Psychoanalysis In Transition
Exploring the Vista from Couch to Collective
An international group relations conference
third in a series​
Belonging to a body larger than your own:
Learning from experience, authority and role
November 6-10, 2025
Online Via Zoom
Who is it for?​​
Psychoanalysts, Jungian Analysts, Candidates-in-training, Psychodynamic/Psychoanalytic Psychotherapists, Group-Analytic Psychotherapists and Group Analysts
The Primary Task of the Conference
To provide a structured setting for learning from here-and-now experience, the dynamics of belonging to bodies larger than your own, across groups and organizations.​
This task makes use of the familiar metaphor of the body to describe both the whole and the parts of small and large groups and the “corporate” bodies to which we belong.
The qualities to be explored will include the balance between the distinctive contributions of both leadership and followership, sources of authority and the nature of the boundaries around tasks, persons, roles, groups and wider systems.
The purpose of the conference is to explore how persons, groups, organizations and society shape each other. Experience of groupings and organizations provokes learning about how we are seen and used by others and about the ways we tend to construe situations quite unconsciously. This is the hidden agenda of a group relations conference, seeking to make its presence felt for observation, transformation and development.
​
The Main Conference is designed for both newcomers to group relations conferencing as well as members with previous experience. The timetable below is designed with them in mind.
The Sub-conference is designed for members who have previous group relations conference experience and have an interest in taking roles in contributing to institutional leadership.
Their programme will be distinct, for a group of 8 members and will also overlap with the main conference at some points. (See below for more details).
​Possible benefits of this GRC for members include:​
-
Navigation, negotiation, and differentiation of roles in supervisory or institutional settings with complex interpersonal dynamics.
-
Increased attunement to group and social contexts that shape patients’ internal worlds or how the institute is perceived in the mind.
-
Deeper understanding and management of how group transference operates on a macro level within groups, organizations, and societies.
-
Cultivation of leadership and followership qualities while navigating collective anxieties, vulnerabilities, and conflicts in real time.
-
Facilitate change and development in institutes and organizations through reflection on boundary-setting, resource management, and leadership challenges.
-
Learning how to unlearn perceptions in how you relate and are related to.
-
Experimenting with deeper dialogues around where paired, group and organizational roles can be creative or locked.
-
Stretching clinical work to include the use and representation of wider societal and collective dynamics.
-
A chance to see how you are, and need to be, as leaders and followers.
-
Exploration of the rigidity and fluidity in the boundaries between person, pair, group, organization and society.
“The individual is a group animal at war, not simply with the group, but with himself for being a group animal and with those aspects of his personality that constitute his “groupishness.” Bion, Experiences in Groups, p 131
Participants reflections from the previous conference October 2021
​
The conference consolidated years of analysis in an experiential way that I was not able to reach in analysis. As a result I was able to feel empowered and free. I was able to experience effective leadership in others. It demonstrated the importance of here-and-now learning in all experiences and the value of a group experience as part of analytic training.
​
I feel less frustrated and more empathic about the leadership in my institute
​
The conference has Increased my group observation/consultant stance in faculty and board meetings
​
The conference increased my motivation to get more involved and become more sensitive to my roles in the community.
​
The awareness of roles in analytic training is crucial.
​
Group Relations Methodology
Group Relations Conferences have been shaped over the past 70 years using a conference design for learning organizational dynamics from experience. Unlike traditional models of learning where expertise is assigned to teachers, ​these conferences are based on the idea of learning from experience, yours and that of others. This may illuminate how social groupings and identifications shape effective collaboration and leadership. The conference is a setting in which these dynamics can be experienced and explored within groups, between groups, and within the conference system as a whole.
Leadership and followership form collaborative roles that are integral to the advancement of a group’s purpose. When human beings gather to work on a shared task, conscious and unconscious assumptions get activated, impacting how collective work unfolds. These assumptions often serve different agendas, ordinarily out of our awareness. This conference creates a temporary institution for the purpose of studying these phenomena in real-time.
Basic Premise – The Study of Authority and Leadership
As individuals, we are always involved in groups. At birth, we are move from a foetal and nursing dyad into a group: the family. This family develops both conscious and unconscious phantasies about who we are and who we can become. We also face both authority and sibling relations, first with parents and peers, then beyond the family with others across a number of societal and institutional roles. Through these identification processes we learn to balance the range of sources for authority, balanced, or unbalanced from within, from below, and from above. These experiences imprint our minds and memories with conscious and unconscious assumptions about ourselves in relation to those carrying authority about the mission of the groups we belong to, and about the roles we take up ‘or are assigned’.
These experiences also impact how we view and collaborate with authority figures, and how we take up our own authority in relation to that of others in our analytic institutes and associations. Studying these leadership and authority issues is crucial for institutes facing leadership disputes and challenges over differences in what and who is represented in leadership, whether from internal schools of clinical approach or from societal dynamics.
​The Program
The program is designed with a clear structure of times, tasks, boundaries, territories and technology, along with clear allocation of staff to manage and consult to conference experience and learning as it unfolds. The tasks of different events within the program define the boundaries staff will consult to. Staff invite members to use these learning events in any way they choose to engage with the primary task to learn the dynamics of belonging to bodies larger than their own. The program is designed to develop a rhythm between engagement and reflection on actions and roles as they have emerged.
The Relevance of Group Relations to Clinical Professionals
Engagement in psychoanalysis discovered a close relationship with a trusted other to find missing parts of ourselves. This is true not only of the child-parent pair, the paired analytic relationship, groups in the therapeutic milieu, but also of psychoanalytic working groups and institutions. Such relationships form bonds quickly and unconsciously in ways that can either enhance or upend shared tasks. A group relations conference offers the opportunity to experience all these dynamics through a field of study different from, but parallel to, the clinical frames of psycho/analytic inquiry.
Analytic work is characterized by pairings with supervisors, personal analysts and schools of thought and practice, to which each of us attach ourselves. Group analysis and community work both include supervision and engagement in groups. One-to-one work, like group work creates a room crowded with the range of present, transformed and transferred objects and characters forming an internalised group and field. In groups especially, members can become aware of the pressure to assign roles to its members.
When emotions are too large for pairs and groups, we distribute parts of ourselves across conscious and unconscious collective archetypal and fantasy narratives. Their exploration promotes dream- and myth-making that are not just pathological, but a resource. This dialectic interconnectedness to a collective is a well for change beyond each analytic setting and key for creating a transformative context for exploring how we belong to bodies larger than our own.
These collectives are also represented by social movements, societal dynamics, and inherited inspirations and trauma, precisely where emotional experience is too large for a sole person to carry. They are also represented by psycho/analytic theories and training institutions shaped by deep and anchored loyalties to traditions, schools of thought and paired relationships with analysts and supervisors.
While psycho/analysis is well suited to explore the dynamics of social movements, societal dynamics, and inherited inspirations and traumas, where experience is too large for a sole person to carry, psycho/analytic institutions have been impacted by the national and international sociopolitical dynamics in an unprecedented way. This surfaces serious concerns about human rights, social justice, equity and inclusion. Disruptive processes and conflicts have emerged, stretching resources, primary tasks and cohesion of psychoanalytic organizations. These processes have left psychoanalytic groups vulnerable to conflicts and divisions, with expression and enactments that challenge interpretation, containment and resolution.
In many institutions in society, not least in psycho/analytic societies, resourcing management committees and leadership is limited. The capacity for both leadership and followership require negotiation of roles and strategic positioning across the boundary with the outside world. These roles demand qualities of integrity, courage and capacity. When these qualities go missing, they demand the exploration of the collective anxiety and vulnerability and therefore lead to building enlarged bodies and minds that can be a resource to understand, contain, and manage challenges across the boundaries of psycho/analytic and therapeutic institutions.
Lead Sponsor
Grex - Affiliate of the A K Rice Institute
for the Study of Social SyStems
Conference Planning Committee - Sheri-Ann Cowie, Marilyn Jacobs, Jack Lampl, Mary McRae, Angela Sowa
The committee began as a joint effort of psychoanalysts and consultants who actively engage in group relations,work with institutes in Northern and Southern California. The group sought sponsorship from Grex to organize the first international conference in 2021, the second in 2023, and this third in 2025.
Co-Sponsors
Conference Staff
The role of conference staff is to provide consultation, when it serves the primary task of each event, to the group as a whole rather than to individuals. In order to provide the opportunity for the emergence of covert dynamics, the staff does not engage in social convensions, but remains focused on supporting member learning.
Directorate
Richard Morgan-Jones, Director
Richard Morgan-Jones Group Relations and Organizational Consultant, Supervising and Training Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist with British Psychotherapy Foundation, Author. Registered member of British Psychoanalytic Council (BPC). Distinguished member of International Society for Psychoanalytic Society of Organizations (ISPSO). Mentor of the AK Rice Institute, member of the Organization for Promoting the Understanding of Society (OPUS). Visiting faculty at the Indian Institute of Management at Ahmedabad, India and the Higher School of Economics, Moscow. Consultant and Director of GRC Program Association for Psychoanalytic Coaching and Business Consulting (Moscow Russia) 2019-present. Director of Work Force Health: Consulting and Research. Author of the Body of the Organisation and its Health and co-editor of Developments in Field Theory for Psychotherapists, Psychoanalysts and Counsellors.
Samar Habl, MD, Associate Director
Associate Medical Director and Director of Admissions at the Austen Riggs Center. Samar is a certified board psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst. She has particular interest and experience in the study of groups and social systems as it pertains to organizational life and the application of group relation theories to leadership development. She has directed three residential conferences sponsored by the Center for the study of Groups and Social Systems (CSGSS), and a virtual group relations conference for psychoanalysts sponsored by GREX. She has also worked as a leadership consultant and executive coach at the International Management and Development school IMD in Switzerland and Copenhagen Business School, Denmark.
Jerry Fromm, Associate Director Leadership and Consultancy Training Group
M. Gerard (Jerry) Fromm spent his clinical career at the Austen Riggs Center where he directed the therapeutic community program and then the Erikson Institute, including the Institute’s Organizational Consultation Service. Jerry is past president of the International Dialogue Initiative, which works to bring a psychological understanding to societal conflict. He is also a Distinguished Member and former president of ISPSO, former president of the Center for the Study of Groups and Social Systems, and former director of CSGSS’s Group Relations Conferences. Jerry is a Fellow of the American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis and has taught at and consulted to several psychoanalytic institutes. He now maintains a private practice of organizational and clinical consulting.
Administration
Jack Lampl, Associate Director for Administration and Technology
​Is an organizational consultant, credentialed mediator and visual artist. He is past president and Fellow of the A K Rice Institute and past president of the Threshold Foundation. He is a board member of the San Diego Psychoanalytic Center and an active community member in APsA. His organizational work combines traditional group relations with creative expression and embodied practices. He is a former board member of Grex. He founded Subjective Technologies early stage virtual reality startup in 1986 and since then has used his background in art and technology to support experimental applications of groups relations.
​
Aschylus Robinson, LCSW (she/her), Associate Administrator for Registration and Technology
Aschylus is a clinical therapist in her private practice named Kulima Therapy, in Salt Lake City, Utah; where she focuses on inner child work and adults navigating childhood trauma. She also provides contract clinical supervision to associate licensed individuals needing support and psychoeducation toward full licensure. Aschylus received her Masters of Social Work degree from Loyola University Chicago. She has been engaged actively with group relations work for several years. Aschylus serves on the board for Grex and is a member of the A.K. Rice Institute and CCSGO.
Consultants
Maxine Dennis is a Psychoanalyst, Consultant Clinical Psychologist working with individuals , groups and organisations. She is interested is psychoanalysis across the life span and that obvious point that we are not single issue individuals .In the past having working in inpatient, out patient and community work. Her involvement with community with those who are marginalised, economically disadvantaged and in providing “Thinking Spaces”, reflective settings for people less likely to access psychotherapeutic services currently she is involved in developing a service with gangs.
​
Maxine is one of the original founding members of 10 Windsor walk ( psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and training in centre in South London) and Black Psychoanalysts Speak. A speaker , lecturer for various psychology, counselling , psychotherapy organisations in the UK and abroad. A Training Analyst for Child Psychotherapy and various adult psychotherapy trainings and therapist for Facefront an inclusive Theatre Company. Her clinical practice is in South London . She has Directed and staffed on numerous group relations conference in the uk and abroad .
Giovanni Foresti, MD and PhD, lives in Pavia (Italy). He is training and supervising analyst of the SPI (Italian Psychoanalytic Society) and the IPA. He works in private practice as psychoanalyst, psychiatrist and organizational consultant and teaches at the SPI National Institute for Training. In the recent years, he served as co-chair for Europe of the Committee “Psychoanalysis and the Mental Health Field”, in the IPA Board as European Representative, in the Executive Committee of the IPA, in the IPA Application Society Committee and he is now part of the Psychoanalytic
Education Committee. His interests are focused on clinical issues, institutional functioning and group dynamics.
Anna Frank, Psychologist, psychoanalyst and group analyst in private practice (Member of the German Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy DGPT), organizational consultant (Member of the German Society for Coaching and Supervision DGSv), training-supervisor in post-graduate Psychotherapy Training. She has directed a number of residential Group Relations Conferences with Training Groups. Born and grown up in Tadshikistan (former Soviet Union) she lives in Germany since her youth.
Megan Kolano is a clinical psychologist, psychoanalyst, and consultant working in Stockbridge, MA. She is a psychotherapist at the Austen Riggs Center and has a private practice where she works with adults and children. She is the past president of the Center for the Study of Groups and Social Systems (CSGSS) and current Faculty for the Leading from Experience (LFE) workshop. She is particularly interested in the intersection between individual character and leadership style, fostering a capacity to work, play and love within organizations, and unconscious group dynamics.
Mary B. McRae, Ed.D, Private practice in individual and group psychotherapy; coaching and group facilitation for groups and organizations. Fellow, A. K. Rice Institute for the Study of Social Systems; member of the New York Center for the Study of Groups, Organizations and Social Systems, President William Alanson White Institute, Member of Black Psychoanalyst Speaks.
Carlos Remotti-Breton, M.A., organisational and leadership consultant, Associate Lecturer in Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck University, Part-Time Professor in Organisational Behaviour IAE Business School, Executive Director of OPUS: an Organisation for Promoting Understanding in Society. Training candidate in psychoanalysis with the British Psychoanalytic Association (BPA); Member of the A. K. Rice Institute for the Study of Social Systems and ISPSO (International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations). He is an international group relations practitioner. Group Relations Conferences at OPUS in London, China and the World, PCCA and first Psychoanalysis In Transition conference staff member. He is an experienced Social Dreaming practitioner and has been the host of The London Social Dreaming Hub since 2020.
Dr. Matías Sanfuentes (PhD) in psychoanalytic studies, University of Essex, UK. He is an Associate Professor and academic director of the master’s in Organizational Dynamics at the School of Business, University of Chile. He is a psychodynamic psychotherapist and organizational consultant. His research interests include leadership, organizational change, gender studies, organizational culture and identity, and the psychoanalytic study of organizations. He is an Associate Researcher Centre for Social Conflict and Cohesion Studies (COES) and Organisational & Social Dynamics journal Editor in Chief. He has 20 years of experience as a consultant and Director of group relations conferences in South America, China, UK, and Australia.
Tara L. Victor, PhD, ABPP/CN, is a board-certified clinical neuropsychologist in private practice in Santa Monica, California and tenured professor in the Department of Psychology at California State University, Dominguez Hills (CSUDH). She has completed the Clinician's Program at the C.J. Jung Institute of Los Angeles and has a particular interest in the intersection of Group Relations, Interpersonal Neurobiology and Jungian analysis. Dr. Victor is an Associate & Certified Consultant of the AK Rice Institute for the Study of Social Systems (AKRI) and former board member of Grex, the west coast affiliate of AKRI. She also serves as a Program Co-developer for the annual Group Relations conference series in southern California, Leadership and Creative Expression.
Event Descriptions and Daily Schedule
Conference learning events include working in small and large groups, as well as collaborating with self-selected groups and with the staff management and consulting group. There are covert forces at play that significantly impact the effective functioning of groups created to execute particular tasks. The focus on the group rather than the individual allows group members to discover how systemic forces are embodied in individual experience, shaping how leadership is exercised, and authority is taken up in the service of a task.
​
Plenaries The conference opens and closes in plenary sessions involving members and conference staff. The plenaries further the process of crossing the boundary into and out of the conference. They provide opportunities to anticipate and reflect on conference learning.
Small Study Group (SSG) Each SSG consists of up to 12 participants working with 1 consultant. Its primary task is to study the behavior and dynamics of the group as they unfold in real time. The unit of study is the group-as-a-whole and not the individual.
The SSG can be viewed as a proxy for small committee work where complex and often covert agendas and personalities impact effectiveness.
​
Large Study Group (LSG) The LSG consists of the main conference membership working together with 3 consultants. The primary task of this event is to study the large group’s behavior and dynamics as they unfold in real time. Again, the unit of study is the group-as-a-whole and not the individual.
​
The LSG reveals the dynamics of all large group interactions such as scientific meetings or even a community list-serve. There is an opportunity to learn how to find and take a role in a large system, along with facing experiences of cohesion, fragmentation and myth-making represented through dreams.
Institutional Event (IE) The Institutional Event provides an opportunity for members to organize themselves into groups of their choice to explore issues they identify as relevant to the developing virtual institution. The staff is available for consultation and collaboration and will conduct its work in open sessions. The task of the Institutional Event is to study the irrational and unconscious drivers of organization, authorization, and collaboration within institutions.
The IE is an especially relevant experience for members of institutions and organizations. The IE provides a frame for understanding of the systems dynamics of the conference as an institution. The focus is on how parts of an organization are embodied in its parts and how they relate together. Members and staff can learn how members join groups, how resources are used, how groups collaborate with each other and with the staff and how power and authority are negotiated.
Role Analysis Groups (RAGs) RAGs provide opportunities for participants to review and reflect on the roles and experiences they come from in family, school, work and community life. They also provide space to present and reflect on the stage of development in their own organizations. These can then be compared with their re-creation and transformation in the conference and how to apply their learning to their back-home organizational roles.
​
The Trilogy Matrix Event (TME) (See reference article below for more background.) The TME marks the transition away from here-and-now learning by experience, moving towards reflective practice of shared experiences and seeking sense-making by working up developing hypotheses. This event will seek to distinguish a) what belongs to the person, b) what belongs to the group/organizational system and c) what belongs to the wider societal and cultural context.
Members and staff will be organized into three sub-groups. Each will work one at a time observed silently (screens/sound off) by the other two sub-groups. We begin with sub-group a) focussing on experiences belonging to the person in the conference, moving from bodily sensations through emotions to thoughts. Next it is the turn of the sub-group b) focussing on group and organizational dynamics revealed in the conference and making links to what was expressed or observed in sub-group a). Finally sub-group c) will reflect on ways the external context got under the skin of conference experience and dynamics, making links to what was expressed and observed in the other two sub-groups.
This TME reflective practice provides a frame for learning from experience across larger system and role dynamics and their boundaries which shapes the exploration of belonging to a body larger than your own.
​
Leadership and Consultancy Training Group – LCT
(by application - see notes below. Application to the this group is included on the registration form)
​
Because psychoanalytic institutes are currently facing serious internal and external stresses, the “Belonging to a Body Larger than Your Own” Conference is offering a subconference, embedded within the larger conference, on Leadership and Consultancy Training (LCT). Those who wish to apply for the LCT group must have been members of one previous Group Relations Conferences and be contemplating taking up, or have already taken up, leadership or consulting roles in their home institutions.
​The LCT is designed to strengthen participants' ability to take up a consultative stance. Whether as a designated leader, consultant or participant, a consultative stance recognizes that people in a group are inevitably, though often without being aware of it, in touch with the emotional life of the group. Paying attention to what one is feeling, thinking about and reacting to may open a window into what is going on in the group. Speaking this experience, while checking it against the experience of others and the purpose of the group, can further the work of a group, particularly as it may lead to discovery of previously unseen contexts and potentially challenging dynamics.
​
The LCT subconference provides learning opportunities in three ways. First, members participate in a Small Study Group, which focuses on the unfolding here-and-now process of the group. Participants are paired to take up formal consultative roles in the self-study group, followed by focused reflection with faculty. In this way, participants have the experience of being both members and consultants to the SSG.
The second learning opportunity is a Dual Task Event, in which two tasks are taken up simultaneously: a real-life work task, to be provided by the faculty, and the task of consulting to how that work task is being carried out. There are no designated consultants; any member is free to offer consultation should they feel moved to do so. Again, reflection with faculty occurs after each session. The third learning opportunity is in Application Groups, where a member presents their institutional challenges for the consultation of the rest of the group.
​
The LCT begins with an Orientation session and ends with a Learning Reflection session. Participants will also have an opportunity to take up consulting roles in the larger conference’s Institutional Event and Review and Application Groups.
​
NOTE: Applicants for the LCT sub conference will be notfied about whether they have been accepted on August 1st. Decisions about acceptance will be made on the basis of who applies first but also on the importance of creating a diverse membership in the training group. Applicants not able to join the LCT sub conference will be welcomed into the larger conference, should they wish to join. No invoices will be sent until the acceptance decision on August 1
The conference is an integrated sequence that relies on participation in all conference events.
Please review the conference schedule below based on Western United States Time (PST) to be sure that you will be available.
Draft Daily Schedule
Time zones:
This conference is designed across many time zones to accommodate an international staff and membership:
West Coast USA: 07.00 – 14.00
South America: 12.00 – 19.00
Central Europe: 16.00 – 23.00
​
The main conference language will be English, although menbers and staff may make use of their own or other languages as well as making use of the many language resources across the conference. Spoken language - as the conference theme suggests - is not the only means of communication even online.
Conference Fees
​
Two or more applicants from the same institute registering together each receive a %10 discount
​
Three or more applicants from the same institute registering together each receive a %20 discount
​
The conference staff will make every attempt to the extent possible in assigning group membership to avoid dual relationships or conflicts of roles within institutes between analysts and candidates. Make sure to let us know about such conflicts at the point of registration.
​
Further fee reductions may be available on a case by case basis. Please contact administration to request. psychintransition@gmail.com
​
Refund Policy
Until August 6 100% refund
August 6 - September 6 75% refund
September 6 - October 6 25% refund
REGISTRATION OPENS MID MAY
all inquiries in advance are welcome
References
While a group relations conference is a unique experiential event, some background may be helpful before attending and then useful afterwards. The linked pdf references are below.
Tavistock Primer
Charla Hayden and René J. Molenkamp
"A Tavistock Primer"has been used in graduate programs in organizational, clinical, and counseling psychology; organization behavior and organization development; social work; psychiatry residency programs; and training programs for group facilitators,
human relations internship programs, and by organizations sponsoring Group Relations conferences as a lay person’s guide to what conferences based on the “Tavistock” model are all about.
Introduction to Tavistock
An Introduction to Tavistock-Style Group Relations Conference Learning
Edward R. Shapiro and A. Wesley Carr*
The authors outline the process of systems learning through participation in Tavistock-style group-relations conferences. Focusing on issues of design,basic underlying concepts, selected comments from members, and steps involved in grasping systems dynamics, they offer both background for and summary of the learning opportunities derived from these working conferences.The paper is designed for those individuals considering conference attendance or reflecting on their conference experience.
The Trilogy Matrix Event:A Setting for integrating the Study of Large Social System Dynamics from Different Dimensions
​
Richard Morgan-Jones
A more detailed description of the Trilogy Matrix Event and its theoretical background.
Ch 18 in Hopper, E. (2024). The Tripartite Matrix in the Developing Theory and Expanding Practice of Group Analysis: The Social Unconscious in Persons, Groups and Societies: Vol.4. London: Routledge.
​
The Institution In the Mind:Reflections on the relation of psychoanalysis to work with institutions
​
David Armstrong
To work analytically in groups, or I want to suggest in institutions, is to use one's alertness to the emotional experience presented in such settings as the medium for seeking to understand, formulate and
interpret the relatedness of the individual to the group or the institution. It is understanding that relatedness, I believe, which liberates the energy to discover what working and being in the group or the institution can become.
The Group As-A-Whole Perspective and its Theoretical Roots
​
Leroy Wells, Jr.
This paper describes some theoretical roots of the group-as-a-whole perspective. Emphasis is given to concepts and constructs that elucidate group-as-a-whole (group level) phenomena. Several case vignettes will illustrate how the group-as-a-whole perspective can be applied, in an organizational context, to better understand, interpret and intervene in interpersonal and group relations.
Our Adult World and its Roots in Infancy
​
Melanie Klein
This paper, originally delivered by Melanie Klein on 11th M a y 1959 before the members of the Departments of Social
Anthropology and Social Studies in the University of Manchester, is a brief but comprehensive statement of her
findings and theories in psychoanalysis in a form specially prepared for a wider social-science audience.
Recovering Bion's Contribution to Group
​
Kenneth Eisold
Bion is clearly acknowledged as a pioneer in group theory and practice. His book, Experience in Groups (1961 ), in which he wittily recounts his baffling early experiences in group therapy and attempts at theoretical explanations, has become a classic, frequently cited alongside Freud's ( 1921) paper on group psychology. He is the first to have approached the group-as-a-whole and to have called attention to the central role of preoedipal dynamics in the unconscious life of groups. Moreover, with his phenomenological descriptions of the "basic assumptions" he provided a tool for categorizing the central events of group life that many group workers continue to find indispensable. In what sense does this work have to be "recovered"?
Dancing Between the Contained and the Container and Their Reciprocal Relatedness in Group Relations
​
Richard Morgan-Jones
This chapter begins with a description of learnings from the author’s own first experiences of a self-study group. It continues with a description of what the study of group relations entails and of the development of the idea of the container in group relations. In reversing the order of “container/contained” in the title of this chapter, priority is placed on what is seeking containment and what shape of experience it might need in terms of timing and responsiveness to build a container. This also refers to Bion’s demand for the patience of “Negative Capability” in waiting for emergent experiences to take shape. For this moment of pausing, we note also Bion’s focus on ultimate truths beyond insight and his elaboration of the “Caesura”.
Regression in Organizational Leadership
​
Otto F. Kernberg
The choice of good leaders is a major task for all organizations. Information regarding the prospective administrator's personality should complement questions regarding his previous experience, his general conceptual skills, his technical knowledge, and the specific skills in the area for which he is being selected. The growing psychoanalytic knowledge about the crucial importance of internal, in contrast to external, object relations, and about the mutual relationships of regression in individuals and in groups, constitutes an important practical tool for the selection of leaders.
The Body Speaks: Bion's Protomental System at Work
​
Richard Morgan-Jones
Psychoanalysis has primarily explored somatic experience in relation to love and intimacy. This paper focuses on the body in relation to work. It explores the experience that what patients increasingly present for analysis are the traumasand pleasures of being caught up with and belonging to a body larger thantheir own, whether in a couple, a group, a work organization or the body politic.
The Denigrated Other:Diversity and Group Relations
Marvin R. Skolnick and Zachary Green
This article explores the dynamics of diversity utilizing the work of Bion and other psychoanalytic thinkers. The Group Relations conference as a laboratory to study the unconscious aspects of these dynamics will be considered.
Selection from Experiences In Groups
Wilfred Bion
"Selection from Experiences in Groups" by Wilfred Bion is a significant contribution to the field of group dynamics, focusing on the role of unconscious processes in shaping group behavior. Bion explores the concept of selection within groups, highlighting how unconscious dynamics influence the choice of leaders and ideas. He emphasizes the presence of primitive emotional forces and their impact on group functioning, such as dependency, aggression, and the need for containment. Bion underscores the importance of understanding these unconscious processes to foster healthier group dynamics, effective leadership, and constructive decision-making within groups.
A Case-Study in the Functioning of Social Systems as a Defense Against Anxiety
Isabel E. P. Menzies
This article offers a significant case study that examines the role of social systems in mitigating anxiety. Menzies investigates how the organizational structure, hierarchical dynamics, and communication patterns within a hospital serve as defense mechanisms against individual and collective anxieties. The study sheds light on how social systems provide stability, control, and predictability, but also highlights potential limitations and implications of relying on such defense mechanisms in institutional contexts.
​
​