This paper will consider the nature of identificatory dynamics and their accompanying emotional experiences for members within a team. I will argue that, compared with other ‘looser’ forms of a psychological group, a team relies more heavily on identifications between members to achieve a task. But this is most specifically a partial identification where members retain their own specific role identities whilst understanding and relating to the roles and tasks of other team members. This is done through a capacity to: a) be in the presence of the other team members (Long, Newton & Dalgleish, forthcoming), b) internalise the other members, and c) refer to and negotiate with the internalised team members when forming judgements. I will suggest that when teamwork is most successful, members are able to internalise the ‘other’ members, particularly, although not excusively, in terms of their work roles. In addition, members internalise the ‘team’ itself. These internalised others and team-as-a-whole act as continuous reference points for teamwork judgements and actions. The accompanying emotions will be quite complex because the internalisation of the other is not a simple ‘idea’ of the other. It involves an internalisation of many of the emotional experiences of the other. Work with the ‘internal team’ requires reference not only to how one might think ‘as if’ in other team members’ roles, but also how one feels and may be impelled to act.

During successful teamwork, there are many occasions when reference to others in person is not possible. Communication takes on subtle forms and members rely heavily on their ‘internalised team’. At other times, members are able to verify, challenge, re-shape and renew their internalised team. Successful teamwork requires attention to team dynamics so that the members’ internal teams are reality based.

Teamwork becomes less successful when members are unable to engage partial identifications based on realistic internalisation processes. Sometimes a kind of ‘full and immediate’ identification with others may occur, so that one’s own role identity is lost and the team cannot operate with complex and sophisticated role divisions. This happens in basic assumption experience (Bion, 1961) and is driven by angers, fears and anxieties. Also, often linked to this, members may internalise phantasy others based on projective identifications poorly mediated by reality. Such dynamics may be due to intense emotional experiences, the incapacity of members to realistically internalise the team, or the inability of the team members to renew their ‘internal teams’ in light of changed circumstances.

The paper will develop an argument around these ideas. Reference will be made to case material from working teams.

Introduction

In the last 30 years or more, a lot has been written about the development of teams in work organisations. Considered first as a focussed and effective way of working where members can co-operate in achieving a task, teams are increasingly regarded as a structural solution for organisations insofar as they may replace several layers of hierarchy and achieve flatter organisational structure. The hope is that this will improve communication and accountability. Semi-autonomous teams, together with project management, are nowadays regarded by many as a superior organisational form over older forms of cumbersome layers of bureaucracy. They achieve, it is hoped, a kind of ‘mini-business unit’ structure with the attendant advantages of mobility, flexibility and independence. As well as achieving task focus, this allows them more readily to be ‘consumer’ as well as producer units within a broader organisation: a distinct advantage in the new consumer dominated culture of organisational life (Long, 1999a).

Despite this focus on teams, plus the process-consultancy industry that has grow up around teamwork through educating and training people at all levels to be ‘team players’, little is still understood about the unconscious processes in teams. Bion (1961) wrote largely about less structured groups, as have most of the psychodynamic writers following him. Of those who consider teams from a psychodynamic perspective, Hirschhorn (1991) writes of the ‘new team environment’, where he discusses the need for collaboration, but in exploring the unconscious dynamics tends to translate mainly from the work on group culture (i.e., basic assumptions) and group defence mechanisms. Stokes (1994) also considers multi-disciplinary teams in a health care setting, again emphasising collaboration and the particular dynamics of the sophisticated work group. Whilst this literature has much to offer, understanding the specific dynamics of teams requires further exploration.

What then is the specific nature of a team and how are the team members related to one another? This paper argues that effective and satisfying teamwork relies upon a certain complex and specific psychological capacity of team members, viz. to creatively work with other team members and the team-as-a-whole as creative internalised objects. When this capacity is not exercised or cannot be achieved, then teamwork is impaired. To build my argument:

(i) an examination of the nature of work is required. I will argue here that the essence of psychic work involves transformative and representative processes that engage the psyche with reality. Given that work organisations are ‘ideas in the mind’ for working with products and services (Lawrence, 1999) then organisational work can also be described in this way, viz. As a process involving transformation and representation which engages the psyche with reality;

(ii) an exploration of the nature of teams as a special form of group is necessary; and,

(iii) the complex dynamic of work with internal objects must be articulated and illustrated from research examples.

I will endeavour to address each of these areas.

Work and the group

Before looking specifically at teams, I will review some thinking about groups and the nature of work within groups. Lawrence (1999) suggests that organisations are no longer necessarily the containers of work, that work extends beyond the boundaries of particular organisations in the non-specific environment which includes new containers such as cyberspace. The group, more than ever then, has to be seen in terms of its psychic space Schlachet, (1986) rather than in terms of a concretely defined organisation.

1. Identification

Following traditional psycho-analytic thinking, this section will argue that the basic ‘glue’ for groups is identification and the primary (partial) identificatory process for work group members is through a common task.

The psychoanalytic group literature from Freud, through Bion to current socio-analytic formulations often centres on the problem of how it is that group members collectively work to achieve a task. Freud’s seminal definition of a primary group, that is, a group with a leader, is centred on identification: ‘ a primary group of this kind is a number of individuals who have put one and the same object in the place of their ego ideal and have consequently identified themselves with one another in their ego.’ (Freud, 1921, p.147, Vol. 12, Penguin Freud). I have previously described some implications of this definition (Long, 1992; 1999b). In brief, we can say that identification is the primary ‘glue’ of a group. It is what holds members together. There is a person (the symbolic leader) or idea that is collectively valued and held in esteem. This, through identification, becomes an internalised ideal. Different group members feel identified with one another because of this collective internalised ideal. They recognise a certain ‘sameness’ amongst themselves that ties them together and brings with it some feelings of loyalty and solidarity. Such emotions are not developed in isolation. One doesn’t simply manufacture trust or loyalty. They are the outcome, initially, of a perceived similarity which can then be tested. Once established, however, trust and loyalty can be shaken. Although they may initially be established through a perceived point of similarity, they are sustained and developed only through an ongoing mutual testing out. This occurs during interactions in reality.

Some social psychologists have demonstrated that people don’t even have to meet others whom they believe to have similar ideals to feel identified with those others (Turner et.al., 1987). Finding their names, together with such others on the same list is enough to begin the process if that list represents a point in common. Further they are likely to describe those others as more similar to themselves, even with respect to characteristics completely unknown or seemingly irrelevant to the initial point of identification. This has implications for those who find themselves communicating across the internet, for instance. Bion’s notion of valency is relevant. It is a kind of immediate, spontaneous falling into an identification.

Of course the strength of ties within a group is variable, and people have identificatory ties with many groups, some of which may present contradictions. Nonetheless, for a group at any one time, it is the identifications among members, or what is more properly described as partial identifications that provide the foundation for collective work together. Bion (1961) described a group in terms of its members having a common task. His exploration of basic assumptions points to an unconscious and implicit task held by members: a collective task of defending the group from an enemy, for instance, or to give obeisance to a god-like leader. He compared the dynamics of such assumption groups to those of the work group whose task, however specified, is explicit and tied more to reality than to phantasy; linked to the process of science rather than magic. In this, Bion links work to reality testing and the scientific method of gaining knowledge. That is, not simply a ‘working with thoughts and emotions’ but a ‘working through’ of thoughts and emotions. One can say that for Bion, the ‘task’ replaces Freud’s ‘leader’ as the object taken in place of the ego-ideal. Or, at least, the task provides the legitimacy for the leader.

2. The Nature of Work

If the workgroup is held together by members identification with a task, this leads to a question about the nature of work. I argue here that work is a transformative and representative process that also involves sublimation of affect and engagement with reality. Without these features, what appears to be work is rather a process of conforming to actions or processes that maintain a status quo or make translations in phantasy alone. This latter is not work but repetition or distortion (Freud, 1914). It may involve some physical or mental effort, but I am distinguishing this from work.

Take as an example, the task of writing a report on a prisoner undertaken by a prison officer working as a case manager in a prison unit. Writing an incident report in a case file requires the case manager to transform the various pieces of information that he has into a meaningful report. This may require making judgements about what is good or poor information. It may require reconciliation of differing pieces of evidence. It will require checking information, talking with different people (including the prisoner and others involved) and deciding what occurred in reality. If, instead of this process, the case manager decides simply to repeat the account of just one of many sources of information then his labour is not real work. Or, if he decides to ‘fill in the gaps’ with what he assumes happened rather than checking it out, or with what he wishes happened, then the result is laborious distortion.

Thus, on the one hand, the first way of approaching the task involves the transformation of information, hunches and observations. It involves the representation of a multitude of thoughts and feelings surrounding the issue and it involves several reality checks. The case manager must become engaged in a process first of suspending judgements whilst checking on facts, and then applying judgements after having gathered as much information as possible. This process of suspension followed by application of judgement is transformative. Personal feelings about the situation are held in abeyance or considered as hunches – sublimated, if you will, into a form of curiosity. This is the condition for ‘evenly suspended attention’.

On the other hand, the second way of approaching the task involves avoidance. Perhaps it is dangerous or anxiety provoking to question the account of a fellow officer or superior. So the inquiry goes no further. The prisoners own account may be easily dismissed (he’s a trouble-maker) or too readily accepted, according to how he or she is generally viewed. Such avoidance is not easily overcome, even when detected.

Nonetheless, avoidance of this kind may be overcome in what psycho-analysis describes as ‘working through’. Here transformation can occur, and reality (including emotional reality) is engaged rather than avoided. The process of working through is, I believe, akin to the process of suspending and applying judgement at critical points in the engagement of reality. It involves self-understanding and the development of symbolisation in contrast to an acting out of primitive impulses (O’Shaughnessy, 1988).

Psychoanalysis has always regarded ‘work’ as an important life motive. But what do we mean by work? And how is it linked to the group task as described by Bion? In the Freudian texts work is discussed primarily in terms of ‘work of the intellect’. Although we can distinguish between physical and intellectual work, the collective work of a group or organisation must be seen primarily in terms of the ideas and the emotions of the members. There is an idea to create a product or perform a service, to carry out a manoeuvre or a ministry. Also there are feelings about what is created. Here I distinguish work from simple ‘labour’. Psychic work is that of transformation and representation. The instincts and emotions are given meaning and a place in personal history. Thought emerges from action and its suspension.

There is a transformation that takes place. For instance, Freud traced how work is done unconsciously in the formation of dreams and symptoms, as well as consciously in the processes of ‘working-through’, where situations and issues are faced realistically and their implications examined; and where emotional experiences are re-experienced (perhaps in the transference) and new responses found. Lacan (1977) linked this work to linguistic processes, demonstrating how the unconscious processes of condensation and displacement are psychically equivalent to the linguistic processes of metaphor and metonomy. And, Bion traced the transformations (through container/contained) of emotional experience in his theory of thinking from primitive alpha and beta elements to scientific hypotheses and mathematical formulations.

So, in psycho-analytic formulations, psychic work is inextricably linked to the subject and its attempts to transform emotional experience. So too is organisational work transformative. Open systems theory emphasises this when work is understood as a process whereby inputs are transformed into outputs (Miller, 1993). Organisational work occurs when ideas and experiences are represented and transformed largely into services and products.

Work as sublimation and engagement with reality.

There is a difficulty in seeing work simply as transformation, however. Psychic work also involves an attempt to reconcile this transformation to an often painful reality. Reiff (1979) for example, understands Freud’s view of the world as reconciliatory and that this is the basis of Freudian morality. He says, ‘It is exhilarating yet terrifying to read Freud as a moralist, to see how compelling can be the judgement of a man who never preaches, leads us nowhere, assures us of nothing except perhaps that, having learned from him, the burden of misery we must find the strength to carry will be somewhat lighter’ (p.xi).

In his comments ‘Thoughts for the time about war and death’ (Freud, 1915) Freud considers civilisation as a true transformation of the instincts. He contrasts this to forms of society which, whilst appearing to be civilised, on closer analysis appear as surface phenomena. Although psychic work may be rational, it may also be a rationalisation. There may be a kind of transformation ‘work?’ for the pleasure principle as much as for the reality principle. Hence what is seemingly civilised may yet be based on quite uncivilised motives. Freud saw the disillusionment brought on by the Great War as the result of an inability to distinguish between the truly civilised (a society built on sublimation) and the superficially civilised (a society built on compliance). This failure to distinguish was due to a failure to question motives. Many Europeans had hoped that the so-called civilised world would not experience such an atrocious war. Freud tries to understand why what had seemed to be civilised was just a veneer; a compliance in order to serve a selfish phantasy. Much like the veneer of work described earlier, when a case manager might report an incident without clearly checking the circumstances, so the veneer of civilisation might be based on a dynamic of avoidance. In the case of the Great War, Freud suggests some of the avoidance was avoidance of the emotional reality of unconscious destructive impulses.

Such a distinction is necessary for understanding work. Two forms of work are implicit, just as Freud saw two forms of civilisation: that is, a true sublimation or transformation in the service of the reality principle, and work that is but a shadow of this, where transformation is in the service of phantasy alone. I am calling this distortion rather than work. This distinction is one that Bion draws on in comparing his ‘work’ and ‘basic assumption’ groups. Basic assumption groups distort reality. This is a distinction often not made when considering the nature of work predominantly in terms of ‘added-value’. Is the ‘added value’ a real development or a transformation in phantasy only? Certainly the ‘added value’ of the speculative processes that marked the 1980’s proved to be no real work.

The other aspect of work is that of representation. Work is a social process even when seemingly performed by a single individual. Much as ‘mind’ is a social process. Individual minds represent something of the wider psyche. Individual thinkers transform the thoughts that are present in the culture. So individual work represents a broader task. The conscious division of labour in work organisations is represented in organisational charts and job descriptions. Each unit of this division represents something of the whole. The unconscious division of work into a system of roles, constantly negotiated at slightly shifting boundaries, represents the tasks of the organisation in a different way, including the emotional tasks of the organisation. Work both represents and is represented in organisation structures and dynamics. This is the nature of the process of representation. It flows across boundaries.

In short, as I said in my introduction, I argue here that the essence of psychic work involves transformative and representative processes that engage the psyche with reality. Given that work organisations are ‘ideas in the mind’ for working with products and services, then organisational work can also be described in this way.

Teams and work

I want to suggest here that a team is a special form of primary group. First it is a most organised form of group insofar as roles within a team are usually highly differentiated. Whereas undifferentiated group members identify generally with one another on the basis of their identification with the leader or the task as ideal, and may take on specialised roles during the development of the group, team members identify with particular specialised aspects of the task from the onset of the team’s operations. Specific team roles are identified. For example, a surgical team will have an anaesthetist, a surgeon, an orderly, surgical nurses and other relevant technicians. A football team will have various roles according to the game’s rules and a management team might have managers accountable for particular organisational functions or projects. Such specialised roles are normally part of the team’s definition, even though this might change over time.

Second, because of its more specialised organisation, team members have a heightened sense of their own role in relation to the roles of other team members. To play a role within a team requires the role holder to have a strong sense of the operation of the team as a whole. You have to know how the special tasks of your role interact with the tasks of other team members so that the team works as a whole on a common task. I think this means that team members have to have a good sense of what it is that the other team members do. In this way, the work of team members must be clearly engaged with a collective reality, where each team member understands not only his or her own work role, but also that of others.

This leads to a third point about work teams. Because members must have a good sense of what it is that their fellow team members do and how they each work to effect transformations, they must move from a position of role narcissism to a position of role centredness. Myself and two colleagues, Jane Chapman and John Newton (1999) first defined these terms. They identified some aspects of work roles observed in a project involving work role analysis. What we found was that many people saw their role as the single most important role in the organisation without which the organisation would cease to function effectively. It was this attitude that we termed ‘role narcissism’ and which gave role holders a kind of single-mindedness in negotiating the conditions and boundaries of their tasks on a daily basis. Yet in order to interact collaboratively with others, this narcissistic attitude had to be tempered. Role dialogue, that is, dialogue between people in roles rather than interpersonal dialogue between persons, could take place when role holders became centred in their roles, seeing the need for interaction between roles rather than seeing their own roles as paramount. The import of this for teams is that the energy invested in one’s own role becomes sublimated from a more directly narcissistic energy into a commonly shared team energy. It describes a kind of ‘dynamic of altruism’ which is built on narcissism but which involves sublimation.

The internal dynamics of teams

I think that well functioning teams achieve this through a particular identificatory process. Each member seems able to internalise a version of his or her fellow team members and then to draw on this internal object during teamwork. This is done through three linked capacities. (i) The first is the capacity to be in the presence of the other team members (Long, Newton & Dalgleish, forthcoming). This might seem to be easily done. But it is a difficult process because there are many anxieties that prevent us from really being in the presence of others. More often we live and act in the presence of ‘fantastic’others who are vehicles for our projections and are distorted by our desires. We see in the other what we want to see, or what we fear to see. The more we can work with the reality of other team members and what it is that their role requires of them, the more the team as a whole will engage reality and hence be able to work.

(ii) The second capacity is the ability to internalise the other team members. As with a group, the identification with others, through the task, is an important aspect of this. The internalisation of other team members is, however, more specific. General identification is not enough. The other must be understood in more detail. Differences between members become as important as similarities. A differentiated and individuated other must first be recognised. Team members may be internalised not simply as a generalised group member through partial identification, but also as a distinctly recognised individual – an individual member of the team rather than a membership individual, to use Turquet’s (1975) term.

(iii) The third capacity is to be able to refer to and negotiate with the internalised team members when forming judgements.

These ideas first came to me when I was working on an action research project with two others. This project was involved with examining the nature of case management within a correctional services organisation. Most field aspects of the research would involve at least two members of this team working together at a particular organisational location. There would be ongoing opportunities to confer about issues that required interpretation or making decisions about interventions. Also, the three of us would have regular meetings where we discussed the ongoing data, the dynamics of the project and our own experiences.

The work we did together involved our attempts to transform the ideas present in the organisation through analysis, interpretation and a working through of the emotional experiences present in us, yet of the organisation (Armstrong, 1996). It also involved working directly with the realities of people in the organisation. This joint work led to a close understanding of each other, in role, as well as a more general understanding of each other as people. We came to see each other’s valencies for particular types of experiences. For example, throughout the project one of us tended to feel fearful, another sickened and the third somewhat voyeristic. Whereas this led both to a deeper understanding of the emotional dynamics present in prisons because we were introjecting these feelings from the system, and to a deeper understanding of how people react when experiencing in each of these ways, it also led to a deeper understanding of each other in our researcher roles. Thus we were learning, a) about the emotions and reactions present in the work system that we were studying through our own work with our projective identifications, and b) about each other in the role of researcher. I came to know my fellow researchers particular ways of thinking about the issues.

This became most evident to me at a time when one of the team was away from Australia and the other was unavailable due to other work commitments. I had to make some decisions but had none from my team with whom to confer. I was project leader and there was no problem about my having the authority to make the decisions required, but I felt rather isolated. Quite automatically I found myself thinking through the issues the way I had found John would, and then the way Jane might. It wasn’t that I consciously thought, ‘what would John be saying here?’ and ‘how would Jane be approaching this?’ It was far more like having an internal conversation with my internal John and Jane. What’s more, I felt myself making internal adjustments so that I would feel myself in postures - both mental and physical - that were those of my colleagues. I literally ‘caught myself in the act’ of doing this and realised the extent to which I was drawing on my internal John and Jane. I was then able to do this deliberately and after the ‘conversation’ was able to make my decisions.

Later, it struck me that this was a good description of how teams might work. The literature on teams often refers to the need for good communication between clearly distinguished and authorised roles. But I think what I am describing goes beyond that. There are a few distinct points to be made.

1. First the question, what is an internal object? Simply, it is the representation or image of an ‘other’, felt, in phantasy, to reside and live within oneself. When members are able to internalise the other they are able to draw on a living representation of the other, not simply a memory or a cognitive representation. By this I mean that it is not a static image or idea that is internalised. The internal object is dynamic and alive. (This may challenge the analytic idea that the unconscious is always timeless and unchanging. Whereas that may be true of the repressed unconscious, and Freud was dealing with the repressed unconscious, it is not necessarily true of all internal objects, aspects of which may not be conscious. There is no room in this paper for this debate but it is a debate worth examining). Nonetheless, I do think that creative processes draw on living and developing internal objects. My internal team-mates were able to engage in a discussion and even able to change their position throughout the discussion as it developed. During this I was able to either stand back as they had this discussion, or engage with them in it. Although this sounds quite strange, it is the liveliness of internal objects that is at the basis of creative imagination. This quality of being alive is due, I believe, to the identification I was able to have with my internal team-mates. It is a phenomenological quality akin to that described by Winnicott (1971) as belonging to the transitional object. The child’s teddy bear.

2. Of course the internal object must also be subject to change, renewal or transformation in the face of reality. For instance, I discussed my experience with the others later and told them how I had drawn on my internal John and Jane. I checked out, in reality, their current thoughts and hence we again, as a team, had each a chance to modify our internal team. They saw how the views of my internal objects might well have been theirs had they been there to consult at the time. This is neither to say that they would have said exactly the same to me, nor that they would not have had other views to add. Moreover, the whole situation had moved on and none could possibly say what they might have said anyway.

But this checking out allowed for further modification. One can say then, that the internal team members, whilst living and changing internally, according to their own inherent dynamics, are also regularly modified through contact with the reality of other team members. At least it is through the reality checking and modification, that the internal team remains creative and effective in the real world of work.

3. The living internal team members provide the real external team members with ongoing support and interaction when direct contact is not possible. The crucial importance of the internal team members was that I had been able to work with more confidence and with a greater range of ideas than if I had acted as if I were by myself and not part of a team at the time of making my decisions. I didn’t feel I was on my own. This was particularly noted because the other members were not available during a critical time for the project.

4. However, there are situations where team members are in fact together, yet direct contact or discussion is broken or not possible during part of the team-work. During these times, it is as if the members internalise the team-as-a-whole as well as the individual team members. This is evident in the following quotes taken from psychiatric nurses who work as part of a team in an adolescent in-patient facility. They were discussing ‘restraints’, that is, the process whereby a patient has to be restrained because he or she is acting dangerously. The need for a restraint may emerge quite suddenly under tense and erratic circumstances. There is no time for discussion. Action must occur as quickly as possible.

Teamwork is especially important during restraints. You feel safer when you are with a teammate you know. One of you goes in first to do the main restraint. There’s no real decison about this. It’s kind of automatic. Whoever goes in first will be backed-up. The other person just stands back a bit and then helps.

But a restraint should be a last resort. You should be trying to de-escalate the situation; calm them down. There may be two of you and you have to sense the need to work together, either to talk them down or restrain.

The situation was tense and I didn’t want to disturb him even more - there was no back-up; no-one within call. It’s harder to work with agency staff that you don’t really know. You never know how they will react. They’d support you but you can’t actually sense how, and there’s not time to exchange views.

Well, all the time you’re making serious decisions like whether to let a kid go on extended leave when they might self-harm or even suicide. Life and death decisions. No wonder it’s stressful. If you’ve got a good mini-team then you can argue out the decision and they’re there to back you when its made.

In these circumstances the nursing staff must act with confidence and calm in a highly emotional setting. They rely on each other and rely on their own judgement that the other will work in role. In working with these nurses as a consultant to a staff support group, I get a strong sense of their each having internalised the team-as-a-whole as well as the individual members. There certainly is labour involved in the nursing task. However, I am here referring to their work. In this instance, if the restraint is appropriate, the work transforms an anxiety ridden and dangerous situation into one that is safer and more emotionally contained. The work was able to occur because team members worked on the basis of their capacity to internalise the team and work automatically from that internal object.

5. I have stressed the dynamics of identification throughout this paper, but here I want to pause in this emphasis. It seems to me that an internal object – person, team or even institution – may be related to the self or other internal objects in a variety of ways. I may identify with the internalised person, that is, I may want to ‘be like’ them. Or I may want to distinguish myself from them, wanting to be quite unlike them. Also I may love them ‘want to possess them’, hate them, want to dominate them, be dominated and so on. The internal object may inspire as rich an emotional response as any person in my external world. The issue for teams is whether the team becomes internalised through identification or through some other kind of relation, say libidinal (i.e., love /hate). When the internalisation is through identification with the task, do then the team members work more effectively than if members internalise each other via libidinal ties?

Impediments to teamwork

If what I have been saying is valid, then we must think about the limitations on the successful and creative use of an internal team. First, there is the problem of team size and stability. Let me speak by way of analogy. Part of my role as an academic involves me in supervising the research of doctoral students. I find that I can successfully keep up to around ten in mind for any sustained period of time – enough say to aid them toward successful completion of their degree. Beyond this number something less than satisfactory occurs. I cannot keep them in mind in a way that allows me to be as actively helpful. Consciously, too many projects means that some start to get forgotten. The detail required in order to think about the research, its conceptualisation, its analysis and implications is no longer present. Too many projects means that my mind is not preoccupied with some at an unconscious level. The occasional creative though here and there does not appear in relation to some. There is a limit on the capacity to internalise a number of ‘living research projects’.

The issue of size and number is relevant to the capacity to internalise the team. It may be that beyond a certain size, perhaps the size of a small group (say 10-12 members) the capacity to internalise each of the members in a distinct way is reduced. The staff on the inpatient unit note that communication between team members was disturbed when the team size doubled. Also, when there is a large turnover of staff with many changes, the sense of trust, clear communication and team-work is diminished. It takes time for people to get to know one another.

Another impediment to team work is more subtle. Sometimes a kind of ‘full and immediate’ identification with others may occur, so that one’s own role identity is lost and the team cannot operate with complex and sophisticated role divisions. This happens in basic assumption experience (Bion, 1961) and is driven by angers, fears and anxieties. Examples of basic assumption behaviour are well described in the literature. I suppose a devastating example of such full and immediate identification was to be seen in the Jonestown tragedy or in cults of all kinds. The distinct symptom of the dynamic is the lack of differentiation between most members.

Another impediment to teamwork that may occur when members internalise phantasy others based on projective identifications that are poorly mediated by reality. Such dynamics may involve the incapacity of members to realistically internalise the team due to intense emotional experiences, or the inability of the team members to renew their ‘internal teams’ in light of changed circumstances. This may be due to the influence of powerful archaic internal objects formed during infancy or during traumatic periods of personal history. Such archaic internal objects may be transferred to new internalised team-mates in inappropriate ways. At the national level this was seen during the recent Timor circumstances. It was as if Australians had internalised a USA that would always be there for them when they called for help. This internal USA must have influenced many an Australian government’s policies and decisions. The hesitation in the response from the US over the intervention in Timor was quite a shock. The internal US in the Australian psyche (if you can talk of such a thing) seemed not to fit with reality. The internalised Australian / USA team playing on a world stage seemed suddenly to have evaporated. An adjustment seemed necessary to this internal object in the national psyche.

In organisational life, such a dynamic is seen when team members do not understanding the role of other team members and hence cannot draw on an internal image of that role when performing their own tasks. A senior university administrator had no real understanding how one of her reports had taken up her role. Consequently, she continued to make judgements and decisions in her own work that cut across those of her report. This influenced decisions about courses and subjects and had strong effects on the relations between her report and students. This in turn led to feelings of resentment and anger that further reduced the chance of mutual understanding from developing. In the long run, hostilities interfered with any sense of wanting to develop collaborative work. Each became a hostile and negative internal object for the other.

The key to successful teamwork involves the establishment of those conditions where members can understand and internalise the roles of other team members vis a vis the common task. A helpful consultant can provide mutative interpretations to aid this process. These are the interpretations and interventions that allow team members to change their archaic internal objects in the light of current realities.

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