Experiences in Groups: And Other Papers
Abstract
A classic study which, by synthesizing the approaches of psychoanalysis and group dynamics, has added a new dimension to the understanding of group phenomena.
... Athletes who overly identify with group norms may suppress their individuality, leading to psychological tension and diminished mental health [15,16]. This aligns with observations that group psychology suppresses individual critical faculties, leading to autonomy loss and increased dependency on authority figures [21,22]. SIT-based interventions, such as team programs emphasizing individuality within a cohesive group framework, can mitigate these effects and foster psychological resilience [15]. ...
... Freud's concept of ego idealization explains how athletes, through intensified identification with authority figures (like coaches), lose their critical perspective and develop psychological structures that are overly dependent on external validation [9,11]. This resonates with the observation that group psychology can suppress the critical faculties of individual members, resulting in a loss of autonomy and increased dependency on authority figures [21,22]. Freud's concept of group pressure aligns with the societal emphasis on conformity and hierarchy in South Korean sports teams. ...
... Also, of great importance for a deeper understanding of the current situation in Russia, is Earl Hopper's group-analytical approach. Hopper extended the three basic assumptions in groups described by Wilfred Bion (1961) by adding a fourth basic assumption. This is based on the influence of traumatic experiences (Hopper 2003). ...
... On the subconscious level of Ukrainian society as a large group, the experience of political effectiveness, which is evident in the implementation of state independence and social reform, could also have contributed to a better processing of the traumatic experiences of the 20th century. With Bion (1961) one could speculate whether the election of Volodymyr Zelenskyi as president in 2019 marked the unconscious transition from the basic assumption of "fight and flight" to the basic assumption of a rescuing pair formation in which the presidential couple are imagined as the saving leaders of the larger group. ...
Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine, which began on February 24, 2022, was met with disbelief in the West. A war in the center of Europe was no longer considered possible by many. Yet Russia's aggression against Ukraine had begun eight years earlier. The fading out of imperial behavior of other former Soviet republics requires its own explanation. This article focuses primarily on historical events that were reflected in the Russian and Ukrainian large group matrix that had an impact on the emergence and course of this armed conflict. In doing so, the author draws on Vamik Volkan's findings on the significance of chosen traumas and glories in collective memory, as well as on Earl Hopper's fourth basic assumption about the consequences of unprocessed traumas in the unconscious life of small and large groups.
... Faced with choosing objects of desire coated with ambivalence, betrayal, disdain, and pity, the colonized may become reinvigorated by a figure who activates fantasies of refusal and reversal of loss. Wilfred Bion theorized group dynamics to show that in the interplay between leader and group the latter creates the former (Bion 1961). In other words, a person is placed into the role of leader by a group's collective unconscious fears and wishes. ...
Theorizes unconscious aspects of sports fandom in the context of identity and empire.
... All three texts aligned with the norms of the field of child psychotherapy in their adherence to the assumed truths of psychodynamic theory, evolved from Freud and his followers. This can be seen within the text explicitly through referencing key historical theorist within the field, like Sigmund Freud (1913Freud ( , 1930, Sándor Ferenczi (1949), Melanie Klein (1946), Anna Freud (1936), Donald Winnicott (1953Winnicott ( , 1956, and Wilfred Bion (1962Bion ( , 1969. Adherence to these theories was also expressed through the use of terms like 'normal' and 'ordinary' to explain the phenomena of human's internal and unconscious psychic life. ...
Despite working at the intersections of numerous cultural and social differences, child psychotherapists face a shortage of literature and theoretical foundations to enable the integration of clinical and cultural approaches. This lack of integration appears to cut across different domains, including literature, training programmes, and the competencies outlined by regulating organisations such as registration boards. The primary objective of this research is to contribute to the exploration of cultural discourses in child and adolescent psychotherapy. It seeks to examine how cultural discourses may play a role, both consciously and unconsciously, in promoting Western and Eurocentric practices, and the associated power dynamics that maintain their superiority. Grounded in activist scholarship and a critical realist perspective, the research paradigm utilised Fairclough's (2010) Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to analyse three texts. Critical social, Indigenous, intersectional feminist, and queer theory informed the analysis of the following findings: i) the field of child psychotherapy constructs humans through Western and Eurocentric assumptions about being and knowing. This creates specific assumptions regarding 'normal' and 'ordinary;' ii) the social power relations within the texts are embedded within colonial hierarchies and logic; iii) There are voices, within the literature review and texts that were analysed, that call for changes in the 'cultural atmosphere,' advocating for greater diversity in theory and capacity for dialogue. The research project is contextualised in Aotearoa New Zealand and aims to generate dialogue in regard to the development of child psychotherapy practice that upholds Te Tiriti o Waitangi and advocates for a more inclusive, culturally sensitive, and equitable approach to working with children, young people, and their families.
Positive work relationships often emerge when coworkers blur the boundaries of their work and nonwork lives in their interactions. A growing body of scholarship suggests that such boundary blurring increasingly occurs in a variety of nonwork settings. However, existing research has drawn mixed conclusions about whether boundary-blurring interactions in nonwork settings lead to beneficial or detrimental outcomes for coworker relationships. Through an inductive study of users of the exercise platform Peloton, we build theory on how and why a nonwork interaction setting facilitates work-nonwork boundary blurring that leads to positive work relationships. Our findings demonstrate that informants perceive Peloton as having a unique set of characteristics that filters out the discomfort of interacting with coworkers in a nonwork setting and provides them with new ways of understanding the potential of their coworker relationships. These two processes enable Peloton to function as a relational holding environment or — a social context that reduces uncomfortable relational affect and facilitates relational sensemaking. Experiencing Peloton as a relational holding environment motivates informants to deepen their existing positive relationships and forge a broader set of positive relationships across work-related silos. Our theory advances scholarship on work-nonwork boundaries, positive work relationships, and the psychodynamic literature on holding environments. It also has important implications for how managers and employees navigate social contexts to facilitate positive work relationships.
One of many challenges in group supervision is the question of how to keep every participant engaged and fully available for learning. This paper describes a group supervision structure that uses Deliberate Practice (DP) to involve every participant in the group through the development of therapeutic skills intended to enhance the effectiveness of their work with clients. A case example illustrates how this process unfolded in the context of therapy with a specific client, conducted by a psychiatrist undergoing psychotherapy training in a deliberate practice supervision group. Analysis of video recordings of group supervision sessions and notes on solitary deliberate practice are used to illustrate how a DP structure engaged all participants in the group, while also facilitating the clinical development of the supervised psychiatrist and enhancing patient outcomes. A DP approach to group supervision enables participants to learn from each other's cases, through the deployment of flexible activities that engage all members of the group while also providing personalized skills training.
The unfolding of affective experiences and their collective organization in forms of mnestic traces progressively define the emotional tone that characterizes the link between a community and its environment. The authors explore and analyze a case study of conspiracy beliefs that have developed in the last decade in Southern Italy following the spread of a bacterium that has caused serious damage to agriculture. Xylella fastidiosa is an allochthonous bacterium responsible for a phytosanitary disaster in Apulia (a region in southern Italy) which resulted in a profound economic, social and cultural crisis that erupted into a deep conflict between the population and the Italian and European government institutions. In this context of general mistrust, where finding what to believe and to whom to blame is a task of survival, conspiracy theories respond to epistemic, existential and social needs providing immediate and reactive explanatory narratives that can fill the meaning voids and alleviate disorientation and suffering. The action of collective archaic defense mechanisms leads to the formulation of narrations of events with deeply emotional connotations. Psychoanalytic theorizations, such as basic assumptions (Bion, 2003), psychic retreats (Steiner, 2003) and transitional space (Winnicott, 1951) offer precious frame for describing sensemaking processes and their possible outcomes as psychosocial phenomena in times of uncertainty and conflict.
the last 15 years, the public mental health sector has been subject to two big policy shifts that have impacted the ability of Community Mental Health Teams (CMHTs) and Specialist Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS) clinics to deliver therapeutic services. This paper discusses the impact of the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) policy and the Health and Social Care Act (2012) on these services and the various barriers to effective treatment that they have created. The author then proposes that, as psychoanalytic psychotherapists, with our particular awareness of unconscious and group processes, we are well-placed to support multidisciplinary colleagues in overcoming feelings of hopelessness, anxiety and impotence that these policy shifts create and takes inspiration from potentially analogous situations with patients as a method to approaching the systemic aspects of our work.
Daniel Ellsberg was an outspoken critic of the nuclear arms race, American nuclear war fighting strategy and the policy of deterrence based on so‐called mutually assured destruction. With courage and a deep moral conviction, he raised an often‐lone voice challenging our denial of the world annihilating potential of a nuclear exchange. His passing offers us a chance to reflect psychoanalytically on the minimization and denial of this and other world threatening existential threats and the omnipotent, hubristic belief in the assumed perfectibility of technology—the absolute conquest of nature by humankind. Together, the twin harbingers of mindlessness, silence and refusing to see, comprise a foundation on which rests the dangerous anti‐thought linked to the possibilities of omnicide and world destruction.
What is ontological (in)security? Recent scholarship on ontological security in International Relations has increasingly turned to the concept's theoretical origins in psychoanalysis and existential philosophy to address the field's (meta)theoretical limitations. This article argues that this development also necessitates an interrogation of the concept of ontological security itself to address the field's theoretical tensions. Further developing the nascent Kleinian approach to ontological security, this article conceptualises ontological (in)security as two distinct positions that denote the different ways in which subjects, be they individuals, groups, or states, manage anxiety. To develop this proposition, the article draws on Melanie Klein's work on the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions to elucidate these positions of ontological (in)security, their respective defence mechanisms against anxiety, and their socio-political implications. This Kleinian approach facilitates a clear theoretical distinction between security and insecurity, providing an analytical toolbox to differentiate the various ways in which anxiety is managed in different positions. This framework particularly underscores the ethical, reparative, and transformative potential of the position of ontological security, aspects that have received limited theoretical and empirical attention to date.
This article explores key aspects of man-made human suffering from a psychoanalytic, group-analytic and group attachment standpoint. It postulates that, when unresolved individual and group trauma remains untreated, it can be a fuel for vicious cycles of hatred, terror and destruction. In order to explore this, the article focuses on the intractable Israel–Palestine conflict; it invites the reader to reflect on the Jewish Holocaust and the Palestinian Nakba and their role in the perpetuation of the ongoing conflict. It includes a clinical case study of a Holocaust survivor who benefited from combined individual and group psychotherapy and became able to come to terms with her traumatic past. The aim of the present research is to encourage working harder for peace, endeavouring to achieve a deeper understanding of unconscious individual and group psychological defence mechanisms in the clinical setting as well as the sociopolitical context.
In discussing “Embodies a Coaching Mindset” (Chap. 7), the supplementary competency, remains objective and aware of the team dynamics and patterns, was introduced. This chapter will delve deeper into some of the dynamics experienced in teams and between teams, examples of how they can manifest, and ideas on how a team coach can best remain objective. As discussed in Chap. 1, while not all groups are teams, every team is a group. Therefore the terms, team and group dynamics are used interchangeably throughout the chapter.
The wars between Russia–Ukraine and HAMAS–Israel have challenged democratic nostrums that violent conflict can be resolved by other means. This paper uses human systems theories to try and answer the question: are humans ready for peace? A scoping review includes international relations, attachment, epigenetics, reproductive competition, group processes, life history, terror management, psychoanalytic and crowd psychology. The material is organised using Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model. Findings suggest humans are no more innately aggressive than they are cooperative. Based on the history and environment of early hominids the fundamental human social system remains that of the tribe, but the intensity and ferocity of modern warfare developed with the nation state. Culture, religion and political ideologies are late additions to human development but hard to change. Conversely gene expression (epigenetics) is actually more responsive to environmental change. Wars will decrease when there is a reproductive advantage in peace. The most promising policy is a global initiative to promote girls’ education. Not that women are any less aggressive than men, but females invest more in protecting their children and with female empowerment so males are more involved in childcare. Both sexes will have a greater investment in resolving conflicts without recourse to war.
Transference-focused psychotherapy (TFP) was originally conceived as an extended, individual outpatient treatment. Our goal is to describe the development of group treatment interventions informed by TFP principles in two different settings: a program for adults in Munsterlingen, Switzerland, and a program for adolescents in Cologne, Germany. We outline the essential elements of TFP-informed group treatment and the role these group treatments play in the comprehensive programs offered to patients at these two sites. Group TFP theory for adults, as developed by Kernberg, builds on a foundation of group dynamics and theory described by Bion and others. Offering any group treatment designed for patients with personality disorder diagnoses requires specific modifications; integrating TFP principles into group treatment can add an extra dimension to these offerings, adding insights derived from object relations theory. These two examples are reflective of the growing movement in sites in multiple countries adapting TFP principles for work in group settings. For example, the innovation of TFP group treatment for adolescents with borderline personality disorder (BPD), underscores the importance of the peer group in the treatment of this population in a group setting. This leads to a triadic situation and due to this, several challenges are in place that play an important role in the life of adolescent borderline patients. The special perspectives with this population are discussed based on group therapy experiences in a day hospital program and in this chapter explored in the context of a broader movement of TFP-informed group work.
The authors explore the group leader's considerations before removing a group member from group sessions. The authors integrate an approach that warns against a too hasty decision without considering the group-as-a-whole dynamics and the possibility of scapegoating, with the approach that looks at the group therapist's countertransference that prevents them from considering the group's best interest. The rule of thumb the authors suggest is that when a severe breach of the group agreement happens, especially continuously, and when it cannot be followed by exploration, reflection, and an agreement by the group member who violated the agreement to make an effort to avoid repeating this event, the group leader might consider removing the person from the group. The article distinguishes between removing a member in the early stages of the group and at later stages of the group's development. It also recommends exploring this issue with the group and following up with the removed member. Special attention is given to cases of racism, microaggressions, and trauma.
Cyberspace arrived with the promise of the availability of information without sufficient cautions regarding how this information might be managed or utilized. In the face of information overload, divisiveness prevails and ideology replaces reflectivity in guiding our ideas and behavior. Totalitarian, oppressive forces are on the rise, easily recognizable in our pressured, rigid, and unreflective political structures, but equally concerning in other institutions. Groups turn towards anxiety-reduction and lose touch with stated goals. Finding a common enemy can feel reassuring and discharges pent-up aggression but, as the reflective thought required for working through difficult problems recedes, anxiety increases, reflective capacities decrease, and the cycle continues. These difficulties are compounded in virtual forums, where pretense and obfuscation flourish even more easily than when we are confronted with the actualities of other persons. Reflectivity seems hard to come by, impeding the epistemic trust so crucial to making meaning together and solving mutual problems. How we encourage growth—and greater maturity and care—in those around us remains a challenge. A psychoanalytic lens may help us more effectively grapple with the complexities underlying ideological fervor and push back against totalitarianism in oppressive structures wherever we encounter it.
Nine members of the Collaborative Artful Narrative Inquiry network (CANI-net) gathered to explore a regenerative intention. This article tracks our interplay of writing, making, and moving together and questions that arose: How do we go about regenerating? Can we find openings to processes happening outside awareness? How does the refrain “now let’s write” act in relation to the un/intention of regeneration? Is our material, embodied co-presence regenerative? Answers were intimated through listening, touching hands, printmaking, and sculpting clay; in letting things be said and unsaid, writing as response, in making shapes and animal sounds, and dancing Zorba’s Dance.
Analytic awareness of the process of meaning-making involves tracking premonitions and intuitions to their sources. As precursors of symbolic processing, premonitions are essential elements in any relationship, including the analytic relationship. They provide unconscious communication that informs and amplifies internal and external body and object relations. These relations facilitate depth and dimensionality between and within persons. They also enable the representational processes to establish psychic structure. When traumatized, a person can lose faith in these processes and defend against relationship. Exploring precursors of the emotional experiences of hope and dread enables the analytic dyad to re-vitalize lost potentials and the representation of experience. A clinical example is given to demonstrate the application of these ideas.
The impact of the decline of democracy on clinical work in analytic groups is explored. With examples of the erosion of democracy in the 21st-century, such as the growth of populism, fundamentalism, and certain understandings of ‘cancel culture’, it is argued that the decline of democracy poses an increased threat to the therapeutic efficacy of analytic groups. It is argued that, while it is essential to retain the distinctively group analytic stance that it is the group that is the therapeutic agent of change, a refocus and revision is needed of Foulkes’ 20th-century understanding of the role of the group conductor in their relationship to the group norms, steering a careful path between the conductor relying on their own authority alone and allowing norms reflecting the decline to democracy to dominate the culture of analytic groups. The changes locate the conductor firmly and inextricably as a political agent and point to a heightened vigilance to aspects of the erosion of democracy as they inevitably appear in analytic groups. Drawing on aspects of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Language, the philosophical underpinnings of Foulkes’ thesis, that it is the group that is the agent of therapeutic change, are highlighted. These help to articulate hope in the context of the powerlessness and despair that can threaten to overwhelm in the current political climate.
There is recognition that teams act as a locus for the sensemaking activity that underpins social workers’ judgement. Research has highlighted that teams also provide emotional support for practitioners. Although sensemaking involves emotional and social processes, there has been limited examination of how emotional support in teams interacts with sensemaking. This article uses the Team as Secure Base (TASB) model as a framework for presenting findings from an ethnographic study of four social work teams in England. Data comprise interviews with social workers and supervisors (n = 22) and fieldnotes from observations (n = 23). Teams exhibited behaviour consistent with the domains of TASB, creating a space for safe exploration of social workers’ thoughts and feelings. However, while a strong sense of team membership contributed to participants’ sense of safety and self-efficacy, this impacted on sensemaking in other ways, such as giving less weight to the views of those who were not team members.
The group analytic concept of the matrix was developed by Foulkes and is constantly being redeveloped by contemporary group analysts. This article outlines the basic structure of the matrix as proposed by Foulkes and how this has been built upon over time. A split between the objective, quantitative biomedical and subjective, qualitative psychosocial approaches is explored. The article attempts to demonstrate the arbitrary distinction between the two positions, as well as to overcome polarization of thought through synthesis and the use of metaphor. Finding balance and mutuality between the two brings the homeostatic function of the organism, brain, mind, and matrix to the foreground. This is complemented through the examination of current neuroscientific research and shows how the two positions enrich and add nuance to our understanding of the matrix as a fluid, ever-changing, and dynamic structure.
This article also explores the relationship between the matrix and the group conductor. This relationship has the potential to offer containment and security for the group and can be harnessed to improve the conductor’s clinical confidence, as well as the clinical care of group members. This is articulated in terms of Gestalt psychology’s ‘figure’ and ‘ground’ as well as psychotherapeutic stances of ‘being’ and ‘doing’. Van der Kleij’s linguistic analogies are elaborated on to explore the concept of the matrix in the total group situation, and how individuals might be able to find structure and meaning in the context of an analytic group. Finally, the author reflects on the process of exploring the group matrix and how this relates to his own development as a psychiatrist and group analyst in training.
To unpack the underlying causes of the events of January 6th, 2021, by supporters of outgoing President Trump, this essay pursues two lines of inquiry. Firstly, drawing on insights from Kuhn and Bion into, respectively, paradigm shifts and group dynamics, we argue support for Trump’s promise to ‘make American great again’ is rooted in anxiety triggered by various disruptive changes facing Americans. Followers alleviate this by becoming dependent upon Trump, thereby affording him undue influence. January 6th itself, we argue, was a paradigm shifting event, constituting a shattering betrayal of a sitting President’s fundamental duty to uphold the Constitution and keep the country safe from harm. Secondly, we examine the MAGA worldview, drawing on social identity theory, its offshoot regarding leadership, and notions of agency. We highlight its deleterious effects on how Trump and his followers exercised their agency and, simultaneously, how it legitimated Trump’s reckless betrayal of his responsibilities. Through our analysis of these underlying causes, we conclude that January 6th was no mere aberration in terms of what Trump and his supporters are capable of doing. Rather we contend the same forces animating what happened that day remain a clear and present danger to democracy in America.
This article introduces communologue, a process and intervention whose aim is to create safe conversation and deep connecting dialogue within groups and between groups. Communologue originated after 9/11 from the Imago Dialogue intervention developed by Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt's Imago Relationship Therapy in addition to other dialogue and communication experts. This article presents the history and framework as well as a detailed description of the communologue intervention, and its application in family therapy. Special attention is given to the role of the therapist. The connection to the dialogical approach to family therapy and the difference between communologue's specific way of mirroring and active listening are also highlighted. A case study is presented which illustrates the profound ways in which working with a family using communologue can create safety, foster connection, and alter the family dynamics. Implications of communologue and limitations are discussed.
Demonstrating how psychoanalysts can be useful in community settings outside the conventional consulting room, this paper describes consultation and group interventions conducted at a San Francisco mental health agency serving a largely Asian community. In the traumatic context of the COVID-19 pandemic, agency staff became fragmented, due to remote working conditions and differential work assignments, including mandated deployments to emergency sites. Two psychoanalysts worked with agency leadership to devise a weekly process group held by video conferencing over 6 months, in an attempt to heal resentments and splits in the fabric of the agency. Examples of the group process, interventions, and major themes that emerged are described, as well as recommendations made, including the formation of an ongoing clinical consultation group. The paper situates these interventions in the greater context of the pandemic which exposed not only a universal threat to life and health, but also structural vulnerabilities organized along lines of (racial) difference and inequity. The dynamics at the agency are thus described as rooted within greater nested histories: of the clinic, its leadership, and their relationship with a strained public health system, and more broadly, of the tangled intersection of these histories with anti-Asian racism. These are understood as manifestations of the Social Unconscious, and the intervention as an example of Community Psychoanalysis.
Collective action failures are often attributed to inadequate organisation and leadership. Protest movements – including recent state-level protests and revolts, from the “Arab Spring” to the square occupations and Black Lives Matter, and transnational ones like the World Social Forum and recent expressions of the environmental movement such as Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion– have been arenas of conflicts over organisational structures and leadership. Activists consider leaders along a spectrum from representatives of the group interests, values and identity, through seductive manipulators of individuals and discourses, to illegitimate undemocratic usurpers. Some activist collectives reject leadership’s emancipatory claims and (cl)aim to prefigure horizontal political relationships. For others, leaderlessness (re)produces structures of domination that cause the collapse of collective action. I propose that a) groups appoint leaders (formal or informal) when they feel unable to ensure their survival (due to oppression, challenges to lifestyle or livelihood) or to prevent the spread of unbearable feelings (helplessness, frustration, anxiety), b) leaders do not (mostly, often at all) represent the group’s conscious will, but its underlying emotions and beliefs, and c) leadership and individual autonomy are inversely proportional and so are leadership investments and group-wide political creativity. Drawing on critical leadership studies and the psychoanalytic study of groups, I introduce some aspects of the relationship between leadership and anti-leadership and, on the other hand, politics and anti-politics. The argument presented applies to any group, formal, informal and unconscious.
Humans are highly social primates who naturally seek out groups in which to live. Our individual psychology is inherently intertwined with that of the group, forming an inextricable link between the two. In keeping with Bion's insights into group dynamics, we approach contemporary conflicts by examining them through both social and psychoanalytic lenses. Drawing on Foucault's and Deleuze's analyses of societies, as well as considering the impact of technology and the COVID‐19 pandemic, we illustrate how modern societies function under the influence of three behaviors observed by Bion. Activated as a result of a psychological disaster, the ruins consist of the symptomatologic triad of arrogance, stupidity, and curiosity. We have called this functioning Bion's disastrous triad. We suggest that when it is set in motion, it leads to a withdrawal from the beauty of life, as Bion well expresses with the phrase “Thus far and no further.” Using Meltzer's notion of aesthetic conflict, we suggest that while operating under the mandates of the triad, recognition of the other becomes an impossibility. A plea for relationships based on mutual recognition—namely, aesthetic relationships—is in order.
The authors use the theoretical framework of group analysis to facilitate experiential small and median groups for students on trainings in individual psychodynamic psychotherapy. Even though in our many years of clinical and educative group practice it would usually be a definite no, the authors found themselves debating whether members who revealed they were a couple in the past could in fact be together in a group. This discussion prompted the authors to reflect closely on their co-facilitator relationship, causing them to consider what they understood by ‘couple’.
It offered an opportunity (previously unconscious) to explore what they had experienced in group trainings and within their own group practice—that of the frequent binary fixing of conductors as male/female and heterosexual, and whether such fixing may be a defence by the group, including the group conductors, against allowing and exploring a more fluid, nuanced exploration of gender and sexuality. The authors propose that instead of small experiential groups, median groups may offer a richer opportunity for such exploration.
The place of work in organization studies and management has waxed and waned. Yet, today, social and technological developments have raised again interest in the study of work and this curated discussion brings together experts in key approaches to this topic. Seven contributions have been selected to provide a panorama of what we know about work while pointing to some uncharted territories worthy of future exploration. The contributions outline the principles behind and value of systemic, contextualized, or holistic view of work and report insights on how changes in some work components reverberate in its broader ecology. We hope this curated discussion will make us more aware of the collective journey scholars have charted so far while posing new questions and opening or re-directing new avenues of inquiry.
Social identities play a significant role in the development of personality and various disorders and challenges. In addition, they play an important role in the encounter between representatives of different social groups and can add to personality and interpersonal perspectives to group dynamics. Despite their significance, exploration of social identities occurs mainly in the realms of social psychology and post-colonialist theories and not so much in psychoanalysis, which favours the individual perspective over the social.
Foulkes, the founder of group analysis, started a revolution in the field of psychoanalysis when he focussed on the social world and its significant influence on development. However, some of his successors argued that due to political and other reasons, Foulkes did not ‘follow through’ with his own theory and in his therapy groups he did not put sufficient emphasis on exploration of social identities and power relations.
This article reviews the concept of social identities through four theoretical disciplines: social psychology, psychoanalysis, postcolonial theories and group analysis. A vignette from an analytic group that has been meeting for two years and coped with the meeting of different social identities in the complex Israeli reality will be discussed.
The COVID pandemic has had a major impact on the mental health of the population, especially on female adolescents. Eating disorders and gender identity problems have increased markedly. Online activities have also grown enormously during this period occupying a large portion of adolescents’ time. We explore the use of social networking and online gaming by adolescent girls and boys. We discuss their possible influence on different levels of psychological distress in boys and girls in the face of the pandemic. We propose that online games, mainly used by young boys, might offer them some emotional protection through mechanisms related to the body and its experience, to the group dynamics of competition, collaboration, and hierarchy, to the possibility of expressing aggression, and to the construction of a clearer and more stable identity. An unprejudiced look at new technologies is mandatory, if we are to avoid projecting our fears and expectations onto them.
A theoretical paper which considers the previous multiple attempts by nursing to engage with and usefully apply the theories of psychoanalysis to varying aspects of the nursing role. References to psychoanalysis within the nursing literature of the last century are reviewed and the legitimacy of the use of psychoanalytic theory 'outside the clinic' explored with reference to general hospital nursing in the UK's National Health Service. Themes explored include unconscious motivation behind nursing as a career choice, with associated risks of stress and burnout when the unconscious drive to heal is thwarted. Psychoanalytic consideration of nurse-patient relationships provides insight into the patient experience on hospital wards, whilst exploration of other aspects of the nursing role was found to be limited. From a wider perspective, psychoanalysis offers nursing an insight into societal changes impacting the profession. The systems and processes of the healthcare institution have also been explored, particularly in relation to containment of anxiety, though limited practical impact has resulted from the psychoanalytic insight encountered in the literature. The limited engagement between psychoanalysis and general nursing is considered from both a psychoanalytic and nursing perspective; ongoing potentiality for enriching dialogue between the disciplines is established and potential barriers explored.
Helping practices that focus on returning members to their work tasks amid significant distress do little to attend to how they may be severely hindered by their own self-limiting responses to that distress. The focus of this study is on helping that attends to individuals limited in their responses to distress—individuals who inhabit, metaphorically, the narrows, a place of diminishment in which individuals are made smaller by accessing only specific parts of their selves. Through in-depth interviews with professionals working with individuals suffering from various distressing conditions, events, and situations, I develop generalizable theoretical insights about interpersonal holding as a specific form of helping dedicated to surfacing, expanding, and integrating aspects of individuals’ selves that have receded amid distress. The findings indicate a sequence of holding behaviors marked by three overlapping phases: holders coming alongside, linking up with, and guiding individuals in distress through narrowed intrapsychic spaces. This sequence is enabled, first, by the availability of individuals to interpersonal holding and second, by aspects of the holders that stabilize them during the complicated work of attending to the agentic selves of others. The study contributes to both the evolution of scholarship on distress helping in the context of resilience, loss, and role distress and to theory about interpersonal holding.
The Cambridge Handbook of Institutional Investment and Fiduciary Duty is a comprehensive reference work exploring recent changes and future trends in the principles that govern institutional investors and fiduciaries. A wide range of contributors offer new perspectives on the dynamics that drive the current emphasis on short-term investment returns. Moreover, they analyze the forces at work in markets around the world which are bringing into sharper focus the systemic effects that investment practices have on the long-term stability of the economy and the interests of beneficiaries in financial, social and environmental sustainability. This volume provides a global and multi-faceted commentary on the evolving standards governing institutional investment, offering guidance for students, researchers and policy-makers interested in finance, governance and other aspects of the contemporary investment world. It also provides investment, business, financial media and legal professionals with the tools they need to better understand and respond to the new financial market challenges of the twenty-first century.
The Cambridge Handbook of Institutional Investment and Fiduciary Duty is a comprehensive reference work exploring recent changes and future trends in the principles that govern institutional investors and fiduciaries. A wide range of contributors offer new perspectives on the dynamics that drive the current emphasis on short-term investment returns. Moreover, they analyze the forces at work in markets around the world which are bringing into sharper focus the systemic effects that investment practices have on the long-term stability of the economy and the interests of beneficiaries in financial, social and environmental sustainability. This volume provides a global and multi-faceted commentary on the evolving standards governing institutional investment, offering guidance for students, researchers and policy-makers interested in finance, governance and other aspects of the contemporary investment world. It also provides investment, business, financial media and legal professionals with the tools they need to better understand and respond to the new financial market challenges of the twenty-first century.
The Cambridge Handbook of Institutional Investment and Fiduciary Duty is a comprehensive reference work exploring recent changes and future trends in the principles that govern institutional investors and fiduciaries. A wide range of contributors offer new perspectives on the dynamics that drive the current emphasis on short-term investment returns. Moreover, they analyze the forces at work in markets around the world which are bringing into sharper focus the systemic effects that investment practices have on the long-term stability of the economy and the interests of beneficiaries in financial, social and environmental sustainability. This volume provides a global and multi-faceted commentary on the evolving standards governing institutional investment, offering guidance for students, researchers and policy-makers interested in finance, governance and other aspects of the contemporary investment world. It also provides investment, business, financial media and legal professionals with the tools they need to better understand and respond to the new financial market challenges of the twenty-first century.
Group hate, a phenomenon increasingly prevalent in recent world history, manifests in ethnic hatred, mass killings, terrorism, and war. In this context, psychoanalysis offers a unique perspective, modestly contributing to the understanding of group hate through the analysis of human aggression and defenses against such aggression. Human beings, while requiring a group life to maintain basic security, often fear being immersed and judged by other individuals in the group. This paper delves into three mechanisms, interpellation, group polarization, and projective identification, that individuals employ to defend against such fears. Interpellation, for instance, sheds light on how cultural forces, referred to as ideology, influence personal identity. The latter two mechanisms, group polarization, and projective identification, foster in‐group solidarity and hatred of the out‐group, thereby perpetuating widening splits and cycles of hatred and vengeance between groups. The paper concludes by advocating for the humanization of the hated others, setting aside fantasies of vengeance, and finding areas of compromise as the way forward. A secondary goal of the paper is to address the split within psychoanalysis between intrapsychic and interpersonal concepts.
This study aimed to provide new insights for diversity management by applying the psychodynamic principles of defence mechanisms and basic assumption mentality. Diversity is an important part of modern society and organisations. However, the evidence of diversity management remains inconsistent. Two opposing social theories have primarily been the focus of the scientific literature. Some scholars argue that these theories may be insufficient as they do not necessarily account for more covert forms of discrimination and experiences. We adopt a psychodynamic perspective because it has long promoted the influence of covert behaviours and subjective experiences.
Ten participants were recruited using the purposeful sampling method. Participants identified as either being White, Black, Asian, or Other which was one of the three main inclusion criteria. The second being participants had no formal managerial authority and all worked in racially diverse teams in different organisations. Participants were recruited from organisations in The UK, The Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, and Australia. Individual interviews lasted 20–30 minutes and were conducted using Microsoft Teams and transcripts were coded using Nvivo 12. Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) was applied to uncover themes and psychodynamic principles were applied to make sense of participants lived experiences.
The findings suggest that participants’ anxieties were exacerbated by socio-environmental factors and adverse workplace experiences that negatively interfered with job performance and relationships in the workplace. Ethnic minorities reported more stressors primarily due to a conflict and discrepancy between the self and their work environment. Reducing uncertainty, leadership emotional competence, and effectively managing work boundaries were protective factors. Recommendations and limitations are discussed.
This article proposes a framework for reflexive choice in qualitative research, centering on social interaction. Interaction, fundamental to social and organizational life, has been studied extensively. Yet, researchers can get lost in the plethora of methodological tools, hampering reflexive choice. Our proposed framework consists of four dimensions of interaction (content, communication patterns, emotions, and roles), intersecting with five levels of analysis (individual, dyadic, group, organizational, and sociocultural), as well as three overarching analytic principles (following the dynamic, consequential, and contextual nature of interaction). For each intersection between dimension and level, we specify analytical questions, empirical markers, and references to exemplary works. The framework functions both as a compass, indicating potential directions for research design and data collection methods, and as a roadmap, illuminating pathways at the analysis stage. Our contributions are twofold: First, our framework fleshes out the broad spectrum of available methods for analyzing interaction, providing pragmatic tools for the researcher to reflexively choose from. Second, we highlight the broader relevance of maps, such as our own, for enhancing reflexive methodological choices.
In this paper, I present the idea that the documentary film My Octopus Teacher (Ehrlich & Reed) is an evocative allegory for some key threads in the ongoing learning at the heart of psychotherapy. On the one hand, the film is a narrative about a relationship formed between the narrator and documentary‐maker Craig and an octopus that he encounters in daily dives in an underwater kelp forest. On the other hand, it is a story–dream of a man and an octopus who swim together in the proto‐mental seas of the unconscious, a space where fluidity and symmetry rule, and where the boundaries between I and thou dissolve. Alongside the theme of mutual dream work, the documentary presents an evocative allegory of what it takes to practice as a therapist: the maps of our own disintegration that inform our work, and the key dispositions of learning to watch and observe and to fine tune our faith.
This paper offers a brief overview of the historically predominant form of psychotherapy research both for individual and group psychotherapies, the randomized control trial (RCT), and its surrounding controversies and critiques as the backdrop from which new directions in both clinical theory building and research are being pursued, including efforts at building integrative models of treatment. The paper explores one promising integrative model, namely the incorporation of process and dynamic orientations into the province of group cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and identifies challenges in implementing this model.
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