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Thinking Refracted in Organisations; W. Gordon Lawrence, MA, Dr rer. oec.
THINKING ABOUT THINKING |
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We are on the cusp of being in the Thinking Society, which will be attained once we have negotiated the transition from Capitalist-Industrial Society. This may take a few years. This transition is grounded in the paradigm shift we are all experiencing as communication, or Information, technology exponentially grows as a result of the scientific and technological discoveries arising out of quantum physics. The Thinking Society, which has been variously named as Knowledge, or Learning, or Creative Society, is one where the mind is valued as the most important assets of the society. We move less and less atoms, as we did in the industrial epoch, and now move more and more bits of information derived from thinking. Each of us, as members of ISPSO, has a contribution to make to the emergent Thinking Society. When Bion distinguished between Oedipus and Sphinx in the context of groups, he drew attention to the individuals with their private, inner, imaginal worlds, but also their capacity to think and give meaning publicly to their world (Bion, 1961, p. 8). Between these two, Oedipus and Sphinx, there is a symbiotic relationship, and it is something of this symbiosis that I want to address. Starting with Sphinx I am to address the question of thinking. Later I will indicate the connection between Sphinx and Oedipus (using these as short hand terms). Two preliminary points that are essential to my argument: (1) I want to convey the sense of thinking being refracted thinking, for knowledge, derived from experience, is not a body of thinking "out there" that has to be acquired through learning; it is rather both "out there" and "in here", as it is continually created. Thinking is refracted both ways because Sphinx and Oedipus are in a symbiotic relationship. One cannot exist without the other (2) We as human beings are thinking contexts. We think as total entities – not with part of our bodies, or features, or faculties of our minds and brains. David Bohm’s proposal is "that body, emotion, intellect, reflex and artifact are now understood as one unbroken field of mutually informing thought" (Lee Nichol, foreword to Bohm, 1992, xi, italics in original). This mirrors A.N. Whitehead’s view, expressed in his Science and the Modern World, that the universe is pure mind and thought. In this paper I am speculating. I shall do that in the time-honored fashion of developing working hypotheses. I shall be mistaken, to a greater or lesser degree, but this risk I have to run if something new is to be developed. And the chances are that you will disagree with me, but this is to be welcomed because it is a way of arriving at what may be truth in the course of the subsequent discussions.
1. Thinking and consciousness Experiencing-feeling-thinking is the process essential to our consciousness, and being. Without consciousness we cannot think or generate knowledge. However, consciousness is of a self-relating, or self-reflexive, character. As Searle describes it: Indeed it is the very subjectivity of consciousness that makes it invisible in a crucial way. If we try to draw a picture of someone else’s consciousness, we just end up drawing the other person (perhaps with a balloon growing out of his or her head). If we try to draw our own consciousness, we end up drawing whatever it is we are conscious of. If consciousness is the rock-bottom epistemic basis for getting at reality, we cannot get at the reality of consciousness in that way (Searle, 1992, p. 95, quoted in Polkinhorne, 1998 edn. p.57, italics in original). The strategy of science has been to see the world and its phenomena as being "out there". This strategy – of seeing reality as being objective – has been the fundamental, scientific posture since the Enlightenment. While the mind has to hold a degree of detachment because the results of science (with its measurement) have to be consistent with inter-subjective consensus, it is fatal for philosophy and the mental sciences. As Polkinhorne says, "Consciousness is not the epiphenomenal garnishing of a fundamentally objective and material reality; it is the route of our access to all reality. Refusal to take it seriously subverts the whole metaphysical enterprise" (Polkinhorne, 1998, p. 58). Consciousness enables us to see our experiences of the world as being of a piece and "has the characteristic of unbroken wholeness" (Zohar, 1990, p. 63), which enables us to perceive a unity and the "distinctive indivisibility of our thoughts, perceptions, feelings, etc. Without it, there could be no experience such as we know it and no self having that experience" (p. 60). While consciousness – as subjective feelings – exists in our heads, it depends, paradoxically, on the fact that we are social beings. This, I think, is the "social-ism" that Bion was pointing to (Bion, 1992, p. 122) when he wrote of "narcissism v. social-ism" in groups and the tussle between the ego-centric and socio-centric impulses in the individual. We do, in fact, co-create our worlds from our subjectivity. We do so by thinking. We are able to do so with confidence because we intuit that other minds exist and that we share our world. Objectivity, I am hypothesizing, is essentially inter-subjective agreement. 2. Organizations as thought products One way we can see the power and force of thinking is in organizations. Organizations can be seen as being a "thought product" (McKellar, 1968, p. 77) in the same way as a novel, or a poem or a sculpture. Someone, or some persons, had the idea of establishing a business to provide goods or services. The thinking of the people involved is to maintain its viability in relation to a changing environmental market. Thinking is essential for its continuance both "out there" as an objective, shared fact and "in here" as a subjective experience. 3. Forms of thinking Focusing on Sphinx, in the first instance, my working hypothesis is that there are four forms of thinking, each with its distinguishing subject area. These four forms can be viewed as a four-sided pyramid. The base of the pyramid, which will be a rectangle, can be allotted to the modality, or means, or way of thinking. A written text will be different from a dialogue or conversation, or a play, or novel or a text. The quality of the thinking will be different as it relies on these different methods of thinking, which will alter the content of thinking. There is, it can be hypothesized: first, thinking as BEING; second, thinking as BECOMING; third, thinking as DREAMING; and fourth, thinking as the "UNTHOUGHT KNOWN" (Bollas, 1987; 1989). My caveat is that I do not think that these are the only forms possible. Perhaps, one day, the pyramid can be extended to being a multi-faceted sphere – a three-dimensional version of Bion’s O. Will humankind then have the mind of the godhead? But this is a speculative phantasy! 3.1 Thinking as being refers to all the thinking that has ever been thought and is to do with living in the world, as it is perceived. The substance of this knowledge, generated by this type of thinking, is culture. This type of thinking (being was probably the first thinking that human beings brought into existence as they attempted to construct and create the meaning of the world in which they lived. As we think in the present tense we are inevitably caught up in thought in the past tense and in the future tense, but the very idea of tense, with its rules, is the product of thinking. An essential dimension of this form of thinking is the way that scientists view their world of natural phenomena. In short, whereas much of our understanding of psychoanalysis is grounded in an earlier version of scientific method that is based on a Cartesian-Newtonian mechanistic construction, we now live in a world which is conceptualized as being based on quantum physics. The objectivity of quantum physics requires a different orientation to the natural world. It is a new way of comprehending the reality of a solid-state world. Behind the solid-states of phenomena in our world lies another world of sub-atomic physics. This one is where all matter can be described equally well as either solid particles or waves. The wave/particle duality has been stated as the Principle of Complementarity. The wave and the particle complement each other; matter is either one or the other. A complete picture of reality can only be obtained when we take the two into account. However, this is a world of uncertainty and doubt. Heisenberg found that you can either measure, or fix, a wave or a particle, but it cannot be done at one and the same time. What has to be held in mind, as a working hypothesis, is that matter and mind are the same. They are composed of the same basic "stuff". They follow the same patterns of behaviour. There is congruency between the two. Even though they are about probabilities, the rules for the two are the same 3.2 Thinking as becoming is the thinking we engage with as we attempt to alter our state of being. If you will, it is always concerned with the future and arises from a sense of frustration, of wanting things to be different, or a sense of destiny. Although I have separated out these two forms of thinking, they interpenetrate each other. As we think of being we are always thinking of how reality could become. All the advances in the natural sciences, all the creativity associated with the arts of all kinds, have their roots in becoming. Both thinking as being and as becoming is in consciousness but they do have their origins also in the unconscious/infinite aspects of mind, or the infinite. I wonder if the Jewish discovery/invention of Yahweh marked the historical process of beginning to think of what could become. The point is that there had to be a symbolic, transitional object created from the subjective world for the future to be entertained and the notion of the perfectibility of humankind to be made immanent. But this is a speculation. When Bion wrote of "the shadow the future casts before" I have taken its meaning always in a literary, metaphorical sense hitherto. There is, however, a quantum way of looking at this process of becoming which Fred Wolf (1994) outlines, based on Fred Hoyle. I give it in a drastically simplified form. Quantum physics is grounded in a mathematical framework of non-observable entities. It is not an observable material field The fundamental entity is the quantum wave function. We have to think of the waves as "out there" in space. It is an imaginative leap to say that an event will occur. Any event it is a probability function, which specifies how likely a specific event, will occur at a specific location and time. For an event to happen here has to be a Stimulating event. This event produces quantum waves in one direction. There is also what could be called a Responding, or echo, event. This responding event (the hoped for-future-event) is in actuality an event that is occurring in the future. Because of that, it sends waves backward in time. Despite its bizarreness, the significant feature is that there is a necessity for two events to occur before there is actually one event. This has been called the "transactional interpretation" (John Cramer). Consciousness is the relationship between two events via this offer-response or echo. This is a quantum-physical mechanism. One way of conceptualizing the tension between particles and waves within the wave/particle duality is to understand them as the tension between being and becoming. 3.3 Thinking as dreaming occurs in the dream space which comes to be populated in a surreal way by significant others and events of our past and present. All dreamers are thinkers, according to Bion. The thinking is of a primary process nature. And just as there are thoughts in search of a thinker, so there are dreams in search of a dreamer. To be sure, dream comes from the unconscious, or the infinite, or the imaginal realm. Dreaming occurs while we are asleep. What the dream does is to set out in images, a "flash", a picture, the state of the relationship between ourselves and our environment, our past and our present. The dream is a metaphor that, once its meaning is disentangled through association and amplification, can provide a hypothesis of the actual state of our relationship with particular features of our social world. From that can be abstracted propositions of our life situation. The dream is a real experience, which always makes a synthesis of our state of relationship, and relatedness, with the environment. The dream inducts us into the parallel universe, which co-exists with the universe and the reality we know. This parallel universe does not operate on causal relationships. It works, as Jung identified, on synchronicity. Synchronicity is when two separate events are observed but are seen to be associated and to have an effect on other events. As Jung described it, there occurs a meaningful coincidence of events that are separated in space and/or time. It is the coincidence of subjective and objective happenings, which just cannot be explained causally. He pointed to this in the paper entitled "Synchronicity: an Acausal Connecting Principle" (cf. Jung, 1993, p. 96). Wolfgang Pauli, a collaborator of Jung, held the view that the unconscious was far more important in making theories about matter than physicists would give credence (Wolf, 1994, p.285). There is in the process of dream presentation the dreamer-who-dreams-the-dream and the dreamer-who-understands the-dream (Ogden, 1993, p. 235). The dream comes from the psyche, which can be seen as a "black hole". Once the dream is put into words we begin the process of wresting its "implicate meaning" (Ullman, 1975, p. 9) from what was explicate in the dream. This is a way of getting into the parallel universe that lies beyond our taken-for-granted picture of reality. Dreaming arises from the quantum realm between things (events) that relate and the mental relationships that exist between them. These relationships can be acausal, but typically associations (Matte-Blanco, 1988). The dream presentation, as it were, is an outcome of the quantum self as it ranges over our, conscious and unconscious, mental terrain, which in everyday life we would find impossible. In classical psychoanalysis the dream is seen primarily as belonging to the domain of Oedipus, and is interpreted in these terms. In this context of thinking, I see the dream as also being a Sphinx project, contributing to the epistemophilic drive of being a human being. The content of the dream distinguishes between Oedipus and Sphinx. When a dreamer has a dream as a citizen we know it is a "social dream". These ideas are set out in Social Dreaming @ Work (Lawrence, 1998) where the dreamer-who-understands the-dream is a matrix of people. In that book my colleagues and I make a case for using social dreaming as a method of action research in organizations. Our hypothesis is that everyone dreams while a member of an organization. These dreams will have links with being, becoming and the unthought known. They offer a different perspective on the organization, tapping into the unconscious, imaginal life of its members in their roles. By working on these dreams, using association, insight can be had into possible ways of development, though offering (very often lateral) insights, and so disrupting the rational and logical gestalt that everyone shares. Social dreaming has altered the nature of the container for receiving dreams. Whereas in classic psychotherapy the container for the dreams is the dyad, which determines the nature of the dream-as-contained, when the container is the matrix (a set of people) the content of the dreams is altered. The idea of container is central in the matrix because one is ushered into a larger domain of dreams and dreaming and resources for association and amplification. Dreaming is of equal importance to thinking as being, and thinking as becoming, and, indeed, thinking as the unthought known, yet because of our typical rational-logical perspective on the world, dreaming has become devalued, being seen as hallucinatory and tangential to the business of living. 3.4 Thinking as the unthought known can be conceptualized, I am hypothesizing, as both a quantum wave and as a quantum particle. Thought goes on all the time as a wave. But when examined it becomes a particle. The observer in this is essential. If you will, thinking unfolds, as it will, which James Joyce brilliantly illustrated in Ulysses. The dreaming process continues as we sleep, occasionally remembered as a dream. The buzzing confusion of our minds is unceasing, periodically remembered as a thinking wave or as a particle thought. The two cannot be measured, or examined, at the same time. There are thinking and thoughts to which we have limited access, but which are available through inter-personal communication, if we can make ourselves available. This is the unthought known, which Christopher Bollas put before us. Crudely, the unthought known is that which is known at some level but has never been thought or put into words, and so is not available for further thinking. Bollas determines this form of thinking thus:
Although transference lies at the heart of psychoanalysis, furthering understanding of the therapeutic dyad, I am hypothesizing that these feelings are present as an essential element of every social context. The are the unconscious forces, pregnant with emotions, present to some degree, in every human contact. They are a way of coming to know whatever it is that the Other, and ourselves, is creating. This knowing can also be destructive. Projective identification is when individuals dissociate themselves, or "split-off" aspects of their psyche, which cannot be contained, into the Other. The Other comes to experience this as her/his own. Telescoping much of the work on transference, counter-transference, and projective identification, I am merely suggesting that it is through these that one comes to know an aspect of reality that hitherto has been embedded (covered-up, inaccessible), in the reality. This is comparable to the implicate order of which Bohm speaks. As a psychoanalyst, Bollas is focusing on the individual. But I believe that the unthought known can also refer to a social system or organization, i.e. it is a Sphinx project. It is that knowledge, which can rarely be acknowledged through thinking, and remains unvoiced. Yet once it is acknowledged it makes a difference to the life of the organization, or the social system. The unthought known is the inchoate because it is lost in language and society that would provide the channels for knowing. Bollas writes, "Phantasy is the first representative of the unthought known in mental life. It is a way of thinking that which is there" (Bollas, 1987, p. 279). What is being pointed to is the importance of phantasy in discerning the existence of the unthought known, i.e., it postulates the existence of that which is there. The importance of phantasy is that it is the imagined representation of reality, which exist in fact (if this does not sound too bizarre.) They are forms of thinking derived from the capacity of the mind for imagination, illusion and hallucination. Thinking as dreaming and thinking as the unthought known point to the existence of the quantum self. This is the self that exists because of relationships; is brought into being through interaction. The idea that we are autonomous is erroneous and arises from narcissistic preoccupations. What we do know, from using this concept in organizational consultancy, is that once the unthought known is surfaced it makes a difference, forever. For example, in a family business one unthought known could be that a job in management has been made for the son-in-law. Everybody knows that he has been selected on the basis of being sponsored by the family. He does not hold his job because of merit. He never had to enter a contest for the job. This unthought known is never voiced. One result is the fabrication of the Lie. The lie is about competence and fitness to hold the role on the part of the son-in-law. There is collusion in sustaining the lie by people lower in the hierarchy of the organization who want to survive in the organization of the family firm, and so more and more lies are fabricated. Here, I am pointing to the denial of the unthought known, leading to the stating of untruths. This making of untruths is a collusive process that is based on joint evasion of getting to grips with the uncomfortable, unpalatable, unspeakable aspects of reality. This is in order to avoid whatever discomfort and pain may be associated with the naming of the unthought known. If thinking as being and thinking as becoming tend to have their origins in conscious thinking, though they are still influenced by the unconscious, or the infinite, thinking as dreaming and as the unthought known arise from the unconscious or infinite. Whereas the unconscious has tended to be seen negatively, I am hypothesizing that it has positive aspects. Both thinking as being and thinking as becoming are enriched and made to be more in touch with reality through the leavening of dream, particularly the social dream, and through the struggle to make the unthought known accessible for thinking, and, therefore, becoming part of our consciousness. The struggle is with our defences. 4. Modalities of thinking I now turn to the modalities of thinking, and, later in the text, to the psychic structure that is inherent to the existence of thinking. The method of thinking that we use in each of the four forms (thinking as being, becoming, dreaming and the unthought known) complicates what looks comparatively straightforward. We can see thinking as being done using two ways. This is the distinction made by David Armstrong (1998) when he says that there are two varieties of thinking: Thinking I and Thinking 2. In the former, thinking comes out of the process of thinking and owes its existence to a thinker. Epistemologically, thinking is prior to thought. Such thinking, and thought, is capable of being put forward as an exegesis, in a reasoned argument, which demands of the listener or reader that it be justified or falsified. To repeat: epistemologically, thinking is prior to thought. In Thinking 2, thought and thoughts are epistemologically prior to thinking. Bion (1970) expresses the idea as: thoughts exist without a thinker whom has to be received by a thinker (cf. Armstrong, 1992). Such thoughts just are; they are neither true nor false. They emerge from the not known, the infinite, from no thought, and are experienced as a frustration, a mystery. This echoes, in some measure, Peter McKellar’s idea that there are two ways of thinking: A-thinking and R-thinking. He derives from Eugene Bleuler (1857-1939) the term "autism" to refer to the thinking "which is fantasy-dominated, self-generated, and uncorrected by reference to external reality" (McKellar, 1968, p.78). McKellar uses A-thinking to "include fantasy, dreams and nightmares, visionary activity, hypnagogic imaginings, hallucination, and the like" (p.78). He contrasts this with R-thinking, which refer to the "thinking of the kind that is prominent in sane, adult wakefulness, in its most logical, realistic and prejudice-free moments…(it) is taken to include realistic appraisal in terms of the evidence, critical evaluation, and logical inference of the valid kind" (p. 78). A and R thinking, Thinking 2, and I can be seen as being the basis of each of the four forms I have indicated. II. PSYCHIC STRUCTURE Taking the complementary perspective to Sphinx, by focusing on Oedipus, we can now regard the place of the psychic structure that constructs, or, what I would prefer, refracts thinking. We can set the ego and the self within the pyramid of the four forms of thinking with its base representing modalities of thinking. What is thought, whether epistemologically before or after the fact of thinking, depends on the inner world, or life, of the individual. The thinking of the four forms is not always conscious. We know, now, that the unconscious, although always present and rarely named, is decisive in human perception ever since Freud brought it to the world’s attention, "into the foreground of modern intellectual concern," (Tarnas, 1991, p. 422). Bion, I think, catching on to the fundamental meaning of Freud that the unconscious was of no time and place, was limitless and boundary-less, saw that the polarity of conscious-unconscious needed to be reworked to take account of analytic understanding. Bion believed that this polarity had to be replaced with the finite-infinite, i.e., "Won from the void and formless infinite", which is a line from Milton, (Symington, 1996. p. 8). Each of the four forms of thinking has a dynamic existence, in that each is a dynamic process construed on the basis of what is taking place in the internal life of the thinker, using the various means of thinking. Each content of a thought is a representation of reality, and a version of potential truth. But these are each made by the individual psyche that constructs outside reality on the basis of the reality that is constructed in the inner world. The inner world will be wrestling with the existence of the finite-infinite, or, more conventionally, the conscious-unconscious. This two-way, participatory process (what is outside is inside and vice versa) is the unbroken wholeness. One might say, here, that thinking is like an electromagnetic field of which each human being is a part. It is hypothesized that in our mental life we take up different positions psychically. We are now in the realm of thinking that is initiated by the psyche. As human beings we live in a double environment, at one and the same time. We are, if you will, a context within a context. This double environment can be expressed as: "…internal and external, psychic and material, unconscious and deeply rooted in the life of the body and also conscious and deeply influenced by human relationships and all the pressures of the social culture (Guntrip, 1961, pp. 351-2). The connection, or links, between inside and outside are made by the psyche. It is always interpreting the reality of experience on a subjective basis. It would be more accurate to say that the psyche tends to be misinterpreting reality as it tries to preserve itself from pain and to enhance pleasure. This means that the impact of reality could produce unfavourable, or undesired, feelings in us that we wish to avoid. So human beings tend to find in reality what will give them pleasure and good feelings. In actuality reality is not manifested to us through raw, sense data. It is mediated through phantasy. As Joan Riviere put it: The phantasy life of the individual is the form through which the real internal and external experiences of the environment are interpreted and represented to the individual. They are completed under the influence of the pleasure-pain principle (Riviere, 1952, p. 41). All thinking as being, in particular, is grounded, in the first instance, in phantasy. Furthermore, it can be said that the elementary and primitive function of the psyche is continually to misinterpret the sensations and perceptions of reality, in order to save the psyche from the unpleasurable aspects of reality. This it does to maintain an apparently equable relationship with external reality for the purpose of having a pain-free existence. The sobering thought is that, for the most part, even civilized human beings are always directing their thinking processes to avoiding the unpleasant aspects of reality. There are two psychic positions, which, I believe, are always directed at being in touch with reality in the sense of striving to be cognizant of the true nature of reality. These are the depressive position and the tragic position. Symington (1986) hypothesized the latter. As adults our thinking about the real world is profoundly structured by our experiences of oscillating between the paranoid schizoid (essentially based in phantasy) and depressive positions (based on the acceptance of the starkness of reality, which is depressing and is, at its most realistic, tragic). On the other hand, the remaining position, the paranoid-schizoid one, pulls us to be out of touch with the state of reality. We are always seduced from being in touch with reality when we are anxious, and are seeking pleasurable conclusions. Then we do not want to know the ramifications and complications of knowing what reality would reveal when it promises pain. Here we see that the unconscious, or the infinite, has to be taken into account. The wish not to know reality takes the form of destroying the very processes of thinking, which is to be psychotic. A working hypothesis could be that the non-psychotic personality is always located in the unconscious. The encountering of the fateful vagaries of life result in the psychotic personality. The thinking associated with this can be rectified, put into touch with reality, once the individual rescues his thinking from the unconscious, or infinite, i.e. from his non-psychotic personality.[1] This rendition is an unsophisticated version of psychoanalytic thinking. Nevertheless, I hope it is sufficient to show that thinking is part of our lives from our beginnings and to show how thinking is refracted from the inside world to the outside environment. III. ENLARGING THE SPACE OF THE POSSIBLE THROUGH THINKING In the society Thinking is always enlarging the space of the possible. The problem for thinking persons is that they are always in a state of being at the limits of their comprehension. Attaining these limits encourages them to draw from the infinite, from what is not known, from the dream and the realm of the unthought known. Thinking is what gives science, art, literature, philosophy, sociology, psychology, psychoanalysis, management science, accounting, music and, indeed, all other disciplines their substance of knowledge, their scholarly presence. At the same time, thinking is ordinary. We all have a Ulysses like, buzzing internal conversation going on "in our heads" about all aspects of living and being in the world. Some of these will be banal or so trite that we do not notice them. Others will be such that they make a difference to what we may think in the future, and, more dramatically, may, once voiced, cause others to change their thinking. Thinking and consciousness are intertwined for they are self-reflexive, mutually informing activities All thinking occurs in an ecosystem, and it is forces of information from the external environment interacting with the reality of our inner worlds that enable us to think. Thinking is a product of the symbiosis between human beings and their ecosystem, at the species level and contributes to the larger phenomenon of life. My hypothesis is that every living entity, human or otherwise, is engaged in dreaming, or proto-dreaming, as a way of rehearsing, or working through, its relationships with the environment. I suggest those proto-dreaming lies at the heart of evolution. Through dream images and through dream work, no matter how vestigial, the organism explores its eco-systemic niche. To be sure, the primitive organism has no language, but is thinking in metaphor of how it can expand what is possible in its niche. Thinking is so basic, so essential, so taken for granted, so mundane, so elemental, that we never really think about its place in the human sphere. John Wheeler clarifies how the space of the possible comes to be expanded through thinking. He claimed that "the world cannot be a giant machine, ruled by any pre-established continuum physical law". Rather, he suggested, we ought "to think of the physical Universe as a gigantic, information-processing system in which the output was as yet undetermined" Wheeler coined the phrase "It from bit". ‘That is to say, every it – every particle, every field of force, even space-time itself – is ultimately manifested to us through bits (bytes) of (thought) information (Davies and Gribbin, 1991, pp. 300-1). The universe, however, is more than an information-processing system. Because of our cultural fascination with computers, we focus almost exclusively on information technology as messages contained in "bit strings" (Cohen and Stewart, 1995, p. 290). This focus on the software tends to overlook the necessity of taking into account the hardware. This is the human being as a total entity, as a context. Information is just information until we apply the process of thinking. Then the information has meaning, which makes a difference to our lives. Thus it can be said that the universe is a gigantic thinking machine whose outcomes are always in the process of discovery. We think to experience the physical universe, and by that process bring the universe, with all its diverse features, into being. Thinking is essential for our being and, of course, it is continually transforming reality. In the organization We experience this in the organization. While the people in businesses attempt to continue as they have in the past, they are always in a state of transition as they transform themselves from what they are in terms of being into what they are in the process of becoming. The business environment today exists in the world of a corporate environment is to be "brought into being" by the participation of managers in the environment as an ecosystem. In the thinking of participating managers, A-thinking and R-thinking will play their parts, even though unrecognized. Phantasy, too, will be ever present in the life of an organization in the way that reality is construed and in the evidence for the unthought known. There are explicit constraints, which are present because of the nature and quality of thinking. Bohm has been the most creative in thinking about thinking. He argues that everything that exists in our physical universe is though embedded in memory. He sees that what is wrong with what happens in the world arises from our capacity for fragmenting thinking. We make boundaries where there is really a close connection. So we have false divisions and false unification. Fragmentation is the result of thinking and thought being separated from feeling and from the body and we locate it all in the mind. The mind, in my view, represents the context from and with which we think. The mind itself, which does not exist in physical reality, is an outcome of contextual thinking. We think, or have thought, the mind into being. We think of thinking and the body as being different and so we come to experience them as different because we think of them as being different. Thought is participatory. At one and the same time as we think we take part in whatever it is we are thinking about, we also partake of the phenomenon. It is a two-way process. Thinking and thought have effects on us both inwardly and outwardly. Action research has made this central to our work. We have the perception that the world is in chaos but we are really saying that both thought and thinking are in chaos. Bohm writes: "That’s each one of us. And that is the cause of world being in chaos. Then the chaos of the world comes back and adds to the chaos of thought" (Bohm, 1992, p 14). Occasionally we find an order in the chaos that makes sense and, hopefully, satisfies criteria of logical and ethical judgement. The problem is that we can hold on to ordered thinking to the exclusion of making ourselves available for the chaotic thinking that lies behind the apparent order, and is the source of creativity. Another major aspect of thought is that "thought doesn’t know it is doing something and then struggles against what it is doing. It doesn’t want to know that it is doing it." Thinking hates the results it is producing. It wants to avoid unpleasant outcomes while it keeps on with that way of thinking. This is what Bohm calls "sustained incoherence" (Bohm. 1992 pp. 10-11). I have put forward some hypotheses, derived from psychoanalysis as to why this sustained incoherence takes place. Thinking, in a present continuous sense, arises out of inherited thought. To think a new thought means that we have totally inside of us all the relevant thought that has been thought and are able to make a new thought because we view the phenomena differently and can see a chink in the way that other people have thought to date. Winnicott’s (1971) ideas on "play" have a critical role here. I have offered a rudimentary way of approaching the complexity of thinking and thought and detailed how thinking is generated. I find it useful in the work of consultancy because I share the sentiments expressed in the epigraph that the company of the future will be "growing the consciousness within each person". Fostering thinking is one way that we do so. Two questions I want to leave you with. (1) How to integrate thinking, in the senses I have described (particularly dreaming and the unthought known) into the "guts" of consultancy? (2) How do we make the conscious-unconscious/infinite-finite central to our work, without giving the unconscious/infinite a pejorative loading? Bibliography Armstrong, D. (1992). Names, thoughts and lies: the relevance of Bion’s later writing for understanding experiences in groups. Free Associations, Vol. 3, Part 2 (no.26). Armstrong, D. (1998).Thinking Aloud: Contributions to Three Dialogues. In Lawrence, W.G. (1998). Social Dreaming @ Work. London: Karnac Books. Bion, W.R. (1961). Experiences in Groups. London: Tavistock Publications. Bion, W.R. (1970). Attention and Interpretation. London Tavistock Publications. Bion, W.R. (1992). Cogitations. London: Karnac Books. Bohm, D. (1992). Thought as a System. London: Routledge. Bollas, C. (1987). The Shadow of the Object. London: Free Association Books. Bollas, C. (1989). Forces of Destiny. London: Free Association Books. Cohen, J and Stewart, I. (1995). The Collapse of Chaos. London: Penguin Books. Davies, P. and Gribbin, J. (1991). The Matter Myth. London: Penguin Books. Fairbairn, W.R.D. (1952). Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality. London: Tavistock Publications. Guntrip, H.J.S. (1961). Personality Structure and Human Interaction. London:Hogarth. Joyce, J. (1939). Ulysses. London: Faber and Faber. Jung, C.G. (1993). The Basic Writings of C.G.Jung. New York: The Modern Library. Klein, M. (1946). Notes on some Schizoid Mechanisms. In Klein, M. Envy and Gratitude. London: Hogarth Lawrence, W.G. (1998). Ed. Social Dreaming @ Work. London: Karnac Books. Matte-Blanco, I. (1988). Thinking, Feeling, and Being. London: Routledge. McKellar, P. (1957). Imagination and Thinking. New York: Basic Books, Inc. McKellar, P. (1968). Experience and Behaviour. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Ogden, T.J. (1993). The Matrix of the Mind. New Jersey: Jason Aronson, Inc. Polkingthorne, J. (1998). Beyond Science. Cambridge: Canto. Riviere, J. (1952). On the Genesis of Psychical Conflict in Early Infancy. In Klein et al. Developments in Psycho-Analysis. London; Hogarth. Symington, N. (1986). The Analytic Experience. New York: St Martin’s Press. Symington, J. and N. (1996). The Clinical Thinking of Wilfred Bion. London: Routledge Tarnas, R. (1991). The Passion of the Western Mind. London: Pimlico. Ullman, M. (1975). The transformation process in dreams. New York: The American Academy of Psychoanalysis, 19, (2): 8-10. Winnicott, D.W. (1971). Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock Publications. Wolf, F.A. (1994). The Dreaming Universe. New York: Simon & Schuster. Zohar, D. (1990). The Quantum Self. London: Flamingo. Notes [1] I am grateful to William
Halton who formulated this in a recent Bion Reading Seminar. This accords
with Fairbairn’s conceptualization of the original ego being a whole
(Fairbairn, 1952), as I read it. Cf. also Klein (1946) where she points
to unconscious knowledge and insight.
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