Nurse Lucy Letby was accused of multiple murders of babies in a neonatal ward and was given concurrent life sentences that meant she would be in prison for the rest of her life. She was never seen to murder a baby and the evidence against her is, therefore, circumstantial. However, it convinced the jury who were unanimous in condemning her as a serial murderer. Since her incarceration there has been much controversy over the case especially around the medical evidence. Various aspects of the case have, post-trial, been re-examined. First, the medical evidence as to how and why these babies died has been challenged, second the statistics that were used to prove that Lucy Letby was a constant, likewise, and third there has been an attempt to discredit the medical expert witness for the prosecution. My focus in this article is on Lucy Letby. I question her possible motivation for killing and suggest that she lacks the psychopathology that we might expect to find in a killer nurse, that she might in fact be innocent. She may have been the object of projective identification or the bad object that enabled splitting in the institution. I suggest that, as a single childless woman, she was the ideal subject to carry the projections of those around her lost for an explanation as to why there were so many neonatal deaths.
This article explores the role of silence in a workplace responsible for supporting vulnerable families. The research is based on the assumption that organisational silence exists and investigates how it influences social work practices and affects professionals. Social workers manage a dual role: enforcing institutional authority while building trusting, respectful relationships with families. The project was conducted in a Danish municipality of 50,000 inhabitants, examining how silence shapes work dynamics. The study concludes that collaboration between management and staff is vital for cultivating openness, trust, and courage. It found a lack of shared goals, weak communication, poor emotional alignment, and absence of containment. These issues contribute to dysfunctional mirroring, emotional strain, and basic assumption behaviour. Though several initiatives were introduced, they lacked genuine staff support, leading to miscommunication and resistance. The project underscores the need to understand the radical disruptions in routines and expectations within organisational life. It reveals how both conscious and unconscious emotions can create a barrier between management and employees, reducing dialogue and engagement quality. Intense emotions increase anxiety, making it harder to accept accurate information and causing distorted perceptions–ultimately affecting the quality of care provided to vulnerable families.
Socioanalytic research, coaching, and organisational consultancy use methods originating in psychodynamic therapy (Long, 2013). But the purposes and ways that the data is utilised in these different disciplines differ. This article explores such purposes, uses, and some implications for ethical practice. The origins of the methods and their current usage is discussed. This discussion is important for those undertaking socioanalytic, psychosocial, or systems psychodynamic methods in research, coaching, and consultancy.
Work, organisations, and society have been transformed by digital technologies. Information and communication technologies are increasingly important to the management and delivery of human services. Significant sums are invested with the expectation that new technology will drive positive changes such as improving service user experience, efficiency, and outcomes. Sometimes the promises of technology are not fully realised. As researchers and practitioners in organisational and social dynamics it is important to understand how these technologies are affecting the ways in which we organise, communicate, and relate. In this article I explore one aspect of this dynamic, which is that technologies are entangled with the anxieties of human service organisations where the task is caring for people who are ill or in distress. This may lead to structures and processes that are not requisite to the primary task of these services and the technology implementation may fail to meet its aims. I draw on the work of Kurt Lewin, Isabel Menzies Lyth, sociotechnical systems theory, and my own research to explore the entangled nature of contemporary organisations. I suggest ways in which we might develop our concepts and practices to fully account for the role of technologies in organisational process and therefore our ability to consult to those processes.
What happens when an institution outgrows its container? In 2000, the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art announced an expansion project that would consolidate its five existing buildings. By 2003, the plan had been abandoned due to its financial reach. This article explores the legacy of this unrealised project and the possible unconscious dynamics at play that led to this outcome. It also demonstrates the way irrational forces influence the development of the built environment, as well as the way architecture is used to contain anxiety associated with periods of organisational and societal change. I argue that this project's legacy endures as an underexplored and valuable case study illuminating the complex intersection of social systems, leadership, global architecture, urban development, and shifting understandings of the role of art institutions at the dawn of the new millennium.
Twenty-five James Bond films, produced across a period of sixty-three years, are being explored as a meaningful indicator of times to come. The unthought known shows us the way.
Drawing on contemporary progressive psychoanalytic thinking and critical social theory, this article examines some of the orthodoxies and unchallenged assumptions in the theory and practice of systems psychodynamics and its offspring group relations. While their foundational forms have been undeniably important to our learning, we question why and how the structural and systemic underpinnings of real global inequities, and social justice organisations??? efforts to address these, are not having more impact in systems psychodynamic and group relations theorising and practice. We use our experience consulting with social justice organisations in their efforts to address these global inequities, and our development and adaption of the groups relations model to challenge potential orthodoxies and question resistance to change within the field. At heart, our inquiry is addressed to those of us committed to systems psychodynamic work and to the originating ethos of that work, in a vulnerable global context and to question, as Carson does, humanity’s faith in existing technological and sociopolitical progress.
A practical psychodynamic understanding of how professionals experience and perform through the uncertainties of innovation may help organisational development practitioners better support executives navigating this specific leadership situation. This article presents observations from a novel leadership development approach building on the previously developed “innovation leadership map” theoretical model as a comparative method of evaluating good and bad leadership experiences with structured psychodynamic interpretations. Action research with over 500 professionals suggests positive professional and personal outcomes with this approach. Observed across participants was that the framework and comparative method provided: i) rarely accessed experiential self-analysis of their response range when operating in emotionally charged environments of innovation; ii) relatable language to insightfully describe and discuss the feelings, thoughts, and behaviours of leadership that influence outcomes; and iii) a way for individuals to access evidence-based underlying psychodynamic imprints influencing how they work with or destructively become overwhelmed by innovation’s emotional dynamics. While every innovation leadership situation is unique, the mechanism of “emotional gearing” featuring centred, surging, and stuck positions is proposed as a practice for how leaders can work with and be mindful of strong emotions within themselves, their team, and/or the organisation.
Social justice leaders work to create more equitable social conditions, opportunities, and human rights (San Diego Foundation, 2024). They often work with people- within their organisations and with those they accompany who experience disenfranchisement within existing systems. Thus, they face highly charged conscious and unconscious emotions and demands driven by their own idealism and that of others, by their own identifications, and the identifications of those with whom they work. These leaders seek ways to continue their work through inevitable despair and disappointment as well as identifying and working towards what is possible rather than what is ideal. Systems psychodynamically informed leadership development can support socialjustice leaders to develop insight into themselves and their organisations, understand more about the intersections between their identifications and the systems they are in, and hone their listening and analytic skills to work more effectively in their leadership roles. The Bureau Kensington Inc. leadership programme is described as a case example of this approach.
This article outlines recent developments in AI from various positive and negative perspectives, examining its impact on the weather, on warfare, in the workplace, in the classroom, and in agriculture. It explores how such developments will impact employment by using AI to replace workers and professionals and outlines how those developments are already having an impact particularly on call centres. AI, with its capacity to create fake news and fake people, is likely to impact on communication and on relationships. This will lead to a loss of trust for key figures through the capacity of AI to be used malignly as a means of punishing, manipulating, or controlling others. The blurring of the boundary between illusion and reality and the replacement of individuals with robotics and bots in the workplace will affect the population's relationship with employers, politicians, and other powerful figures. This article considers the likely societal and global threat on populations in terms of social cohesion and explores whether the introduction of Universal Basic Income, which is being trialled extensively in various countries, would be one way of providing the stability that loss of employment will bring.
Social justice leaders work to create more equitable social conditions, opportunities, and human rights (San Diego Foundation, 2024). They often work with people— within their organisations and with those they accompany who experience disenfranchisement within existing systems. Thus, they face highly charged conscious and unconscious emotions and demands driven by their own idealism and that of others, by their own identifications, and the identifications of those with whom they work. These leaders seek ways to continue their work through inevitable despair and disappointment as well as identifying and working towards what is possible rather than what is ideal. Systems psychodynamically informed leadership development can support social justice leaders to develop insight into themselves and their organisations, understand more about the intersections between their identifications and the systems they are in, and hone their listening and analytic skills to work more effectively in their leadership roles. The Bureau Kensington Inc. leadership programme is described as a case example of this approach.
The quote in the title is from Eric Miller, and this article-first given as the 2024 Eric Miller Memorial Lecture-considers the questions "What is our kind ofconsultancy?" and "What might be subversive about it?" Key is curiosity and the capacity to be surprised. A number of ways to retrieve this capacity are described, illustrated by case studies. These include organisation-in-the-mind drawings, role analysis in groups, reflective leadership, and a consultancy exercise designed to break through either/or thinking to find a "third position". All of these require containment ofthe anxieties unleashed by dismantling existing defences, so that we can begin to consider the possibility of alternative stories. At a societal level, existential anxieties are rising, and so too bipartisanship, as people defend against uncertainty by engaging almost entirely with people who think as they do. One result is that each person's version of "the truth" is constantly amplified in echo chambers and less available to examination, regardless of any evidence. Attempts are described of leaders trying to open up more space for dialogue, but these often meet extreme resistance as they pose a threat both to idenand to the need for that can come from to an "us".
This article explores the question in an organisational setting of the interrelationship between vision, delusion, and reality. The urgent need for societal change on a number of fronts, not least in regard to the environment, suggests the importance of advancing the understanding of designing productive societal change efforts from the outset, and, critically, driving adaptations and corrections as efforts unfold. Using a case of an evaluation of an environmental initiative, the dynamic interplay between the driving vision, delusion, and reality as experienced by the consultant, by key client participants, and by important system stakeholders, is described in some depth so as to convey an impression of their workings. Clues to recognising dysfunction, to functioning amidst the circumstances, and to fostering some reconnection with reality are offered. This article closes with some further reflection on additional questions related to the project dynamics and to broader considerations.
A key function of an organisational consultancy practitioner, working from a systems psychodynamic perspective, is to hold individuals in a psychologically safe place as they engage in difficult conversations. A key question in this regard is how the practitioner goes about attempting to create a holding environment in a complex organisational setting. This research, which uses first person action research methodology, and was conducted as part of a professional doctorate, explores the creation of a holding environment. The author, in her role as a practitioner in an organisational setting, inquired into how she created a holding environment using a systems psychodynamic lens. Inquiring in the present tense with triple attentiveness to the outer data of sense, the inner data of consciousness, and the intellectual data of her understanding, the author shows and illuminates with case material how she attempted to create a holding environment. While others have made reference to the experience of the consultant in creating a holding environment, the contribution of this article is to do so systematically using a specific research methodology. Seven key elements emerged in the research. These elements include (1) negotiating with key authority figures within the organisation, (2) creating psychological safety in the group, (3) dreaming and reverie, (4) communicating with group participants including attuning and mirroring, (5) creating space for needs, vulnerabilities, and emotions, (6) enabling insight and understanding, and (7) holding environments-in-the-mind.
This article outlines recent developments in AI from various positive and negative perspectives, examining its impact on the weather, on warfare, in the workplace, in the classroom, and in agriculture. It explores how such developments will impact employment by using AI to replace workers and professionals and outlines how those developments are already having an impact particularly on call centres. AI, with its capacity to create fake news and fake people, is likely to impact on communication and on relationships. This will lead to a loss of trust for key figures through the capacity of AI to be used malignly as a means of punishing, manipulating, or controlling others. The blurring of the boundary between illusion and reality and the replacement of individuals with robotics and bots in the workplace will affect the population's relationship with employers, politicians, and other powerful figures. This article considers the likely societal and global threat on populations in terms of social cohesion and explores whether the introduction of Universal Basic Income, which is being trialled extensively in various countries, would be one way of providing the stability that loss of employment will bring.
On or around 12 January 2024, Listening Posts were conducted, mainly online, in fifteen countries, yielding nineteen written reports. By studying the reports, it was possible to discern the terrifying impact of global warfare, the lasting legacy of Covid-19 and lockdown, overwhelming concerns about the future (regarding economic and environmental sustainability, the advent of artificial intelligence) and widespread disillusionment with the status quo—a sense of democracy failing. As a consequence, the authors of this report wondered whether the prevailing global experience could be best described as a "collective trauma". During the Listening Post, citizens (i.e.members of society) are encouraged to adopt a "reflective citizen" role in order to think together about society. There is no doubt that in the nineteen meetings held internationally, there was a steadfast commitment to this task. However, the experiences reported by participants all around the world led the authors of the global report to question whether we are living in a time of reflection, or whether we are all in some ways drawn to enact the violence and aggression to which we are exposed daily in the news media and online. As outlined above, the fear is that by acting out on our unconscious impulses (in variations of the fight/flight or freeze model), we inadvertently contribute to the decline of society and ultimately increase the likelihood of war. If we are experiencing a collective trauma, how on earth do we recover?
The problem: In many developed Western countries, physicians tend to quit healthcare institutions. Factors contributing to physician retention are numerous, but young physicians' intentions towards public hospitals still seem mysterious to senior physicians and administrators. The solution: We investigate physicians' desire for a meaningful "dialogue" with their institution as an overarching need determining their intent to stay. Our data was gathered during a cooperative action-research project in a French University Hospital. We hypothesise that the physician-administrator relationship is crucial because the dialogue they hold in the "outer world" prolongs the dialogue in which physicians unconsciously engage with their institution-in-the-mind. The stakeholders: This article informs hospital administrators and managing physicians who need to ensure younger physicians remain in public healthcare institutions. This article's original clinical viewpoint will be of interest to healthcare organisations and other public service institutions wondering how interprofessional relationships contribute to professionals' intent to stay.
This article explores what we call “the hostile container” and how it influences the capacity of a writer to think about and write about ideas. The hostile container is an intrapsychic space that diminishes the capacity to think and write. The notion of the hostile container emerges from the idea that the process of thinking–and hence of writing–is largely an unconscious dialogue between two parts of the dual self (Meares, 1992; Ringer, 2022). We refer to one part of the dual self as the “declaring part” and the other as the “receiving part”. The “declaring” part is “heard” by the “receiving” part. If the receiving part is a hostile internal object, the dialogue is severely impeded because the declaring part will avoid being attacked. We develop this core concept to help to understand intrapsychic processes that both enhance and impede the ability to write. This article is presented in the form of a “metalogue” (Bateson, 1972) between the authors. Following in the footsteps of Gregory Bateson???s idea of metalogue, the article that follows is a condensed version of many conversations between Fiona Martin and Martin Ringer as they jointly explored the notion of a hostile container within the experience of authoring. The authors’ intent in presenting this material in the form of a metalogue is to provoke associations in the reader rather than to postulate firm ideas. We invite you to follow your own associations as you read through this and we hope that this process evokes new thoughts for you. We invite you to share your thoughts with us, the authors.
This article brings Mary Douglas’ theory of the four elementary and universal forms of social ordering‐grid‐group theory‐into juxtaposition with the Klein object-relations tradition in psychoanalysis. Klein and her successors have proposed fundamental orientations‐the paranoid‐schizoid, depressive, and narcissistic “positions”–as universal attributes of personality development. Bion’s theory of containment is considered as a development of Klein’s ideas. The question explored is whether these different models, the first concerned mainly with forms of social behaviour, the second with the dispositions of individuals, have any illuminating relation to one another. This exploration takes the form of a case study of changes which have been taking place in the organisation of the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust, which is the largest institutional embodiment of a wider Tavistock tradition. The argument is that these changes can be understood both in the terms, following Douglas, of its dominant form of “social ordering”, moving from “hierarchy” towards “individualism”, “enclavism”, and “isolation”. And in Klein’s and Bion’s perspective, the shift is away from more “depressive” and “contained??? dispositions and relations. These (contested) changes represent a significant break with the Tavistock earlier traditions, and in this reflect wider changes taking place in society.
This article analyses the role that hope and spirituality play in enhancing the capacity of work teams and organisations to face extreme contexts of crisis and disasters. The study utilises Bion’s concept of sophisticated work‐group mentality to examine how these phenomena can contribute to the generation of new capabilities within the group to address the dilemmas and challenges that emerge in times of crisis. It addresses an iconic case of catastrophe–the case of the Chilean miners rescued in 2010 after surviving entrapment for almost seventy days–in order to analyse the relationships that unfold within and around the hopeful endurance of disaster. This article empirically examines the constructive dimension of basic assumptions mentalities, contrary to the predominant view in the socio‐analytic field that emphasises the regressive and disabling nature these phenomena have on the achievement of the group’s task. For this purpose, the concept of work‐group pairing (French & Simpson, 2010) is used to show the productive nature of hope on the group members’ psychic functioning. Thus, this article contributes original insights on the role of hope in the psychosocial construction of pathways for organisational recovery and resilience during and after a crisis.
