroup and Group Process in The Social Engagement of Social Science, Ibid

Spero M, Healthy Organisations, paper presented at the Southbank University Conference 1994

Spero M., Die Matrix im Setting von Organisationen, Gruppenanalyse Vol2, 1992

Steiner J., Psychic Retreats, Routledge, 1993

Turquet P.M. "Leadership, the Individual and the Group" in Kreeger (ibid)

Winnicott D.M., Playing and Reality, London, Tavistock Publications, 1971