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Transference, Counter-Transference, and Organisational
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| In this
presentation I will review the theory of transference and counter-transference
with new ideas on its application to organisational development consultancy
illustrated by vignettes from a consultation with an organisation that
promotes the performing arts.
Distinguishing Consciousness from Unconsciousness Psychoanalytic thinking concentrates on the tension between consciousness and unconscious processes and is a major influence in our understanding of human behaviour. In particular, by utilising counter-transference, psychoanalytically-oriented consultants gather data that would otherwise be inaccessible, and facilitates the formulation of working hypotheses (the systems psychodynamic equivalent of the mutative interpretation of the clinical situation in psychoanalysis). The counter-transference is the mechanism by which consultants listen to and are made aware of the unconscious meaning of communications between them and their client organisations. Transference and counter-transference and ‘thinking’ are three primary elements in elaborating organisational issues. ‘Thinking’ is crucial to all aspects of organisational functioning, and the form of consultancy we do differentiates the qualities of thinking in organisations.
Of particular interest to us, is the line dividing conscious from unconscious thinking - what is knowable and what is unknowable in the organisation. In our work we are attracted to the concept of holism, which considers that all parts of all systems affect one another. (Tarnas, 1991; Eden, 1994). In examining the connection and inter-relationship of parts to each other, and of parts to the whole, systems psychodynamics oriented consultants will bear in mind that they themselves form significant parts of the organisations they are consulting to. Miller (1990) captures the essence of the transference dynamic in group and organisational work when he states that:
Transference and Counter-transference in Organisational Consultancy Psychoanalytical approaches to organisational consultancy are viable and valuable insofar as they are formulated within a human listening context. The psychoanalytic position consists of listening as carefully and as fully as possible to what one is being told. The listening task is derived from the conclusion that whatever the human mind may be, it is complex, elusive, ever changing, to the extent that objective studies are in principle impossible. We can only listen in the broadest sense to the things that people tell us and hope to develop a way of thinking and speaking about our listening experience. Purely objective science has given way in psychoanalytically-orientated consultation to systematic subjectivity; the search for historical and objective truth has given way to formulating narrative truths, or working hypotheses. Myths give way to the formation of subjectively viable frames of reference. Psychoanalytic knowledge is not about a thing, but a body of thought concerning mutually enlivening relationship experiences. Our attempts to define and elaborate the perspectives from which we listen to the ways our clients (whether as individuals or groups) experience and represent themselves, hold much heuristic value for psychoanalytically orientated consultancy. In this way, it is possible to define the different types of emotionally laden exchanges with our clients and to study them from the psychoanalytic standpoint of listening and responding in the consultation encounter. In the organisation consultancy situation, active interpretation of the symbolic transference would resemble something like ‘how are you, manager, team or organisation, going to find a way of not repeating a particularly dreaded aspect of the past in the current situation?’ When the organisation cannot turn away from a destructive mindset with its environment, systems psychodynamic consultancy offers the hope of a re-orientation of organisational thinking. The consultant’s presence in the organisation is the trigger of thoughts, that reside in the area of organisational life that Bollas (1989) defines as the Unthought Known, i.e. they are thoughts that are inchoate and pre-conscious that everyone is thinking, but won’t acknowledge publicly. For example, a partner in a successful firm said in a meeting of senior staff that I was consulting to: "Going for the last million and thinking about the quality of your life has to be balanced. Levels of remuneration are not the only things in life". This thought had been at the back of many people’s minds and found its way to conscious expression in public by virtue of the consultant’s presence. The idea that thoughts are thought only when there is a container/receptacle to receive them, underlines the purpose of consultancy. Within the protected boundaries of the consultant-organisation relationship, the Unthought Known, the vastness of unexpressed, but felt wishes and fears - the acts of becoming and the failures of being - are opened for discussion, exploration and incorporation. The organisation is characterised by thoughts of becoming: ‘How do we make ourselves the best organisation in our field?’ But the organisation also has to contend with the unknown, the infinite and the unconscious, all of which inter-relate and oscillate between and with each other. In the counter-transference, the consultant becomes intimately involved with the thinking, conscious and unconscious, of the organisation. The consultant can be said to introject the client’s projections in an attempt to work out what is going on in the others’ mind. Searching out and focusing on the counter-transference is a way of utilising the feelings of the consultant to understand what is going on in the client’s mind. In other words, using the counter-transference (the consultant’s feelings, associations, dreams, and fantasies) is based on the psychoanalytical principle that the source of the consultant’s feelings is other people. Therefore, in the making of hypotheses about what is going on in the organisation at that time, we eschew the orthodox scientific demand for objective facts, but we speak of a fact subjectively. A subjective fact is real because it is based on real experience and real thinking.
The Arts Organisation Consultant’s Counter-Transferences (including how these are accessed - the methods) The Consultant’s Tools In a consultancy assignment with an organisation devoted to developing the performing arts, my methodological tools consisted of keeping a detailed diary of subjective experiences in which my feelings, thoughts, ideas, emotions, dreams and working hypotheses that resulted from every contact I had with the organisation were recorded. These recordings focused on how the organisation and I related and were used to formulate working hypotheses about the work as it progressed. The diary formed the basis of my formal working notes that were sent to my interviewees in the organisation and which formed the tableau of dialogue between myself and client organisation. The working notes included working hypotheses and I will produce one later as an illustration.
Keeping track of all available evidence, including the consultant’s own emotional state and how it is affected by the work, serves the psychoanalytically-oriented consultancy. These methods help to distinguish between my fantasies and the client’s fantasies; to distinguish between what is a fantasy, what is indirect information and what is fact: namely, using all the data that separates and distinguishes what is conscious and what is unconscious. First contact with the performing arts academy (let us call it the British Academy of the Performing Arts) was a telephone call from Duncan, director of one of four departments. As he talked on the telephone, I had the impression of a clever, determined and ambitious person, even a little ruthless. He was undeterred about wanting to engage me, although we had not met yet. On the telephone, he told me in some detail about the difficulties he was having with administrative staff in his department all of whom he wished to fire. Duncan wanted to meet with me as soon as possible. At the meeting, Duncan explained in great detail how his department functioned, what the issues were and how he saw the solutions. His administrators used antiquated office systems, and had established a cosy cartel of workers who refused to adapt their working methods to the demands of the department. A disciplinary hearing against one of the administrators was pending, masterminded by Duncan who was forcing the Chief Executive’s hand to set an example to the Academy on discipline, but the matter was dragging on, largely because of the Chief Executive’s placatory attitudes. Very soon, Duncan was weighing in against the Chief Executive, the Academy’s administration. Duncan was fighting on all fronts simultaneously. He wanted to change things in his own department, in the Academy as a whole and in the larger employing authority. I was intrigued by the unfolding scenario and by Duncan’s thinking. He seemed to have clear ideas on how the Academy should "be" and how it should conduct itself with the employing Authority. He was a role holder and a thinker. He seemed to confirm McKellar’s idea (1968. P.78) "that an organisation is a thought product and arises from a convergent system of all the role-holders as thinkers, and that their thinking will be a reflection of the rational as well as ‘autistic’ thinking. Duncan was clear in his own mind that I should work with the Chief Executive and his other senior managers. Duncan was full of complaint about this and that and reckoned that he could do a better job than the Chief Executive could. He was contemptuous of the Chief Executive whom he said would do nothing about the appalling administration in the Academy, because he did not wish to ‘rock the boat’. Outputs: The Academy’s ideal output is professional musicians and actors. Duncan’s department had different throughputs. It certified musicians. It was like a mail-order business issuing the right kind of certificates to order. The place and role of the administration was vague. If ‘creativity’ went in one direction, i.e. the artists, then destructiveness appeared to be held in the ‘distance’ learning section of Duncan’s department. The administrators in Duncan’s department as a group never got to see actual students. Reworking the Primary Task of Duncan’s Distance Learning Department: I felt I was becoming identified with Duncan by sharing his feelings of irritation with the administrators. I caught myself believing the formulae Duncan put forward to resolve his department’s problems. On the other hand, the administrators had had projected into them ‘clerkishness’, a particular Dickensian type of clerkishness, and if they could be helped to understand their projections, the administrators and others would understand what they were making each other into. Trevor, the subject of the disciplinary hearing, had been made into tragic figure. He had acted out the part given to him. Using the dramatic metaphor, the Academy is everyone’s stage, but the people in Duncan’s department have no stage. Their work now was to rework the question of their primary task. At that time, they looked like they were operating on a warehouse model. It was a form of distanced learning and mail order. But in fact, it was one branch of the Academy, which could have expanded immediately and quickly. For example, they could convene summer schools in different parts of the world for final examinations. They could help frustrated musicians lead master classes all over the world. This group needed to re-conceptualise their task e.g. to move in the direction of being an extra-mural department of the Academy, opening up and exploring new markets. In this way the Department would generate more money. Currently, life in Duncan’s department is a rejecting one. If the people could re-invent their roles they could become successful. For example, they could market the Academy’s certificates in the ex-colonies, organise teaching and examining in the EU and Eastern Europe. The department could become a paradigm for re-learning. Evolution of the Consultancy
Cultural achievement, by way of producing well-trained musicians and actors, is the main objective of the Academy. Teachers and Heads of Departments are mindful of the difficulties and challenges of teaching students their highly specialised and refined craft. They are aware of the drive towards fame and distinction that motivates parents and pupils on the one hand, and the reality of the world of art with limited opportunities, the tough struggle, dedication and loneliness, on the other. But it is in the nature of the performance of music and drama that interlocking arrangements between departments, sections and individuals have to be made. This requirement for co-operative endeavour was at variance with the individualistic, creative nature of artists. This tension between part and whole, individual and group, "chorus and speaking part", was present in all interviews; organisationally the tension is manifest most acutely between the Directorate (the Chief Executive, the Director of Administration and Academic Registrar) and Heads of Department. Despair and Renewal: Transference to the Consultant The feeling of not being able to escape from disillusionment, permeated many of our discussions. It was as if art itself had turned into a failed transitional object, one which was meant to stand between the shortcomings of the world of reality and the fantasised world of perfection. I frequently felt that the respondents wanted me to do something about these failures - in particular to rearrange relationships between the Directorate and the Heads of Department so that everyone could be restored to a previous idealised state of being.
Discussions with the Chief Executive and his team produced strong feelings of being engaged in important work. Many of the topics discussed by the respondents, like the role of art in society, interested me personally. I had to guard myself against over-identifying with the respondents and their questing drive to provide good, wholesome, affirming solutions to an uncomprehending world. It seemed to me that by being immersed in art, the respondents hoped they could set themselves apart from the ordinariness of life and the problems of ordinary people. The Academy building itself was solid and fortress-like, protected by security guards and thick walls. Into this atmosphere of a lack of direction and mutual suspicion, I was invited to act as a consultant in order to help the Academy "find its way" and to "give it direction". I felt my omnipotence was being mobilised. I could not afford to ignore those signals and its counterpart, failure. The issues belonged to organisation-as-a-whole dynamics; and I had to keep my mind on helping people to take authority to interpret the situations they were in. The key, I told myself, was not to take upon myself the responsibility for solving the Academy's dilemmas. When I found myself doing so, it could only mean that I had been forced out of my role as consultant as a reflection of how staff and students were failing to achieve theirs. I could not help wondering at times that I too was vulnerable to the fantasy that I myself would be fired, given the nature of the first contact with the Academy and Duncan’s wish to fire a member of staff. (The first session contains all the key themes). Pressures to conform to and confirm the respondent’s perceptions of self and other have bearing on the way the consultant manages to work with different parts of the organisation. I understood my feelings of welcome and engagement, and intrusion and redundancy to be part of the daily reality of experiences in the Academy; that as consultant, I was being exposed to their feelings of anxiety which are rooted in the denied and repressed destructive sides of creative people. Perversely, the conflict between creativity and destructiveness was dealt with by projecting the Academy's ego ideal on to the father/Chief Executive, thus making him a model, an object of identification, in order to become like him in the hope of replacing him at the side of mother/Art. Pupils and staff encouraged by the acclaim and admiration of audience, critic and sponsor live with the illusion, based on an immature ego, that they are adequate for mother/art and have nothing to envy in father/reality. The artist's narcissism is projected onto part objects; he subjects them to an idealising process in order to preserve his convictions. His ego ideal thus remains attached to a pre-genital level of development.
Example of a Working Hypothesis Leadership, fights and containment Staff in the Academy are struggling to contain the educative process, but it gets lost. Instead, the Academy lurches from crisis to crisis. It has a resigned, it-will-be-alright-on-the-night- attitude; dicing-with-death themes abound in all discussions that members of staff have had with me. A bad performance is death: death of the self, death of the artist. Some staff members are caught up trying to introduce order, but it will not succeed, because they do not know what the order is about, nor do they understand the nature of the conflict and chaos that order is meant to protect them from. So new forms of order turn into new forms of persecution; the Steering Group steers nothing and the Directorate directs nothing because it does not deal with the purpose of the Academy in its systems, not does it deal with management as "containment". Working hypothesis
Was the Work Consultancy or Performance? As tension between the Chief Executive and myself mounted, he declared that "in the relationship between the Academy and the consultant, there must be the confidence that the consultant has the understanding of the Institution". Ironically, this statement was made many times to me before in connection with the employing authority, supporting the fantasy of the Academy’s specialness that no outsider could possibly appreciate. The nature of the consultancy work with the Academy was to try and understand the Academy and its environment, so that negativity in the Academy could be tempered, morale and job satisfaction increased and staff helped to manage themselves more effectively in their roles. To be sure, I enjoyed the experience; the people I interviewed were struggling with professional and organisational problems that were familiar to me. I felt they were a cut above the rest - artistic, young, attractive, ambitious, determined, intelligent and articulate. It is part of their work too to be in touch with their feelings and emotions. There was synchronicity between us. However, the Academy could not abandon its belief that artists are born and must be nurtured to produce pure forms of art. A fierce morality supported the organisational view that from the point of entry into the Academy, there is a discernible line of development that will enable the artist to achieve virtuosity. Compliance, it is believed, is the enemy of virtuosity. This is a central dynamic to understanding the Academy: their belief in the possibility of achieving the nearly-impossible. It highlights the tension between the individual and the group for which we owe so much to Freud (1921) and Bion (1961). This state of being can be compared also to Winnicott's ideas about the infant's innate morality and the capacity for concern. So, the artist feels that to compromise on his chosen role is wrong, "even to the extent of dying for his principle". (Winnicott, 1960). Compared with these powerful forces for near-numinous experiences, the exigencies of daily organisational life are annoying and made more so by the reminders made by the consultant.
The implication here is that for artists, and those around them, there can be no other ambition except that which has become part of the self. An over-arching morality, based upon the uniqueness of individual production that characterises the narcissistic self, involves sacrificing group and organisational life. Organisationally, the Academy’s realities of existing and functioning in a competitive environment had threatened the morality of virtuosity. It appeared that the zealous wish to achieve virtuosity had entered the Academy-consultant relationship requiring near-perfect performance by the consultant. The narcissistic position of "I am/we are the best/do not need assistance from any other" had to be upheld. Any suggestion that performance could be "good-enough" had to be rejected. The organisation did not experience separateness from the environment, and insofar as it was possible to talk about the organisation's "self" at all, there was no difference between what is the performer and what is not the performer. The audience, the critic, the employer are all one. The consultant too must be "at one" with the Academy; he must not see things differently. "No object external to the self is known" [by the baby]. (Winnicott, 1960). The artist and performer must acknowledge the complex inter-relatedness of many parts that assist in the achievement of his talents. For most, solo virtuosity is never achieved. For those who do not achieve it, the virtuoso carries the hopes, and the envy, of everyone to do the impossible - to rise above the limits of themselves and achieve masterful, superlative states of being. The consultant who does not share that vision of human nature, or that perfect states of integration are illusory, is turned into a ‘bad object’ and must be ejected. And that is what happened. My early fantasies about being lumped with the administrators who were about to be fired, turned after a year into an acted-out dynamic in which I was fired, I believe, for presenting options to the management that did not fit the fantasy of achieving solutions without having to compromise. The Academy had found a way of working with the dynamics of creativity in a world of limitation. The emotional task for the consultant was to acknowledge the tension within himself between his urge for creativity and the realities, inner and outer, of the client organisation. References Bion, W. (1961). Experiences in Groups. Tavistoxk Publications, Lonson Bohm, D. (1994). Thought As a System. Routledge, London and N.Y. Bollas, C. (1989), Forces of Destiny. London. Free Association Books. Eden, C. (1994). New Futures, at Whose Cost? In: Boot, R., Lawrence, J., & Morris, J., Managing the Unknown. McGraw-Hill Book Company, London. Freud, S. (1921). Group Psychotherapy and the Analysis of the Ego. In: Strachey, J. (ed) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London. Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953. Vol. 18. Lawrence, W.G. (1998). Thinking Refracted. A Working Paper. Lawrence, W.G. (1998). Social Dreaming as a Tool of Consultancy and Action Research. In: Lawrence, W.G. (1998). Social Dreaming @ Work. Karnac Books. London. Miller, E. J. (1990) Experiential Learning in Groups I: The Development of the ‘Leicester’ Model In: Trist, E. and Murray, H. The Social Engagement of Social Science: A Tavistock Anthology. Free Association Books, London.) Tarnas, R. (1991) The Passion of the Western Mind. Pimlico, Reading, UK. Winnicott, D. W. (1960). The Relationship
of a Mother to her Baby at the Beginning. Tavistock Publications.
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