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Susan Long (Ph.D.)
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Order and Discourse What sort of list is this? What is the order of reality or of experience inherent? 'These are a few of my favourite things', sings
Julie Andrews, inviting us to understand the basis of this collection
of seemingly disparate objects. Presumably, the meaning of each is associated
with some important and pleasant experience of the character who sings
the song. From our modern psychologically minded position, we might
say that each is an internal object. We might even call them internal
part-objects: 'whiskers on kittens', and each has something of the sense
of a transistional object (Winnicott, 1971) with its own sensual quality,
and, on hearing the rest of the song we realise that they are internal
objects with a purpose. They are brought to mind in situations of some
anxiety: 'when the dog bites; when the bee stings.' They form a category
of comforters. All told, the song enunciates the Sound of Music theory
of 'thinking of favourite things as a defence against anxiety', and
this theory is promulgated to the children in the stage show and advocated
as a practice or exemplar, perhaps to us all. In the preface to his book 'The Order of Things', Foucault writes: This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought .....This passage quotes a 'certain Chinese encyclopaedia' in which is written that 'animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous,
(g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (I) frenzied,
(j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et
cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long
way off look like flies'. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing
we apprehend in one great leap.....is.....the stark impossibility of
thinking that. This is a working paper or paper in progress. I am trying to examine issues that have preoccupied me over many years and that centre on what I think psychoanalysis is and how I apply its ideas, methods and practices to my work with groups and organisations. You could say that I want to examine the ordering of experience that is psychoanalysis: something that I can do only in a modest way here. I want to move from some of the ideas that I have worked with to where my thinking is now, talking about how I conceptualised psychoanalysis along the way. I don't really want to centre on an autobiography of my own thinking, although in some sense this is inevitable. What I do want to trace are the various orders of thought that I have come across and how I arrived at my current perspective. State-of-Mind A major idea that has informed my thinking and practice is that of 'state-of-mind'. This may seem like a cognitive concept but what I mean by it is a socio-emotional-cognitive state. That's about the closest I can get to it. A socio-emotional-cognitive state. Melanie Klein described two such basic states - the paranoid-schizoid and the depressive. Bion (1961)talked of collective states of mind when he described work and basic assumption groups. The idea of a group culture is linked to the dominant presence of one state of mind or another. A hallmark of this idea is that different states of mind are discontinuous with one another. The work I did with groups in the 80's explored the various states of mind present in self study groups as they proceeded (Long, 1992a). I found that although there might be a developmental pattern, groups tend to move through a series of discontinuous states. I also found that these group states-of-mind could be understood as the conscious counterparts of unconscious identificatory dynamics existing in the group-that-was joined - a term I gave to the group present before members are able to make the group their own (and perhaps present in some form always: a living presence of history). My method of research was heavily dependent on working with transference and countertransference in the groups as well as using interpretation and working hypotheses guided by psychoanalytic theory. The place that I have arrived at, at least the place that I want to explore in this paper, involves considering psychoanalysis, its theory and its practices, as a discourse precisely aimed at studying subjectivity particularly as it is organised into states-of-mind (socio-emotional-cognitive states). Moreover, I understand psychoanalysis, as part of its practise, to cultivate and employ a state of mind (or a combination of states of mind) as a tool from which to work: a state-of-mind peculiarly able to work with and study the subjective states of mind of others. Such a state of mind is not unchanging, nor does it work in isolation but couples with the state-of-mind of the other in order to arrive at analytic truth. Symington (1986, p.18-19) points out that the work of analysis occurs between the analyst and patient: 'truth is grasped in dialogue with another ... it emerges in between ... and in the moment of understanding there is a change in both.' The pre-conceptions of both parties are dissolved and the analytic truth can emerge. In a sense then, it is not a static state-of-mind that the analyst employs but a kind of potentiality for creating a state-of-mind in between. Winnicott (1971) captures this notion in his concept of potential space. Nor is it a clearly articulate state-of-mind. Marion Milner (1988) expresses something of what I mean when she says in talking of of her work with a schizophrenic patient (p.xxii) 'I was to discover that the essence of some of the states of mind I wished to take into account was their indeterminacy, their ineffability even; they were beyond the reach of words used logically and discursively.' She later says (p.xxx) 'certainly one of the main practical things that I learnt from her was to do with the variations and fluctuations in the depths of the way I attended to what she said: that is, how deeply the emergence of some of the most primitive levels of psychic and body-ego experiences in the patient can depend on the body-ego perceptions in the analyst.' To describe how I arrived at thinking about psychoanalysis in this way, I'll need to start with some of the ideas and arguments that I have written about previously (Long, 1992a; 1992b & 1993). In one article (1993), I looked at Freud's theory of the formation of symptoms in the psychoneuroses and the analogous formation of symptoms in organisations. This strand of thought is, of course, that followed by those who examine social defenses against anxiety. I wanted to pursue the idea of organisational symptoms by returning myself to Freud's 1926 work on 'Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety' and reading this from the retrospective stances both of Kleinian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. At least my understanding of these two perspectives was in my mind at the time. A crucial part of my argument was based on Freud's idea of compromise formation where 'the symptom formation scores a triumph if it succeeds in combining the prohibition with satisfaction so that what was originally a defensive command or prohibition acquires the significance of a satisfaction as well' (Freud, 1926, p.267). For Freud, the organisation of the ego, through a modification of its defensive function in the face of anxieties that cannot simply be fought or fled from, allows for the formation of a symbolic code, for example the code of a symptom or a dream. The code, unconsciously present, enables the establishment of the symptom of say, an animal phobia or an organisational ritual. The symptoms represent both desire and the defense against desire. The code itself is created through processes of limitation, inhibition and constraint. I argued (following Freud, Levi-Strauss, Lacan and Wilden) that cultural information, itself registered as rules (a rule being information about information) is encoded unconsciously in the structure and dynamics of organisations. Cultural analysis might be seen as recovering the unconscious rules - a decoding of information - through an understanding of the code as discovered in the organisation members experiences: an interpretative process achieved through the window of experience, which will mean utilising the tools that psychoanalysis provides for exploring emotional experience: a primary tool being the state-of-mind of the analyst or the psychoanalytically informed organisational consultant. Flowing from this primacy are those capacities to engage the patient or organisation and to provide an appropriate environment so that something might emerge in the potential space in between. At that time, I was looking at the idea of causation, ie., of symptoms and organisational behaviour, in terms of limitations, inhibitions and constraints rather than in terms of determinism. I felt clear that psychoanalysis was not a positivist science where x causes y in a predictable or even probabalistic fashion. Nor that the psyche could be explained in terms of biological mechanisms, which seemed to me reductionist. That is, I did not believe that efficient or material causations were correct or useful models. I was more of the mind that formal or systemic models were appropriate. I saw the processes and structures described by psychoanalysis as emergent from an unconscious symbolic code, itself made possible by the limitations (boundaries), inhibitions (repressive tendencies of a social establishment or an established mind in an individual) and constraints (posed by the emergent organisation of the code on itself in a reflexive manner) proper to human symbolic functioning, as exhibited, for example, in language (Jackobsen and Halle, 1956; de Saussure, 1959). Linguistic determination is not of the efficient kind. 'Phonological, semantic and syntactic rules operate as constraints on the organization of the process of signification in the code. These rules do not determine what I say, but they do place constraints upon my linguistic productions, in a way that allows meaning to emerge.' (Long, 1993, p.170). In the organisation of the mind, such an (unconscious) symbolic code arises from the boundaries, inhibitions and constraints surrounding the development of a capacity to think one's emotional experience. Bion describes this in his theory of thinking and in the relationship of container to contained. In organisations, the boundaries, inhibitions and constraints, both within and between people, create the conditions for a symbolic cultural code. This is explored in group relations conferences. Around that time, I thought of psychoanalysis as distinct from science because I thought of it as having a different object from science. Science, I argued, regarded human beings from the vantage of their consititution as material objects. Biology, physiology, neurology all studied the human as object. Psychology, I already had decided was not really a unified science in any sense. It seemed an amalgam of many of the biological and social sciences surrounding human beings and was held together more by its relations to external institutions, such as universities, health departments, behavioural research units, education and the law, than through any sort of internal conceptual, theoretical or practical dependencies. I saw psychoanalysis as studying humans as subjects. I thought one of the aims of psychoanalytic enquiry was understanding the emergence of subjectivity through experience, and through the organisation of subjectivity within the social field. My work with groups (1992a) had led me to a view that the human subject emerges from transindividual processes within groups, particularly located around identification and the engagement of symbolic social process. The organisational task of the ego, I saw as an attempt to unify the multiple emergent selves derived from one's place or roles within a variety of groups - many of which are in the family (and I mean by this that - following Bion -several psychological groups are present within one set of individuals). This organisational task (of the ego) is difficult, if not impossible, and the ego has often to project its fragments into a imaginary whole, as described by Lacan in his idea of the mirror stage, or which might emerge as an (imaginary) narrative whole. In Bion's theory the fragments are transformed, through the mother's capacity to metabolise her infants projections, and are reintrojected. Gradually through internal objects and the development of mechanisms such as the alpha screen, the process of thinking aids in the integration of the ego. Organisation into larger social wholes, such as work organisations, I believe follows a similar process. The organisational task of the group, whilst ideally consciously foccussed on an enterprise task, is largely (unconsciously) to unify the multiple roles within it. Such roles are derived not only from the overall group-as-system but also from their institutional connections outside the organisation. The group then, may project its fragments into an imaginary whole, although these fragments are also held and experienced by parts of that whole. (An obvious attempt at this is the organisational mission statement). An interesting question, of course, is what mechanisms or capacities does the organisation have for 'metabolising' these fragments so they can be thought about. Psychoanalysis as Discourse In this paper, I want to move beyond the position described above. Not because I see that as false or wrong. The full integrity of the position may still have to be worked out or through. It remains as background to another set of thoughts. What I want to do now is predicated on a recognition (derived from Foucault) that it is not simply the 'object' of an intellectual or practical endeavour such as psychoanalysis that defines it but a far wider set of practices. Psychoanalysis, I'm suggesting, may not be simply a paradigm within science (Kuhn, 1962) but a totally new discourse (Foucault, 1972) or vertex (Bion, 1970) in knowledge and practice. According to Foucault, a discourse is created through its practice. That is, more particularly through its discursive formations, which can be summarised as:
That is, a discourse is a whole dynamic system of organisation of knowledge and is constituted by a set of symbolic relations that together delineate and constrain it. Its emergence is not piecemeal, but arises from its relations with other discourses, themselves emergent (systemically rather than purely historically) from the way that knowledge is organised in its totality (within a culture). Foucault refers to the organising principle as an episteme. I suppose what this really means is that to understand the discourse one looks to its practices and to its internal organisation. Looking for an explanation in terms of history, or in terms of the hidden unformed thoughts of a transcendent subject who speaks the discourse is counter to this. I was drawn to explore such a view when I saw some resemblance between Foucault's ideas of suspending history and transcendant subjectivity to allow a new order of knowledge to appear, with Bion's ideas of eschewing memory and desire in an analytic session to allow the new order of the analysand to appear from his or her unconscious. This does not mean that history, memory, the subject or desire are unimportant or invalid. It does mean that in their suspension another order of reality may emerge. Since psychoanalysis was first developed, there have been many debates about its scientific status. As it is, many of these debates have been largely spurious and been engaged in more for political reasons - either to discredit psychoanalysis or establish its claim to respectability, depending on which side one was on - than for reasons of exploring its epistemological basis. Eysenck's and Wilson's (1973) experimental exploration of Freudian theories relied on operationalising concepts in naieve ways, for example. The depth of science rests not on 'operationalisation' within a naieve empiricist tradition, but on its particular capacity to reach truth within its own frame. The discoveries in quantum physics, for example, have the quantum universe as their empirical validator; as their test of truth. Special technologies have been devised in order to enter this universe and test its properties. The empirical test for psychoanalysis cannot be within the frame of behaviourism or its bedmate, naieve empiricism. Psychoanalysis has itself developed a special technology for exploration of psychoanalytic truth within the universe of subjective experience. Here is its field of testing. The new critique of Freud to be found in Tallis (1996) and Webster (1995) appears to rest largely on an attack of the man, his beliefs and mistakes, his sampling methods, the dynamics of the early psychoanalytic movement and the growth of misguided therapeutic developments post -Freud rather than on a deeper look at the ideas produced within psychoanalysis. What we need is not such ad hominin arguments but to articulate and delineate the field within which psychoanalysis lies, the means by which it pursues its truths and the methods by which it attains validity. I want to argue in this paper that psychoanalysis is not a science but a separate discourse in its own right, with a respectability and integrity its own. It is probably regarded by some as a pre-science, Freud certainly often argued this point of view. I'm not so sure. It might be argued that I should define science if I want to argue that that is what psychoanalysis is not. That would take another whole paper and the best I can do here is to refer to Kuhn's definition that a mature science is what is practised by a definable scientific community with a common set of values, tends to be primarily established around a central paradigm (except during times of revolution and paradigmatic change), is basically a puzzle-solving enterprise and educates by means of exemplars (Kuhn,1962, p. 209). Does psychoanalysis fit in here? Again, I think it does not clearly do so. The puzzle-solving aspect is most clearly indicated in Freud's case studies where the description of the hunt for the base cause of a symptom becomes almost like a detective story. But the recognition of the dynamic of transference, and by further implication of counter-transference, lead psychoanalysis to a stronger focus on 'working through' than on interpretation alone. Many analysts believe that holding the therapeutic frame is more important than any interpretation. Moreover, the idea of education by means of exemplars does not fit either. Although analytic education is achieved primarily by means of the student's own analysis, the learning is not primarily through the exemplar of the training analyst. Although this may play a role, it is the ongoing development of the capacity to work through one's own internal dynamics so that the analytic state-of-mind might be achieved, and so that the effects of the unconscious might be experienced directly, that is of crucial importance. A major part of the learning involves tolerating painful states-of-mind. I agree with Eisold (1995) that psychoanalysis is not a constant; that it is changing and developing. Its position in relation to other discourses such as science is also in flux. Given the surrounding context, it is not surprising that psychoanalysis borrows from other sciences and disciplines. It owes a lot to social science, biology, linguistics, literature and history. These are used in analysis but are not the central or essential element. Science or not, I want here to locate the particular nature of psychoanalysis as discourse, following Foucault. Rycroft (1968, p.7) argued nearly 30 years ago about 'whether it is a religion, as some of its critics assert, a science, as most of its practitioners claim, or an art, a craft, one of the humanities, a form of semantic theory - or even something sui generis, a new phenomenon which eludes classification into any of the traditional categories.' Extensive argument as to its scientific status only detracts from the examination of such a possibility and from a projection of where psychoanalysis might be leading. A discursive analysis, on the other hand, opens up the possibilities of examining the light that psychoanalysis can throw on those institutions with which it has relations. A psychoanalytic perspective on the institutions of work and wealth and on the transformations of desire within these institutions, for example, would seem to me to be a worthwhile endeavor. (See for example, Rose,1990, who describes the emergence of psychological and psychiatric practice during war, and the impact of this practice on our understanding of modern subjectivity, particularly the relation of that subjectivity to work, government, family and the pursuit of freedom.) It is in such an endeavour that the psychoanalytic study of organisations resides. Discourse analysis in itself is not concerned with whether or not a discourse is a science (p.38 The Archeology of Knowledge). It holds in suspension current unities in order to find others through an examination of ongoing discursive formations (as I mentioned previously, much like Bion suspends memory and desire to achieve an emergent purpose). We need suspend our current ideas of science when dealing with subjectivities to allow new forms of knowledge to appear. Yet the new discourse of psychoanalysis, whilst being qualitatively different from others, still grows from elements of those that came before, even though it does so in a discontinuous leap. It is worth looking then at how psychoanalysis works with issues that are named in science as problems of, for example, replicability or empirical validity. Such problematics seek to ground science in its ongoing context of reality rather than in human perceptual error. We might wish to consider how psychoanalysis seeks to ground itself in subjective and psychic reality rather than be subject to those disguises cast up by the ego, or by collusive illusions in organisations that hide the analytic truth. The truth of science is reached in a different way to the truth of analysis. But both require rigourous paths and the exploration of parallels in those paths would be a worthwhile endeavour, although I do not have time to pursue it here. ( The pursuit of these issues was raised in a conversation with Tom Michael whilst on sabbatical in Melbourne.) I'm not here to give you a lecture on Foucault's theory nor his methods of what he terms, 'the archeology of knowledge', although I will be using his work to guide me. What I really want to work with is the practice of a psychoanalytic study of organisations in terms of its discursive formations. Before doing this, I should point out that although I have argued for psychoanalysis as a discourse, with its centrality being that it is precisely aimed at studying subjectivity, particularly as it is organised into states-of-mind, I am mostly interested in the application of this discourse to work with groups and organisations. This might be seen as moving away from the centre of psychoanalytic discourse, at least as it has been practised in the clinical field. The position that I take, however, is that psychoanalysis is primarily a social theory and practice, although much of its work has been located in the pair (analyst and analysand). The pair, however, may represent just one part of the development of the analytic discourse. As an example, I want to explore the intergroup event within the group relations conference as a model for the psychoanalytic study of organisations. The event seems to represent, at an obvious level, the way our society goes about organising for work and politics at unconscious levels. The intergroup event also provides a space where we can address how mutual thinking and collective knowledge about the other interact. That is, it provides a space for epistemological research as it pertains to organisation. Most of us here will know the model of the intergroup
event conducted within group relations conferences. Although there are
many variations possible, the task is usually stated as studying the
relations between groups, meaning the study of both conscious relationships
(the visibile and easily accessible dimensions) and unconscious relatedness
(those non visible, symbolic and underlying relations that form an institutional
glue). The method is one where groups form and work with consultants
on the task. If the event is an institutional event, the conference
staff are more formally and visibly present as a management group, although
the presence of management is a thought within the conference whatever
the event; and it is a thought that has associated anxieties. The intergroup event provides the opportunity to study the nature of organisational dynamics and how these give rise to organisational structure. Structure, in turn, both gives form to the dynamic, perpetuating and establishing it, and gives rise to further dynamics through allowing the development of implications and their attendant anxieties. The work done on social systems as a defense against anxiety is predicated on this type of analysis. Bion gave us powerful tools for doing this work through his theory of thinking. He made the distinction between the thoughts that are unconsciously present in the group and the thinker who may develop an apparatus or mind for thinking those thoughts. Thinking is the capacity to work with (that is to transform) the thoughts that are in the thinker but are not simply of the thinker. An example might be helpful here. In a recent group relations conference members formed groups consciously on the basis of interpersonal issues. They worked on forming both around consultants and around other members who, for a variety of reasons they wanted to be with. A not untypical scenario. Some exploration of what this might mean and whether or not they wanted to go ahead with such a basis for formation occurred, but during this discussion 3 groups became established within the political climate of claims for what were termed 'resources' - primarily consultants, and primarily the consultant from America, who became the 'precious resource' in this Australian conference. One understanding of the unconscious intergroup relations within this event came from the idea of a model of consumption. A working hypothesis was that members had formed groups in order to avoid feeling deprived and a high level of greed became mobilised. It was if there were a motto of consume or be consumed; a not surprising ethic within the real political climate of the state of Victoria at the time. The American consultant found himself registered in a category of consumables that listed ensuite toilets, lemon tart and himself. A position sure to lead to an experience of being an object of utility and perhaps contempt rather than of desire. The competition inherent in the structure and dynamics that developed (that is a competition experienced predominantly as greed, envy and hatred of the institution as a whole, and established as a dynamic of consumption) was carried through to later events where the near 'impossibility' of taking up leadership was demonstrated, except and unless the structure was one of a pair or of a family. (My thinking of this was aided by members of the conference, the conference staff and particulary, Alastair Bain. This was a conference directed by a woman and many issues surrounding gender were worked with reasonably successfully. Also, it was firstly a conference with the task of studying succession. Gender and succession seemed often to come together in a fairly ferocious way. In particular, there was a strong impetus in many of the women to find older women who could show them how to move onto the next lifestage without being too destructive, or without themselves being destroyed by their own interactions with their ageing bodies. The poignancy of this was strong because the potential for destruction and hatred, expressed sometimes as an invasion of men's emotions, was present, especially in the large group event. It was in this context that the intergroup event developed and pointed to a dynamic of competition, avoided and hated, becoming structured or established through a consumer culture. Competition for leadership took the form of competition for resources. (Perhaps in our culture, age and emotions themselves are felt to be resources; cf. Rose (1990) and Reiff (1966).) I have also indicated that the intergroup event provides a space for epistemological research. What I have said so far in other words, is that the implicit model of learning or of gaining knowledge within the intergroup event might be seen as structuralist. This is certainly how I would have seen it when I was thinking as I described at the beginning of this paper. The way into an understanding of unconscious dynamics is through an understanding of thought and emotional experience as it becomes located in the individual and in the groups within the larger organisation, that is, within the structure. The epistemological space then, provides opportunities for going beyond the obvious surface structure, to an underlying dynamic or principle of organisation (just as Foucault describes is the basis of the modern episteme which allowed for the emergence of psychoanalysis). In the above example, the seemingly strange category of ensuite toilet - lemon tart - american consultant, became understandable not simply through the hidden meaning as 'consumable'(that is, not simply through a hermeneutic device), but largely through the experience of the individuals subject to such a hidden meaning (that is, their experience of envy, greed and hatred for an institution that, in phantasy, could only consume or be consumed). This phantasy was also present in the conference in the theme of staying silent, lest your words be taken over and misinterpreted; consumed in fact. But rather than simply looking at the example from the perspective of a depth psychology, ie, a social science of interpretation and recovery; can we look at it from the perspective of psychoanalysis as discourse? That is, as psychoanalysis is practised. What are the discursive formations evident in this example? The Objects of Discourse We often take it for granted that objects exist
'out there' because we first and foremost think of physical objects
which lie within the province of everyday discourse as well as the physical
sciences. However, the objects of any discourse are not self evident.
It is not a form of idealism to recognise that we have to learn how
to 'observe' entities rather than simply be subject to stimulation or
even sensation. We learn what to observe through our immersion in a
discourse, and through having others guide us in discerning and accepting
objects. I stress that this is not an idealist nor a relativist position,
as are some forms of postmodernist deconstructionism. Our capacity to
think and to construct new forms of knowledge, including new objects
of knowledge, is distinct from the truths that may emerge from such
ways of knowing. As humans we are subject to the constraints of a reality
- with physical, historical and social components- that we can affect
but that is not simply created through our epistemology. One group formed fairly quickly and became (in the words of one member) the 'thoughtless, rush in and don't even think about it' group. Their idea was to get on with the task without much reflection on how they might do it. They decided to get working in the nearest room with the nearest consultant, and, although they came back to the large group when asked by other members to take part in reflection about how the large group would divide up into smaller groups, they basically remained as initially formed throughout the event. They believed they knew their task and wanted to secure appropriate resources to carry it out. This group formed the basis of a group in the later institutional event that contained 'the silent men' who acted before putting their thoughts out into the larger institution because they felt that their words would be distorted in the larger group, and their meaning lost. A second group formed around issues of diversity. A few members voiced that they wanted their group to contain individuals whose valency was to think and reflect, together with individuals who were more action oriented. A third group seemed to form from those who were positioned in neither the first nor the second group. The larger forum of members tried to divide up on a different basis, this time around consultants, who came to be termed resources. The configuration of groups changed only marginally with this new basis for order. In fact one member of the second group had stated a strong preference for working with the american consultant and seemed to strengthen the resolve of others around her for so doing. The third group had also stated a preference to work with the american consultant and the large group became a forum for negotiation about which group should go to the room with the american consultant and for how long. Somehow, it seemed that whatever the consciously chosen reason for ordering the members into groupings, the three groups represented something basic about the institution, even though the membership might change around the edges, and even though the groups might name the basis for order differently. Another way of saying this is that the formation of the groups was constrained by the dynamics of the institution. What seemed to emerge during the event was a model of consumerism. The subjectivities in the event, it is hypothesised, were formed around the experience of consumer. (This brings to mind the analyses of narcissistic development in individuals and societies and the emergence of interest in narcissistic subjectivity and its links to consumer cultures as in Lasch, 1979. For example, Reiff, 1973, argues that 'the therapeutic' as an end in itself rather than a side road in the development of community, leads to an aggrandisment of self . One could extrapolate and say that therapy or learning about self as a consumer product forms a state-of-mind that is anti-community. I think there was something of this emerging in the conference). This theme was connected to the phantasies surrounding a female leader and the question of succession. If the culture at a primative level was one of consume or be consumed, was this the outcome of female leadership? Could a male leader or a couple ameliorate this influence? It may be that women as leaders arouse deeply held phantasies about consumption. In the discourse of the psychoanalytic study of organisation, 'the group' and the 'institution' are objects which can be studied in order to understand emergent 'subjectivity'. The intergroup event provides a method for understanding the relatedness between these objects: the ways in which they co-emerge and constrain each other. The Enunciation of the Discourse The second discursive formation described by Foucault
is that of manners of enunciation, including rules for conducting the
discourse, new authorities and processes of legitimation and new locations
for containing the institutions developed through discursive practice.
Psychoanalysis has a strong sense of formation around the International
Psychoanalytic Society - even if some movements have their identity
through a kind of opposition to this (for example the Lacanians). The
group relations movement, if it can be identified as such, is more loosely
formed. Different establishments around the world have their own rules
and authorities, although professional genealogy is not so strongly
or formally present. The movement uses psychoanalysis to some extent,
but is outside the establishment of psychoanalysis. Those who use psychoanalytic
methods in therapy or in organisational analysis have to find their
own establishments and authorities. It's not surprising that many members find themselves searching for the hidden rules of the institution, and finding that part of the learning is to challenge the authority of the management, questioning and exploring the unconscious dynamics and codes present in their ways of organising; in their order of things. How did the category ensuite toilet - lemon tart - american consultant emerge? Was it from management's state-of-mind about the participants? Was it from the participant's projections about the management's state-of-mind? Is it derived from the state-of-mind present in the institutions from which members come and toward which many respond through withdrawal into basic assumption 'me' (Lawrence, Bain and Gould, forthcoming). The methods employed in the conference are not simply about teaching organisational management. Nor are they simply about the study of the social or cultural dynamics of the temporary institution, recoverable from an analysis of member's experiences. Such aims may be there, but they alone would constitute working with social science or management methods, not within psychoanalytic discourse. The institution conducting the conference - whether it be AK Rice, or the Tavistock, or the Australian Institute of Social Analysis - may have an educative aim, however the practice of the staff, if it is to be psychoanalytically informed, attempts to develop a state-of-mind that is not, for example, persecutory, but that allows persecutory thoughts and feelings to emerge and be explored, (for example, persecution about being deprived, not getting the goodies, being dismissed as unimportant in the eyes of the establishment); a state-of-mind that is not dependent, but that allows dependency to be understood and worked through and so on. It is this aspect of the conference work that engages the specific identity of the psychoanalytic discourse. Recently in AISA, a group of members responsible for thinking through the training needs of AISA conference consultants, 'brainstormed' the following list of capacities required by conference consultants:
Concepts and Theoretical Strategies The third and fourth discursive formations outlined by Foucault may be the least controversial. We expect that each discipline has its own ideas about how its objects relate to one another, how they are ordered and arranged, and how they give rise to further implications and activities. The concepts and theories within psychoanalysis spell out the implications present within psychoanalytic objects. If the oedipus complex was and is still controversial, it is because it is implied within the relatedness between sexualised subjects. Mother as an object of desire has its own implications. Most relevant to the practice of psychoanalysis as the establishment of working states-of-mind, because that is what I have been arguing for, are concepts such as projective identification (Klein), evenly suspended attention (Freud), container and contained (Bion), attention to the signifying chain (Lacan) and holding environment (Winnicott). Work with organisations is developing its own extended sets of concepts and theories and in many cases is transposing the concepts developed in the analytic clinical setting. The usefulness or otherwise of this is to be tested and explored in the practice. Discourse analysis and the exploration of discursive structures are, at heart, historical enterprises. It takes time for a practice to develop and work through implications that, however present at the beginning, may be surprising in their manifestation. A temporary institution, such as developed in a group relations conference, unfolds issues in ways that reflect the dynamics of the members other institutions. The discourse of psychoanalysis, through its practice, is unfolding a way of working that, as I have argued, posits a centrality to the state-of-mind of the practitioner. I want to end with one more example, taken from some research that I am currently undertaking in a government service organisation. This participatory action research project came about after some consulting work I had done within the organisation, with one part of the organisation. As part of this research, three of us are interviewing a large proportion of organisation members. A group interview was conducted with the group of people with whom I had worked previously. The research team agreed that it might be useful if I was one of the interviewers, given the knowledge I had of the group, but that another member of the research team should also be present to pick up on other kinds of thoughts, feelings or observations than might be available to me. At the beginning of the interviews we had been informing interviewees that their individual contributions would remain anonymous, but that themes would be fed back more generally in the organisation as part of the next stage of the research. When in the group I felt some discomfort about my having information about their views that I had gained whilst working in a different role with them. The interview produced material that was on different aspects of their roles than had been discussed with me previously and left out aspects that had been discussed. I felt caught in a quandary about the information that I held and how I might be able to use it as part of the research. I mentioned this in the group and got some agreement about using previous material if it was treated confidentially in the same way as the interview material. I left still feeling most uncomfortable and beginning to blame myself for not having faced and managed this issue more clearly before. The discomfort persisted and, drawing on my understanding of practice within the psychoanalytic discourse, I put myself in a frame of mind where I could think about this as a projective identification rather than simply my fault. To do this, I needed to draw on another member of my research team. As I talked this experience through with my co-researcher, it dawned on me that this particular group had talked in the past about holding organisational secrets through their internal consultancy work. They worked with all levels of the organisation and often were caught between groups. For example, working with feelings that case managers had about their own managers, whilst also acting as consultants or advisers to those managers. I realised that what I was feeling and experiencing was parallel to their experience. The organisation was also attempting to deal with such issues by assuring confidentiality for individuals or within groups. Tensions were most apparent between groups, but the organisation had few ways of working with this tension, except in formal meetings whose agendas often covered up or exacerbated the tensions rather than providing a space to work on them. The more formal research interview had seemed also to have that function. Reaching this realisation came through studying my own state of mind in the presence of another who invited and aided that. This began with an acknowledgement of my bodily feelings of discomfort, my associated feelings of guilt and an exploration of that guilt. Had I simply tried to put things right in terms of the overt issue of confidentiality, I would not have come to a deeper understanding of some of the dynamics within the organisation, or at least to the beginnings of a testable working hypothesis. Closing Comments Working with organisations may require interventions
from a variety of perspectives and the practice of organisational research
or consultancy must draw on many sources. These might include data gathering,
analysis and interpretation drawn from social science and economics.
They might include drawing on systems theory, management theory and
theories about human behaviour. The unique contribution of psychoanalysis
in this arena is not in its capacity to be a social science of depth
psychology, even though it does include some aspect of this - many social
science disciplines have theories of recovering underlying dynamics
and structures through the examination of surface symptoms. Foucault
sees this practice as the fundamental characteristic of the total modern
episteme (see for example the anthroplogy of Levi-Strauss, or even the
theory of transformational grammar). Nor does it lie in its capacity
to solve the puzzles of individual or group histories, even though analysis
does this quite well and can bring to light many of the missing pieces
of history that the thinking subject needs for his or her work in analysis
or organisational development. Psychoanalytic practice (which includes
its theory) itself is a strange list of disciplines, techniques and
communities. However, its unique contribution, I believe, is in the
capacity of psychoanalytic practitioners to work in a state-of-mind
that enables others, through the in between, to emerge, study and work
through their own states-of-mind. This is the centrality of psychoanalytic
discourse that is sustained within the institution of psychoanalysis. Simple fornication: (with unmarried persons) monk - 1 year fasting on bread and water nun - 3-7 years fasting Adultery (with married persons) monk/nun - 2-7 years bread and water bishop - 12 years bread and water 25 paragraphs were devoted
to the problems of masturbation which for some reason seemed particularly
prevalent in church itself. (in church) lay people - 40 days fasting monks and nuns - 60 days psalm-singing 22 paragraphs are given over to sodomy and bestiality which ends with - bishop fornicating with cattle (1st offence) 8 years fasting (subsequent offences) 10 years fasting
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