Intimate Innovation

I want to discuss – at some length – an extract from a paper by David Armstrong[1] in which he explores some ideas about organisational leadership that I also want to explore. He describes how his (provisional) ideas owed their origins to listening to two child psychotherapists, Branca Pecotic and Anne Alvarez, on different occasions over an 18 month period. On the one hand, Branca Pecotic sketched out some ideas in a paper in which she offered a number of observations on what she saw as a tendency within the Tavistock approach to groups and institutions to over-emphasise the destructive and pathological aspects of group and organisational functioning. This emphasis, she argued, risked obscuring the extent to which, for example, defensive processes or strategies can simultaneously carry within them, as a shadow, a stimulus for growth and development.  As she put it:

“The defences are a sign that something is moving on…  Whatever the defensive culture in the group or institution is, it may be viewed as a communication of an inner struggle, of a conflict between the need to change, adapt or grow and the difficulty in doing so for fear of disintegration or painful loss of identity” (Pecotic, 2000). This observation links to a further point Pecotic goes on to make:  That while

“the Kleinian authors who have written about groups and institutions have tended to emphasise both the defensive nature of institutions as well as their function of containing anxieties and psychic pain, (they have written) little of those aspects of the containing object that promote growth and development.”

This contrasts with some recent work in child psychotherapy, which has drawn attention to the capacity of

“the object not only to contain anxieties, to digest primitive communications of dread and pain, but also as being able to receive, augment and return back something that might be described simply as “joie de vivre”… pleasures of discovery of the world and discoveries within oneself…  If that is missing, then the child feels that there is no meeting point between his object and himself in the areas of pleasure, joys of growth etc.  Only the pain is understood.”

David Armstrong goes on to describe how around the same time as listening to Branca Pecotic, he attended a scientific meeting at the Tavistock in which Anne Alvarez was reading a paper based on her work over many years with autistic and seriously disturbed young children.  In this paper, Alvarez referred to various respects in which her experience of working with young patients had gradually led her to question “the emphasis in some psychoanalytic theories on frustration as the major impetus for learning” (Alvarez, 1999, page 184). She cited at the meeting, for example, Freud’s assertion that “it is the experiences of unpleasure that educate us and introduce us to “reality”, as in infancy and early childhood the baby gradually learns the truth that “he is lord and master of neither his mother, nor the universe”” (Alvarez, 1999, page 184).

David Armstrong continues will his account, describing how later, Wilfred Bion, in reframing Freud’s observations in the light of Melanie Klein’s views, offered a two-stage model of the genesis of learning:

“First that a preconception (something like a primitive expectation of the object) had to meet with a realisation for a conception to be born, and second, that a conception had to meet with a frustration (the absence of the object and/or the satisfaction derived from it) for a thought to be born” (Alvarez, 1999, page 185).  Most of Bion’s attention, however, Alvarez suggests are focused on the second step rather than the first.

The second step, though, is consequent on the first, in the same way that absence is consequent on an experience of presence.  Alvarez was concerned to show how, for many of her young patients, the deep emotional and cognitive disturbances from which they suffered were linked not so much, or not primarily, to anxieties and anger about losing the object as to anxieties and despair about “finding it”.

Alvarez (in David Armstrong’s account) goes on to argue that the establishment of presence is an achievement of normal development in a parent-child dyad, an achievement she describes as “pleasurable, but in a demanding way” (page 193).  This establishment of presence is neither passive, nor static.  One might rather say that it is co-created in the interplay between parent and child through which the child begins to get to know, “reflectively and cognitively, as well as emotionally… the whatness the is-ness” of the object (page 194).

Some of the ideas in this discussion stand in thought-provoking relation to the concept of leadership and the role of a leader. I wonder what organisational life would be like …

• if the relationship with the leader was ‘demanding in a pleasurable way?’
• if the leadership system fostered – not degrees of paranoia – but was able to to … ‘receive, augment and return back something that might be described simply as “joie de vivre”…’ (quoting Armstrong, quoting Pecotic, above)?
• if there were some way in which our leadership systems could help us to get to know ‘reflectively and cognitively, as well as emotionally’, our own ‘whatness and is-ness’ and that of the ‘organisational object’ (which David Armstrong goes on to discuss in his paper).
• There is also an implication in this material that reverie is on the verge of – at the edge of – some future generative moment. In its very consideration of the moment, now, reverie also holds in mind (in relation between those involved in it) the sense of the future moment. So, as well as the attunement to now, reverie involves a process of awareness and choosing about ‘what-might-happen-next’.

This train of thought brings me to the idea of – and process of – reverie. Is there a sense in which there could be a process of organisational reverie as an analogue to the reverie between a mother and child? And what would the capacity to ‘do’ this in an organisation, expressed through its leadership, help bring about? In the same way as Bion talks about the ‘capacity’ for maternal reverie, is there an organisational ‘capacity for reverie’? And – in a special sense – might reverie (in this context) be a special form of organising?