Potential Space and Maternal Authority in
Organizations
M. Gerard Fromm, Ph.D.
Erikson Institute,
Stockbridge,
Four
months after 9/11, the opening plenary of the Institutional Event of a Tavistock Group Relations Conference began ordinarily
enough. But after the
initial instruction about the task, there was not the usual silence, nor the
confusion, excitement, anxiety, frustration, laughter, leadership struggles,
power gambits, and fragmented efforts to form smaller groups, which often
follow the group’s being left on its own to take up the work. Instead, members exploded out of the room as
though it were unconsciously “Ground Zero”.
The seven or so people left in what felt like the debris spontaneously
decided to study the effects of 9/11 on the conference - clearly, an impulse
experienced on behalf of everyone.
Whatever eventually happened in the smaller
groups, the potential “potential space” for the full membership
in the IE was not sustained. As a large,
public space in that particular moment, it could not become a space for play,
for a vitalizing sense that “something could happen” or that “we could do
something together.” Rather, members
acted as though they knew that disaster would happen. What Winnicott would
think of as the space for creative illusion was filled, instantly and paralyzingly, with the certainty of delusion.
The external context of disaster – a disaster of
boundary rupture on many levels - seemed to have collapsed the boundaries
necessary for the Institutional Event to become a potential space. But perhaps it was the internal context that
had actually created the hole in the boundary.
The conference Director had announced that she would be leaving
temporarily for a funeral. In this
emotional context for both staff and members, the IE consultants could not
bring their weight to bear on building new boundaries in an environment no
longer felt to be holding either group.
This example seems to me to say something about
the conditions that collapse potential space and may serve as a basis for
examining a more positive statement about what creates them as well. I will argue, following an examination of Winnicott’s original discussion of the concept, that
potential space, at its inception, implies an authority relation between child
and mother, or, at the organizational level, between the human being naturally
motivated toward creative engagement with the world and his or her partner in
facilitating that development. Further,
authority in the maternal role is exercised in specific ways, having to do with
creating conditions for the holding of, the unfolding of, and the making sense
of, a process that has its own inherent shape.
Let me first re-visit Winnicott’s concept of potential space and un-pack it a
bit, before examining its implications for organizational life. Potential space as a concept does not appear
in Winnicott’s writing until the late 1960’s, that
is, not until the last five years of his life.
As with others of his theoretical ideas, however, it is present in
different form quite early. What is
eventually called potential space begins with Winnicott’s
discussion of the transitional object.
As such, potential space is heir to the earliest scenario of human
relatedness, the phase of the infant’s life when, if things go well, the
infant’s basic need meets good-enough adaptation by
the care-taking other, and a sense of ordinary omnipotence or basic confidence
is experienced. Omnipotence is what Winnicott imagined to be the infant’s subjective
experience; as the caption on the Jerry Seinfeld mug
says: “Want a cookie; got a cookie!”
Confidence implies a developing sense of trust in the
beginning-to-be-sensed, silent, but reliable partner to this magical experience. In the beginning, the infant’s relatedness to
the other is as a critical part of his or her subjective experience of creating
and engaging the world.
The overlap between this
need-driven gesture of the infant and the need-gratifying response of the other
is what Winnicott called the space of illusion. Importantly, he declared that no “claims” are
made on its behalf. It is an
“intermediate area”, “allowed” to the infant as a “resting place” from the
strain of relating inner experience to the dawning perception of external
reality. This space takes concrete shape
as the child’s transitional object, the first “not me” possession, which the
child invests with the power to soothe and over which he/she “assumes
rights.” “Of the transitional object
it can be said that it is a matter of agreement between us and the baby that we
will never ask the question: ‘Did you conceive of this or was it presented to
you from without?’ The important point
is that no decision on this point is expected.
The question is not to be formulated.” (Italics Winnicott’s)
This space of illusion and of
transition to relatedness is eventually called potential space, the word
“potential” highlighting the experience of creativity Winnicott
imagined to be the core experience of the
well-cared-for infant. What the infant
found in the external world, at the beginning the good breast, was there
waiting to be found by the infant whose need created it in the first place. “Maximally intense experiences,” enriching
the developing sense of self and of the world (as one’s oyster, accordingly to
the old saying), were the regular outcome of optimal relating in the potential
space.
My starting point for a
consideration of the implications of the potential space concept for
organizational life is to recognize that Winnicott’s
assertion of the infant’s “rights” implies a theory of authority. The care-taking other lends herself, her
physical, mental and affective responsiveness, to the infant’s budding agency,
and through what Milner called her “answering activity,” she facilitates the
infant’s creation of the need-satisfying world. Her authority in the role of “mother” is
exercised by lending it to the nascent authority of the infant, and the
“agreement” between baby and mother implies a contract, including elements of
responsive presence and knowing restraint.
This question of authority is taken
up again by Winnicott in his discussion of the True
and False Self. There he talks
explicitly of leadership and followership roles. In healthy development, it is the mother who
responds to and makes sense of the “spontaneous gesture” of the infant, shaping
bodily aliveness into a sense of true self.
Should the need-driven gesture of the parent substitute for the
infant’s, a sense of falseness, reflexive dissociative
defenses, and an alienation from one’s own potential authority develop in the
child.
At the end of his discussion of
transitional space, Winnicott says that it “widens
out” into, on the negative side, the pathologies of omnipotence (lying,
addiction, fetishism, etc.), but more usually, into play, artistic creativity,
culture and religious feeling. Indeed,
it is in his theoretical paper on playing that Winnicott
makes his first reference to potential space.
“In order to give a place to playing, I postulated a potential space
between the baby and the mother.” He
calls this space a “playground,” the same word that Freud uses in “Remembering,
Repeating and Working Through” to describe the arena of transference. Winnicott speaks of
play as “immensely exciting,” and as always being “precarious” because of its
having to do with “the interplay of personal psychic reality and the experience
of control of actual objects.” He calls
this “the precariousness of magic itself, magic that arises in intimacy, in a
relationship that is being found to be reliable.”
Winnicott also cites
Erikson’s work in this paper, and the latter did
indeed make the important point that, in the play phase, it is essential that
the family, “in one of its exemplary forms,” help the child with a critical
boundary - the distinction between play and “irreversible purpose.” Playgrounds need the safety of good
boundaries. An Oedipal age little cowboy
with a toy gun is free to give full rein to his fantasies of being in charge of
his homestead. But, if he somehow had
acquired a real gun, the potential for irreversible purpose – for the actual
death of his rival - would not only create a real-life danger; it would destroy
the child’s ability to fantasize and to enjoy the play inherent in it. The boundaries of a good playground
distinguish fantasy from reality and wish from consequence.
Of Winnicott’s
squiggle game, his colleague, Masud Khan, describes
how “a child uses paper as potential space in order to be privately alone with Winnicott. And this
potential space of the paper is a shared space where both Winnicott and the child mutually act towards that
‘significant moment’ when the experience of the child can be interpreted to the
child.” (Italics Khan’s) Indeed, Winnicott surprisingly once defined his work in terms of
play: “Psychotherapy takes place in the overlap between two areas of play,
that of the patient and that of the therapist (italics Winnicott’s).”
“It’s
all yours.”
Through what might be thought of as
a variation of the squiggle game, I would like to offer an example of what can
happen within a potential space. In the
Role Analysis Group of a Group Relations Conference, a young engineer reviewed
his experience of the conference. He was
a shy person, he said, and though he wanted to participate more fully in the
Small Study Group, he found himself having a very hard time doing so. He found it interesting and moving, however,
and he valued the experience, in contrast to his experience of the Large Study Group,
which he hated. People were forever
arguing, and he wanted to scream at them, “Stop fighting,” but he didn’t. He went on to say that his parents had fought
constantly when he was a child, and he did scream at them to stop fighting, but
they ignored him. In my role as
consultant, I said to him, “So now, you ignore you.” He said, “Yes, I guess I do.” He went on to say that he really enjoyed the
Institutional Event. He took up a
boundary role, found it fascinating and surprised himself with how good he was
at it.
Then, in the Application part of
the group, I invited him, as I did the other five members, to draw the
organizational issue he wanted to learn about.
Many people, given this task, draw elaborate organizational diagrams,
always however illuminating the unconscious organization-in-the-mind they are
struggling with. This highly skilled
professional approached the large blank sheet of paper and drew a small square
box with the letter D in it. “D stands
for design,” he said. “I’m a designer,
and I love it.” “But,” he went on,
drawing a second box with an M in it, next to but unconnected to the first,
“Management is always interfering with our work, and I’m the one in my group
who always winds up dealing with them.”
As he talked, the members of this
Role Analysis Group, none of whom were mental health professionals, did not see
Design and Management; they saw Dad and Mom, and they said this to him. He responded as though lightning had struck
and had illuminated with shocking clarity the continuity of unconscious roles
in his life. And, as he discussed this
insight, he seemed to realize that he had a choice: If he loved design, he could declare himself
and decisively leave the arguments between those representing the un-integrated
sub-tasks of his organization; or, if he did indeed love boundary work and was
good at it, he could embrace it and realize that Design needs Management, and
vice versa, the way Mom’s and Dad’s need each other. After 25 minutes, this lovely man asked if he
could take this large sheet of paper, with two tiny squares in it, home with
him. I said to him, “It’s all yours.”
Where is potential space in this
example? I would argue that there are
concentric playgrounds, if you will. The
conference itself, designed to be a “temporary organization” with no evaluation
of members, no reports back to home organizations, and full authorization of
members’ desires to learn, is a potential space. And the innermost playground is that blank
piece of paper, charged in the dual sense of that term – that is, both
authorized as a field for real work and enlivened as a field in which personal
expression is seen to be intimately and inevitably related to that work.
From one angle, this man had great
difficulty playing. Indeed, he seemed
quite constricted emotionally, and his drawing reflected that: two small
squares on this vast sheet of paper. The
lack of connection between those squares paralleled his report of
non-connection in the small and large groups.
But nevertheless, he did reveal himself in the conversation and on that
paper. Erikson
felt that the most simple and elegant definition of play belonged to Plato; at
its essence, to play is to jump. This
engineer “jumped” in the Role Analysis Group.
He put out the organization-in-his-mind for all to see and for whatever
they might do with what they saw. He
created an overlap of many people playing.
The insight he took from this process seemed held in some intermediate
space within him, a space of fascination and gut-level learning that he may or
may not choose to integrate into his “real” world.
Where is maternal authority in this
example? I would suggest that it too
could be thought of in terms of concentric “holding environments” and that two aspects of the leader’s role in relation to the
holding environment draw upon the earliest exercise of maternal authority. Those two aspects can be given various
names. In another context, I have
written about the two basic functions of the psychotherapist as establishing
and maintaining the frame for treatment and offering one’s mental and
emotional responsiveness as a medium for the patient’s
communications. In the next section, I
will discuss Winnicott’s notion of the “setting”, and
I will argue that establishing it, which also includes its atmosphere, is the
most important exercise of maternal authority.
For now, let me simply note my two
comments to the engineer. The first –
“So now you ignore you” – engaged directly with the risk he had taken. From one angle, I did no more than say to him
what he had said to the group; from another, it was a jarring statement, a
“meeting” of his more piecemeal communication with the essential sense within
it. I think of this as “answering
activity,” as the inevitable response, albeit unanticipated by the engineer, to
his own “spontaneous gesture.” He had presented what could almost be seen as
an emotional syllogism. Major premise –
“I wanted to scream ‘Stop fighting.’
Minor premise – “I did scream ‘Stop fighting,’ but they ignored
me.’ The conclusion seems inescapable
even if not articulated. I would even
argue that not to articulate it destroys potential space because it
rejects the gesture arising from it as too dangerous.
My saying it could be called an
interpretive action, if by that term one means speaking explicitly the implicit
sense already there in the communication.
This links to my final statement to the engineer: “It’s all yours.” I said it spontaneously, but I later realized
that it carries a resonance related to the transitional object notion. It affirmed that whatever was created in this
overlap was his, more than it was mine or the group’s,
as was the life to which he may or may not apply it. In a way, it said that his question - “Can I
take that with me?” – was in that category of questions Winnicott
suggests should not be asked, the kind of question – perhaps raised defensively
at the end of the encounter – that seems to want to give back authority as
though it was given to him, rather than discovered and taken, in the first
place. It is an exercise of maternal
authority, Winnicott says, not to allow such
questions.
In 1954, Winnicott’s
work took a creative leap into the first conceptualization of the treatment
setting in the psychoanalytic literature.
“Freud takes for granted the early mothering situation and my contention
is that it turned up in his provision of a setting for his work.”(Winnicott’s
italics) Winnicott
argued that Freud offered his neurotic patients the kind of setting that they
and he had known in their infancies, a setting in which they could relax into
non-integration, free association and the safe- and helpful-enough “answering
activity” of the psychoanalyst. In a
sense, it couldn’t have been otherwise.
In some ways, this strange setting – the couch, the
alone-in-the-presence-of-the-other relatedness, the contact with dream life –
was also uncannily familiar as a trace of earliest life.
It was
for patients whose severe troubles implied developmental difficulty in those
early phases, and therefore in relation to the early maternal environment, that
the analytic setting materialized as a potential difficulty. Such patients were exquisitely sensitive to
any “failure” of the analyst’s holding.
His lateness or empathic mis-attunement or
vacation registered in a deep way, and containment of un-metabolized affect and
potentially disastrous regression became the paramount concern of the analyst.
The
analytic setting was both a physical and a metaphorical space for Winnicott. For example,
his list of a dozen items describing the setting includes “a room that was
quiet and not liable to sudden unpredictable sounds, yet not dead quiet and not
free from ordinary house noises.” Winnicott’s setting, like that of Goldilocks, is not too
much this or too little that; rather, it is happily in-between. It is a concrete and a symbolic space,
charged, again in the dual sense of that word, with transference
potential. But then, Winnicott
makes a remarkable statement, one that I imagine to have major implications for
organizational life: “By setting, I mean
the summation of all the details of management (italics
mine).
The
paper in which Winnicott makes this quantum leap in
psychoanalytic theory takes regression as its primary subject, and Winnicott’s invoking of management has to do with the task
of providing the conditions for a necessary benign regression while also
attending to the potential for malignant regression. In his second paper on playing, he remarks
that, “The person we are trying to help needs a new experience in a specialized
setting. The experience is one of a
non-purposive state (or) formlessness.”
But, he adds, “Account has to be taken of the reliability or
unreliability of the setting,” of “the relaxation that belongs to trust and to
the acceptance of the professional reliability of the therapeutic setting.”
“Professional reliability of the therapeutic setting,” “a specialized
setting” for a “non-purposive state.” If
we apply these ideas to organizational life, what are their implications? It seems to me that the idea of potential
space within an organization is an idea about the process of members’ joining
with full creative resources, and, for this to happen, Winnicott’s
theory would suggest that the organization’s leadership must be able to contact
within itself elements of maternal authority, that is, elements that
include management, especially along what I would think of as the outer
side of the boundary, and, interpretation along its inner side. Another example might serve to illustrate
these points.
The Medical Director of a large urban mental health center
contacted me to ask for help with confusions and morale problems accumulating
in his organization. He had completed a
Fellowship in our training institution, where I had been one of his supervisors
and where he had learned to pay attention to group and organizational dynamics
in the course of work in a therapeutic community program. He was the second in command of his new
organization, with a female Executive Director as his boss.
Our conversations - Dr. X’s and mine, and then ours with the
Executive Director - suggested that the clinic was suffering from its
success. It had begun not many years
before as a volunteer hotline and had grown into an emergency phone system
handling 60,000 calls per year. Driven
by this pool of clients, one new service after the other had been
initiated. At the time of our contact,
in addition to the hotline, there were at least eight other major services,
including three residential treatment settings and a new outpatient
clinic.
Along the way, roles had gotten very confused for at least
two reasons. The clinic had come to see
part of its mission as being a kind of Goodwill service, actually supplying for
the needs of more impoverished clients.
This became extremely confusing when brought into relation to the
treatment task. Secondly, in the
competitive financial environment in which the clinic now operated, the tail of
grants was beginning to wag the dog of mission.
Worse still, the language of business – with its fight-flight tolerance
for casualties – was invading the task of care, indeed care for the very
casualties the capitalist zeitgeist was implicated in creating.
Though it seemed clear in my conversations with the clinic’s
leadership that some reflection on these issues would likely be useful to the
staff, commitment to carrying out an organizational intervention was ambivalent
and ambiguous. Instead, they opted to
ask us to help them with what they saw as a more pressing need, namely,
training for their clinical leadership in basic ideas about severe
psychopathology and its treatment. If we
could include a way of helping them think organizationally, that would be fine,
but it would not be the primary focus.
So, we did indeed design a Clinical Leadership Retreat. Twenty-seven of the clinical leadership of
the clinic came to our institution for a weekend of meetings. We supplied good food, some focused but
informal instruction, a lot of discussion and the opportunity for this group to
meet and interact with each other, something they could have done at home, but,
for whatever reasons, had not. A wide
range of topics was covered, and on the last morning of the Workshop, in
response to the group’s request and in consultation with the Medical Director
(but not the Executive Director who had not come to the Retreat), a colleague
and I led a consultation to the system, beginning with a short presentation
about organizational dynamics.
After the presentation, we invited them to participate in an
exercise designed to help them address the dynamics in their organization. We moved the chairs to the side of the large
conference room in which the Retreat had taken place, creating a large open
space. Then we invited them to gather in
their administrative groups (e.g., this residence or that service), use drawing
materials to signify, symbolically if they wished, who
they were, and then gather some chairs and sit together. They were quite enthusiastic about this task
and took to it energetically.
Ten or so minutes later, they had assembled themselves in
various parts of the room and had drawn quite colorful signs or pictures
designating who they were. My colleague
and I then invited them to look around the room and to see their whole
organization. They did so with pleasure
but also with a new level of seriousness.
We then said to them: “This is
Clinic X. What conversation would you
like to have with each other?”
The first few comments had to do with the startling and
gratifying experience of seeing the whole.
Putting names to faces and knowing what people did throughout the system
had gotten lost in the growth but also the angst of
the organization. Then curiosity
emerged: Why on earth had each of the three residential setting leaders put
their signs on their chairs and left themselves standing behind the
chairs? Did this unconsciously represent
the current situation of the residences, so full with clients that the staff, who were supposed to interact as part of the home,
actually had no space of their own within it?
Then, from the farthest reaches of this assemblage of
different seating groups came an outburst of pain. The director of the new outpatient clinic was
near tears: “Look where we are! We are
as far away from the administration as it’s possible to be. This is exactly where we are in this
organization: so far away that we are forgotten. No wonder we can’t get what we need to make
this new service work.” Indeed it was
true that the administrative group was in the opposite part of the room, and
the outpatient group was something of a tail to the loosely formed circle of
other sub-groups, in the middle of which, true to its central place in the
clinic’s history and current operation, were the hotline leaders.
The outpatient director continued: “My staff is so angry at me. I feel like a mother who is supposed to do
everything and can’t do anything right.”
In the middle of this intense lament, one of the hotline staff loudly
interrupted, “Bbbrrringg! Bbbrrringg!”, then
pretended to answer the phone with the standard hotline greeting: “You’ve
reached….” “This is what happens at
Clinic X,” he said, and for a moment, all seemed to agree on the fragmenting
and disorganizing effects of the task of emergency responsiveness. A minute later, when the former conversation
resumed, he again interrupted with a pretend crisis call. This time we consulted to the defensive possibility
within such interruption, the way that for all of us we are not only exasperated
by the phone’s ringing, but often grateful for its having gotten us out of
something we didn’t want to be in.
This intervention led to a more textured discussion. The mother metaphor was taken up, and what
emerged was the status of the outpatient department in the minds of the other
services. It was seen as yet another new
service, a new baby really, brought into the world prematurely, without full
planning, by the Executive Director – not only because there was a client need
but also because there was funding. It
was also seen as unable to take care of itself and left to the other services,
the older kids, to look after. They,
however, resented the attention and resources lavished initially on the
newcomer and saw it as a foster child, not really one of them because not
clearly mission-related, or at least they hadn’t been helped to see how. This line of interpretative thinking seemed confirmed when one service leader said: “Thank God your service has come along. Last year we were the new baby that no one
wanted to attend to. I’m sorry for you,
but I’m glad it’s not us anymore.”
The conversation ended with ideas about how the group as a
whole could manage the integration of new services. People felt that they had been present for
each other in new, real and creative ways.
At dinner that night, this huge group, each one paying for his or her own meal individually, managed to spontaneously put
together enough money for a hefty tip.
The conversation could be seen as having major implications for the
Executive Director as well. Indeed, the
female outpatient director, the embattled mother who could never do enough for
her own staff and who felt so alone in that task, seemed to be a displacement
figure for the Executive Director, representing the dynamics around the new,
but needy and loosely related baby in a family of other competitive
children. That the male Medical Director
was gently opening this dynamic for reflection suggested that a potential partnership
was emerging at the directorial level through which these feelings might be
held, engaged and resolved.
One result of this exercise was the
group’s astonishment that they had unconsciously
created and indeed presented, in the here-and-now, the geographical relationships
and attendant problems of the organization.
Along with that came a sense of conviction about the power of
unconscious processes within the system. The concrete space of the conference
room had become a living potential space, and “maximally intense experience”
had occurred. How did this happen? I want to suggest that it depended on the
exercise of a certain kind of authority in the leadership of the institution
and in the consultants, an authority that derives from the maternal authority
intrinsic to the creation of potential space.
By maternal authority, I am not referring to gender per se, but to a
combination of management and interpretation in the service of play.
The relationship
between the Medical Director and me, along with the members’ accruing
confidence in the staff team throughout the weekend, had made for the feeling
that we were “professionally reliable” and for the faith that something could
be gained from “relaxation” and “formlessness.”
In that context of reliable holding, the group could “jump,” and that
they did so implied their belief in a safe landing. Management here means not only the management
of time, space and task, though these boundaries are critical. It also means self-management by the
leadership, including the consultants, within the play space created by these
boundaries.
To say this in a different way, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan spoke of the “Nom du Pere,” the name of the Father, the developmental
achievement of which organizes the child’s relation to the world and provides
access to the social order. Lacan meant the pun in the phrase, the way that the word
“nom” is indistinguishable in speech from the word “non.” It is the No of the Father that provides the
limit on the Oedipal child’s wish to stay forever in the imaginary dyad and to
refuse the larger world in which development, work, growing up and “shrinking
to life size” (in the words of Harry Stack Sullivan) are required. It is surely an oversimplification, though
perhaps it makes the point, to say that organizations-in-the-minds of members
and many organizations in fact tend to take the No of the Father as their basic
structuring principle. That is, the
model of authority tends toward the paternal and the paternalistic.
By maternal authority,
I mean the “Oui/We de la Mere.” At the foundation of Winnicott’s
work is the maternal Yes. In a
discussion with Wesley Carr on religion and psychoanalysis, the French
psychoanalyst, Francoise Davoine,
asked him about the difference between belief and trust; “You know,” she said,
“my psychotic patient tells me his delusion and asks ‘Do you believe me?’ and I
answer ‘I trust you.’” This “I trust
you,” this faith in the process, this “How are they right” (Shapiro and Carr)
consultative stance is at the heart of the kind of authority deriving from the
early mother-infant relationship. It is
a protective authority insofar as its No is to the outside world. It holds intrusion on the play space out;
there are questions not to be asked.
But it is also a generative authority in that it recognizes and
legitimizes the subject’s authority arising from within. And it answers that authority with the sense
emerging from its unconscious expression.
In our example, we
invited the group to see their whole organization, implicitly saying to them
that we trusted their capacity to handle what they would see and ours to handle
how they handled themselves. We invited
the conversation they would like to have with each other, trusting not
only their and our capacities to handle the conversation but their wish to
speak to each other as well. We
interpreted only once: to address the social defense function of the crisis
calls, i.e., the way the structure of the organization was being mobilized to
say a defensive No to the emerging, unsettling dialogue. We then simply joined their evolving metaphor
of the mother who can’t deal with the needs and dynamics among her
children. We helped them take the metaphor
seriously and play out its meaning throughout the organization.
What emerged was not
only their creative engagement with each other, re-vitalizing as that is to an
organization’s work life, but also an interpretation for the Executive
Director, carried perhaps by the embattled “mother” in the new outpatient
service. With the help of her partner,
the Medical Director, the Executive Director might come to see her role in the
turmoil within the organization and might begin to address it and to support
the emerging inclination within other participants to address it in their own ways. This would represent her more deeply joining
her own organization and might allow her new outpatient director to join as
well since the latter would no longer have to represent the “mother” within the
system who couldn’t do anything right.
The Executive Director’s absence from the Retreat may have in fact
reflected her avoidance of encountering this role in the immediacy of the staff
work. Within the competitive business
model in which the clinic now found itself, it may have been hard for a woman
in leadership to exercise maternal authority.
But, perhaps paradoxically, her male partner could and could then
represent the Third, the “other parent” so to speak, interpreting the dynamic
within the embattled dyad.
I will close with three dreams from
a quite different setting.
1.
I was in my house. It was much
larger than it actually is. There were a
number of large rooms and spaces in the walls.
Refugees had come to hide in the house, and some were hiding in the
walls. I saw a man and a teenage girl
walking outside, and I was frightened for them.
2.
I was in my house. My house and
all the houses around mine had tanks on the roofs to hold water. All the tanks had different shapes. Each house had a well, and the wells were all
at different depths from one another.
Water was being pumped into the tanks from the wells. Then, a pipeline was being constructed to
connect the wells, so that in case of drought the water could be shared. Only, the pipeline was not a direct link, but
a roundabout, jagged line. Still, the
wells were being connected. I began to
worry that my water might become contaminated by water from another well that
had too many chemicals or minerals in it.
3.
I was locked out of my house, and it was raining. I was upset.
Then, my teenage daughter came along and said “Don’t worry, Mom; I’ve
hidden a key outside the house.” She got
the key and opened the door, but I was angry at her for leaving a key outside
and making the house vulnerable to people getting into it.
In the context of a Dream Seminar,
these three dreams are invariably taken to be the dreams of one person. The consistent setting of a person’s house,
the theme of endangered boundaries, the affective tone of anxiety all suggest
an ongoing set of personal preoccupations worked out in various
configurations. In fact, however, these
dreams were brought by three different people to a plenary session of a
conference. The conference theme was
“The Uprooted Mind: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Living in an Un-Safe
World.” It included a number of
presentations on very difficult sociopolitical situations throughout the world
as viewed through the lens of psychoanalytic thinking. Smaller groups met after the presentations
for further discussion and to apply the ideas to other situations. In October 2003, the time of the conference,
intense feelings about the growing war in
In this context, Andrew Samuels, a
political psychologist, invited the membership to bring their dreams to the
next day’s plenary, framing them as being collective
dreams, dreamt on behalf of the entire group.
He did not call it social dreaming, but he was clearly suggesting that
the conference might not only bring the concepts of psychoanalysis to an
understanding of an un-safe world, but its process as well. So, the next day, in a group of 350 people,
the three dreams reported above were opened up, one emerging from work on the
other. After an initial defensive
attempt by members to elicit the dreamer’s associations, rather than their own,
and to interpret back into the dreamer, the group allowed for the possibility
of a truly “uprooted mind” and let the dreams belong to all of us. Once this happened, the dreams were worked
with a depth of feeling, the courage to face conflict and emergent levels of
understanding. The latter included the
tanks, wells and pipelines of
Interesting as this material is, I
would like to make only a few brief points about it. First, this extremely large group was,
despite its size, able to achieve a remarkable potential space. Second, the management and interpretation
activities described earlier were deftly carried out by the group leader
through framing the task, then consulting to process, and productive work
pairings with him emerged throughout the plenary. Third, the method of social dreaming was
extremely useful to conference members’ recognition of and tolerance for their
own unconscious participation in the social problems they deplored.
Finally, the dreams illuminated
another aspect of this conference: namely, its own genesis and silent fault
lines. This was the first conference
ever put together by all seven psychoanalytic organizations in
My primary point in this postscript
to my paper is that the establishment of a potential space and the method of
social dreaming illuminated the emotional underpinnings of this up-until-then
hidden inter-organizational moment.
Genuine work between and among organizations could take place once this
new entity of self-other relatedness had come into being and its underlying
concerns both experienced and shared.
While major questions certainly remain about what happened when the
conference was over and constituent groups re-differentiated themselves, there
are nevertheless astonishing moments to be savored in the overlap of a great
many people playing.