Contents Vol. 26.2
to be published Dec 2026
ARTICLES
Belonging to a Body Larger than your Own:
Moving and being moved between clinical and organisational consulting using a psychoanalytic lens.
Richard Morgan-Jones
Abstract
By describing and enquiring into a range of personal and professional experiences across a career, I want to explore links between three dimensions: a) bodily experience, b) group and organisational dynamics, c) societal context. These three dimensions have been the focus of the trilogy matrix framework for practice and research that I have been working with to explore the many dimensions of the known and unknown fields with which we work. In this way I seek the nature of the task of coming to know aspects of what will always, in part, remain out-of-reach and out-of-sight. This is the practice method of study I have developed to learn from the experience of belonging to body larger than your own.
Theoretical reference will be made to links between Bion’s “Experiences in Groups” and his later thinking and also to developments in psychoanalytic theory and practice using Field Theory. I will also borrow from Anzieu’s application of the analysis of skin phenomena and Trevarthen and Guerra’s observations on rhythm in parent-child observation.
Exploration of negative capability through co-creative theatre
Manon de Jongh, Morten Svalgaard Nielsen, Mette Tranholm
Abstract
This paper explores the concept of negative capability within the context of co-creative theatre, drawing on a multi-year case study of the Betty Nansen Theatre in Denmark. Negative capability – defined as the capacity to remain present in uncertainty without prematurely seeking resolution – is examined as a foundational leadership and followership competency in complex, emotionally charged organisational settings. Through a systems psychodynamic lens, the study investigates how co-creative theatre fosters psychological containment, distributed authority and collective meaning-making. The findings reveal that co-creative theatre challenges traditional hierarchies by inviting participants into fluid roles and shared decision-making, thereby generating both vulnerability and creative potential. The paper identifies three core manifestations of negative capability: avoiding premature closure, holding tensions and creating in real time. These practices support adaptive leadership, proactive followership and institutional learning. The study contributes to systems psychodynamics by positioning co-creative theatre as a laboratory for developing emotional resilience and relational intelligence in organisations. It concludes that cultivating negative capability through artistic collaboration can offer a sustainable path for navigating complexity, fostering innovation and reimagining leadership in contemporary institutions.
The Flayed Institution: Symbolic Dissolution, Psychic Envelopes and Professional Suffering in Social Care
Gilles Brandibas
Abstract
This article examines the suffering of professionals working in social care and health-related support organisations through a multi-level theoretical framework. We argue that professional burnout cannot be reduced to individual emotional deficits or simple organisational dysfunctions. Rather, it represents the terminal impact of a recursive dynamic in which societal, institutional, architectural and psychic levels continuously produce and are produced by one another — a crisis that does not simply descend from above, but resonates across each level, amplifying at each passage while leaving intact, at each level, the possibility of resistance and subjectivation. This dynamic begins at the societal level — with the dissolution of symbolic containing functions — and reverberates through institutional architecture, group dynamics, and individual psychic organisation. Drawing on Castoriadis’s imaginary social institution, Legendre’s dogmatic function, Han’s transparency society, Winnicott’s environmental holding, Anzieu’s skin-ego, Kaës’s group psychic apparatus, and the psychodynamic framework of defensive arrangements, we trace how the progressive elimination of thresholds — both physical and symbolic — destroys the successive envelopes that sustain professionals in their work. We conclude that out-of-walls practices, in which professionals become nomadic institutions, radicalise this dynamic to its extreme, and that clinical analysis spaces are no longer merely supportive devices but architectural substitutes — the last physical places where the institutional envelope can be reconstituted.
Systems Psychodynamics Reconsidered
David Lawlor and Mannie Sher
Abstract
This paper revisits the historical and conceptual foundations of Systems Psychodynamics (SP) and offers a contemporary account of its theory, methodology and practice. It responds to recurring critiques that reduce SP to the BART heuristic (Boundary, Authority, Role, Task) or to a narrow preoccupation with anxiety and pathology (Gould and Cytrynbaum, 2004; Cilliers and Koortzen, 2005). Instead, the paper shows how SP has developed as a broad and evolving synthesis of field theory (Lewin, 1946), Tavistock wartime psychiatry (Bion, 1961; Bridger, 1990), socio-technical systems theory (Trist and Bamforth, 1951), open systems thinking (Katz and Kahn, 1966), object relations (Fairbairn, 1952; Winnicott, 1965), group relations methodology (Cytrynbaum and Noumair, 2004), social defence theory (Menzies, 1960; Bain, 1998), narrative and symbolic approaches (Gabriel, 1995; Lawrence, 1998), and more recent work on digital and ecological psychodynamics (Diamond, 2016; Randall, 2019).
Particular attention is given to Eric Trist’s concept of inter-organisational domains and meta-problems, which extends SP beyond the single organisation to the wider fields in which contemporary societal challenges are governed (Emery and Trist, 1965; Trist and Emery, 1973). The paper argues that concerns now foregrounded in systems change, network-oriented leadership and AI ethics, interdependence, identity, informal authority, resistance and meaning-making, have long been central to SP (Hirschhorn, 1997; Krantz, 2010). An integrated contemporary SP framework is proposed and illustrated through a reflexive case study of the EU-ALMPO Horizon Europe project on AI in labour market policy.
At the Boundary of Meaning:
Reframing the Cultural Interpreter Role and Ethics of Authority in GRCs
Yihe Yang
Abstract
This paper reframes the Cultural Interpreter (CI) role in bilingual Group Relations Conferences (GRCs) not merely as a linguistic mechanism, but as a critical diagnostic site for organisational ethics, authority, and containment. Adopting an interpretive qualitative approach, the study draws on participant observation and archival data from the 2024 International Group Relations China Conference. It examines how CIs occupy a liminal space, essential to system functioning yet frequently unauthorised and overburdened with unprocessed systemic anxiety. The analysis reveals that CIs often face “epistemic injustice,” in which their interpretive labour is used to maintain stability while their voices remain structurally marginal.
To address these tensions, the paper inductively and deductively develops the 4R Framework: Respect, Responsibility, Relational Transparency, and Reflexive Space. This model moves beyond performative inclusion to advocate for structural ethics, where the burden of holding cultural difference is shared collectively rather than privatized onto liminal roles. Ultimately, the author argues that ethical intercultural leadership requires transforming the CI role from a service function into a shared systemic capacity for metabolizing ambiguity and meaning.
SPEAKING OUT
The Trump Phenomenon: an exploration of ‘mindless following’ in the ‘unthought known’ of the human herd, with selected references to the human brain.
Marilyn Miller
Abstract
This paper builds on an earlier JSOD publication on propaganda and infancy (Miller, 2023). There it was argued, following Arendt, that Bernays’ propaganda techniques generated ‘mindless following’ of an unconscious pre-moral nature in human groups, by stimulating infantile memories at a protomental level. (Arendt 1963; Bernays, 1923; Torres,2018). The paper implicitly also raised issues about the uniquely successful political and market leadership of Bernays; a feat admired and copied by Hitler. The group behaviours in focus there are described by Trotter’s ‘herd instinct’, and his student Bion’s ‘valency’ and ‘basic assumption dependency’, each sharing conceptual roots in the history of evolution (Bion, 1961; Trotter, 1916). They are therefore essentially biological; a direction followed in this paper. I aim here to explore group behaviour around Donald Trump as a form of ‘herd following’, and as an example of unconscious leadership selection, shaped by what has been called the ‘unthought known’ of a population (Bion, 1961, Bollas,1987). Trump carries two leadership roles: first of the USA population, and secondarily as a world leader. Significantly, he has been selected to carry these roles at a particular existential moment in evolutionary history, at a time when the planet itself is under well-documented existential threat (Ellis, 2018; Weintrobe, 2021). Pursuing the biological thread, I will include selections from neuroscientific research and theory developed between 1985 and 2023, concerning the functioning and limitations of the human brain. This research defines limitations in the human capacity to think, a difficulty arising from innate group (or herd) pressures toward homogeneity. These neuro-scientific foundations will be linked to the easily led, ‘herd behaviours’ to which I previously referred.
Psychodynamic Reading of the Film “The Zone of Interest“
Halina Brunning
Abstract
Jonathan Glazier’s 2024 film The Zone of Interest can be read in many different ways. I chose to see it as a philosophical treaty about a moral choice between engagement and disengagement in the face of Evil.
Does psychoanalysis have the potential to intervene in the proliferation of hate in society?
“Everywhere you look the cruelty of the human spirit is on display.”Julianne Schultz.
Allan Shafer
Abstract
A key focus of this paper is on the divisive and paranoiagenic role of hate amidst rising political and social violence: racism, domestic abuse, child exploitation, climate denial, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, fundamentalism, and fascism. I will consider the underlying pain which hate conceals. I explore how hate hinders thought and understanding. I investigate whether psychoanalytic thinking can penetrate these dynamics, and ultimately, whether it can contribute to strengthening social bonds. I consider and propose how psychoanalysis may have the potential to intervene in the proliferation of hate in society.
Modern Day Slavery and Exploitation: Human Trafficking, Forced Labour and Servitude
Olya Khaleelee, Ray Bakaitis, Rebecca Ellison, Veena Pinto, Carlos Remotti Breton and Augustine Sagoe
Abstract
This paper focusses on the phenomenon of modern day slavery and analyses how societal defences are mobilised through splitting, projection or denial to enable the individual citizen to remain unaware about what is going on in society, including the forced trafficking and exploitation of vulnerable groups such as children, migrants, minorities, refugees, and persons with disabilities. OPUS and AKRI organised three workshops during 2025-6 to explore this phenomenon, looking at the issues of the psychodynamics of power, powerlessness and collective responsibility as well as the core motivators that drive people to flee destitution for the sake of economic survival, who then find themselves caught up in a cycle of exploitation. The outcomes suggested the need to address modern slavery and exploitation using an active systemic approach that moves beyond denial, splitting and simplistic narratives. By integrating psychoanalytic and group relations perspectives, and using Tavistock conference methodology as an intervention, the paper shows how unconscious processes, such as complicity and the bystander role, shape both individual and collective responses to exploitation. Reflective awareness of citizens and making survivor voices central to the discourse disrupts collective silence and fosters opportunities for reparation and transformation.