At this year’s conference, ICI is continuing to build on the theme of exploring our relationships to colonialism and how our bodies are a source for deepening our knowledge. Janelle Joseph and Yamikani Msosa will join our work with a group of 25 invited participants to foster learning using movement and somatic practices as well as group relations methodologies.

In order to shift the hierarchical structures endemic to colonialism, the conference is being developed by a co-leadership group which includes: Jo-anne Carlyle, Tanya Lewis, mak wemuk, Kristine Stege and Barbara Williams. Similarly, participants are being invited to step into leadership from the membership by taking up specific roles during the conference.  Participants need to have some experience of group relations and are being invited to attend the conference.

If you would like more information or are interested in attending please email Tanya at tlewis@bureaukensington.com

In planning the Exploring Difference Conference and making adaptations to create more opportunities for reflection on colonialism,  the co-leadership group has been reflecting on the key group relations components  that support the exploration of social justice themes. These include:

Attending to both the unconscious and conscious levels of what is happening in the group
Surfacing unconscious dynamics through parallel process, symbolisation (dreams, fantasies)
Remembering the operation of Group-as-a-whole: that what is happening may reflect the entire group not the behavior of  single individuals
Using psychoanalytic concepts to support understanding about group functioning (e.g. anxiety, denial, splitting, projection/projective identification, as well as containment)
Considering how Bion’s concepts of basic assumptions and work group functioning are at play
Considering and disrupting the ways Boundaries, Authority, Roles and Tasks are thought about and taken up.  Provoking curiosity about roles – assigned and assumed; unpicking social assumptions about the dynamics of authority, leadership structures, use and abuse of power
Considering how power is operating within the group as a companion to authority and leadership. Noticing how power is manifest and has roots in hierarchy, white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, and all the other things against which we struggle. When power is considered in this way then social justice becomes an overarching theme

The co-leadership group’s conversations have included discussions about how to balance the traumatic experience individuals bring to discussions of colonialism and the traditional group relations practice of fostering regression. This year’s conference will work on the premise that regression will inevitably take place and that the work is to support members to confront their difficult learning about colonialism through reflective practices.

Last spring ICI hosted a panel discussion on adaptations to group relations which featured: Jo-anne Carlyle, Janelle Joseph, mak wemuk, Evangeline Sarda and Barbara Williams. Jo-anne Carlyle described the theme of the conversation in saying how do we describe both the power of group relations for learning but also its reenactments? She talked about the tension in adapting group relations work for social justice issues as one of moving from reflection to activism, from an appreciation of tasks and unconscious dynamics with a willingness to interrogate what is ignored in the assumptions made in group relations methodology.

In following this thread, Barbara Williams quoted Palmer (1994) saying  orthodoxies, “address a range of situations, but fail to engage with others because they articulate a ‘reality’ in which significant ‘objects’ do not exist and critical distinctions are not problematized”.

Reenactments within Group Relations

Barbara highlighted that the learning space concerns itself with how oppression and racism works and is mindful about how repetitions of harm can occur even against/with the best of intentions. The work then is to seek ways to address these repetitions.

The panel thought further about how group relations reenacts hierarchical practices, individualism and an “apolitical” stance which reinforces the status quo. In talking about  the work of Insight for Community Impact, Barbara challenges the idea of a temporary organization – a basic tenet of group relations – with its inherent individualism.

Through ICI’s work to engage social justice communities to learn together over time, there is an opportunity to continue to reflect, integrate learning and apply insights to the work of social justice organizations. ICI struggles with how might people challenge and support one another within overlapping relationships to take up this difficult learning? How do we design opportunities for learning and continued reflection that take into account the demands of participants’ lives? How do we create visibility for the historical, social and political context of the work to surface the social justice struggles?

Participants involved in social justice initiatives may not have the resources to attend group relation conferences, particularly in person, even when bursaries are provided. How do we think about enhancing financial accessibility to reach participants from more diverse workplaces and range of life experiences?

In speaking about her experience at a group relations conference of having dominant modes of learning imposed on her, through long hours of sitting quietly and talking, Janelle Joseph raised the question about how people learn. Sitting for long periods of time can be stifling and counter productive. She is exploring how movement and reflection on movement as a group can promote learning in a different way from sitting for long periods of time in groups.

Evangeline Sarda described how group relations learning is a journey with evolving insights to be explored. At the same time she outlined the tension between this approach to learning and how group relations organizational structures create a hierarchy in which staff are chosen for conferences. How do we openly work with the dynamics involved in those choices and with the potentially conflicting desires to perform well enough to be chosen as a staff member and to go where the learning leads?

mak wemuk talked about the desire for transformative change that we may bring to group relations. Instead people may experience a kind of stuckness. He asks whether or not it is time to question the ideas and assumptions embedded in group relations methodologies that replicate the very thing that we wish to break through. Ideas that include: projective identification, projection and Bion’s basic assumptions. Might new thinking open up through working with complexity theory or with the idea of agency rather than authority? Do we need to question the orthodoxy of group relations?

Following several of the participants’ comments, Jo-anne ended with the question about how we can bring other views into the process coming from less vertical and more lateral perspectives of seeing things differently,linguistically and symbolically?

In September of 2022 Jo-anne Carlyle and Barbara Williams presented at the NIODA symposium on social movements. They asked a series of different questions about group relations orthodoxies by  working with social movement  concepts.   They ask what it would  mean to ‘face’ the politics of  injustice as it is often re/enacted and repeated in a group relations format? How can we contend  with power, the anxieties that mobilize action and provoke defenses such as projective identification and  disavowal in which we participate in our systems-dynamics work and limit our capacity to  ‘think’? In what way then, can critical progressive social movements helpfully challenge or  mitigate some of the foundational power-oppression in systems psychodynamic orthodoxies and make space  for new thinking?
Bringing the practices of social movements to a consideration of group relations, new possibilities may be opened up. These include:

How to use lateral and not only hierarchical forms of leadership?
How to encourage the playfulness inherent in competition to imagine different futures and realities generatively, inclusively and collaboratively?
How to sustain innovation with attention to values,  power and oppression?
How to open a third space which relates to its parameters but is not constrained by them?
How might such concepts as the primary task; anxiety and boundaries be reconsidered and redefined?

As their work develops we look forward to hearing more about it.

Resources

To register for this event on-line, please go to:

https://torontopsychoanalysis.com/between-hours/23rd-annual-day-in-applied-psychoanalysis/