Leadership vitality is experienced in the inter-subjective dynamics of very small events, lasting seconds. ‘The scale is small’ but this is where we live; the scale if small, but this is where we lead, where we are led, where we follow – the relationship between leadership and scale is prone to ‘bigness’. It is often a term of approval for…
There is very little consideration of ‘pleasure’ in leadership – which is curious; perhaps there is a particular type of pleasurable demand, or demanding pleasure, to which the capacity for leadership in all of us can relate. And even less consideration of the pleasure in followership, the act of being led. Paul Bloom, in his recent book How Pleasure Works develops a…
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…
In her MA thesis, Sarah Sutton (2007) proposes the concept of ‘corporate reverie’ linked to the role of ‘corporate parenting’, which is a responsibility in the role of senior officers in local authorities (as described in various parts of UK government policy (1998)). This role is particularly expected of these corporate parents in relation to ‘looked after children’ (in some form…
Bion’s concept of maternal “reverie” as the capacity to sense (and make sense of) what is going on inside the infant has been an important element in post-Kleinian thought: “..reverie is an act of faith in unconscious process…essential to alpha-function’” Some commentators consider it to be the equivalent of Stern’s ‘attunement’, or Winnicott’s ‘maternal preoccupation’. In therapy, the analyst’s use of “reverie”…
There is something about envy in the dynamic of intimate innovation – as there is in any relationship. The absence of something good can be experienced as the presence of something bad; the absence of something bad is experienced as the presence of something good. This tendency has tell tale signs – the things we get snagged on – caught by,…
Maybe there is a link between envy and performance anxiety – will I be up to it? Can I include all of me in this relationship – if not what will I have to leave out? Perhaps, there is a particular envy of attunement – that you ‘know’ me better than I know myself – or at least there are things…
We tend to externalise communications – see it as the ‘inside’ communicating with the ‘outside’. and make big assumptions about the scope of what we mean by communications – from ‘broadcast’ to ‘dialogue’ – without much consideration of the degree of inter-penetration of one another. After all ‘language creates its own reality’, as well a communicating what might be the…
Partnerships are a way of promoting a kind of dissonance, especially for partners for whom conflict is muffled, baffled and starved of opportunity. Ruth Duek discusses dialogue in impossible situations, in her examination of ‘antagonism’ rather than ‘agonism’ in Israeli:Palestian negotiations. One of the things she says is: ‘In the conflict between narcissism versus object love lies the danger of empathising…
Partnership is to do with equality, in theory – public sector partnerships have proliferated in the late 1990s and early 2000s with mandates to try and tackle ‘inequality’ (close the gap – as it is commonly described). They also confront those that are involved in them with the paradoxes of working with those who are not one’s equals, and with whom…
Slingshot