R.D. Hinshelwood
psychoanalyst author editor
What are Organisations?
In 1987, Free Association Books published my first authored book, What Happens in Groups – see Section 1.1a. It is no surprise that it was an attempt to organise much of the thinking and ideas that had gone into papers of mine up to this point. This publication led to my own sense of greater confidence in having understood organisations a little better, and in a serviceable way. So, despite developing my own psychoanalytic practice with individuals in this period, and teaching psychotherapy both in the NHS and in private psychotherapy organisations, for a while I produced a number of consolidating paper.
1987 Social dynamics and individual symptoms. International Journal of Therapeutic Communities 8: 265-272 This is the first of three paper (the others in 1988, 1989) addressing sequential projections flowing through a number of social inter-relations, that is, the emotional flow through a group network. In this case, it was possible to observe a disturbance in someone with a long-standing psychosis, that led in unconscious ways to a disturbance in nursing staff, brought eventually to a supervision session, and manifesting itself in a discomfort in the supervisor. 1989 Social possession of identity. In Barry Richards (ed) Crises of the Self (London: Free Association Books) In this paper (like the 1987 one on social dynamics), serial projections through many interpersonal relationships could be followed, deriving from observations in the open climate of the Marlborough Day Hospital therapeutic community. They showed how the experiences mutated, and in general drifted from very personal ones, to more and more widespread group phenomena, as if the specifically individual could be possessed by, and deployed as, the social. 1989 Communication flow in the matrix. Group-Analysis 22: 261-269 This is the third paper reporting serial projections from relationship to relationship amongst the membership of a functioning group, and shows similar phenomena to the last paper, thought the example is different. 1988 Discussion of Mark Ettin’s `Babel of Tower’ – the process and dynamics of Reagen’s National Security Council Group. Group-Analysis 21: 75-78 I was interested in the use of group dynamics to speculate about a current affairs issue that had been in the news. 1988 Psychotherapy in an in-patient setting. (Review article) Current Opinion in Psychiatry 1: 304-308 Invited to do an up-to-the-minute review of this topic, I was surprised at how flimsy the thinking about in-patient psychotherapy had become. Not the best of my work. |
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