GROUP RELATIONS: AN INTRODUCTION
Chapter Five
PSYCHOTIC ANXIETIES IN GROUPS AND INSTITUTIONS
by Robert M. Young
What lies beyond Freud's reductionism of cultural issues to repression, guilt and
sublimation in the space between the two great instincts of love and destructiveness. I
shall point to a different level of analysis of why we behave so badly toward one another.
I assume that none of you would take the trouble to turn up to this lecture unless you
found relationships, families, groups and institutions bewildering and distressing. Why
can we not do what we intend? Why is it so hard to see things from conception to
completion, and when things are good from time to time, after lots of struggle and too
much compromise, why can't they stay that way for any length of time? I well remember when
I first encountered the notion of self-envy in my own analysis - that a part of the self
attacks the good because it's good. It made instant sense to me. I have practically no memory of a time when I did not find people at least as awful as
nice. One or two moments alone with my mother at the edge of my memory count as
exceptions. But for the most part I can recall hostile groups, strict regimes at home, at
school and at work. Arbitrary, rigid, stern, retributive. I am speaking of the earliest
groups I can recall - rival, excluding, mutually combative gangs in latency - mudball
fights (with stones in the mudballs), a clique of bullies in elementary school who
dominated, chased lesser boys home and tyrannised the swimming pool all summer. Older boys
who tied us to a chair and ran electric current through us, tied us to trees and shot
beebees at us and beat on us at their leisure. Crossing into puberty involved hazing at
Boy Scout initiation - being spat upon and masturbated with the crook of a coat-hanger,
rival cliques at school, cruel and unusual punishments in the cadet corps, paddles and
detention at the hands of teachers. Racism was rampant; so was sexism and class barriers
that were so rigid that one simply never met anyone from a different social stratum. I can hear your minds saying that life was never like this in Sofia. I concede a little
to that thought, since I am describing life in the suburb which featured in the 'Dallas'
television series. To drive this point home, I remind you of how street urchins are being
treated throughout the world and especially in Brazil and how regions newly freed from
Soviet hegemony are behaving toward one another. And I'll offer you a quote about another
sort of group, which, by definition, must work in harmony. Ry Cooder is one of my
favourite musicians, though his output is disappointingly and tantalisingly small. His
latest album is 'Little Village', and I read an interview with him about his work. He must
have been reading Bion between takes. He said recently: 'Bands generally don't get along.
First thing they do is fight, last thing they do is fight. In between something happens.
Maybe (Sunday Times, 16 Feb. 1992, 6:3). I have offered the examples I have in order to make it clear to myself and to you that
evidence for the bad and intractable aspects of organizations is all around us, including
throughout all our autobiographies. In my own case I could easily fill the hour with tales
from nominally enviable settings in which this sort of thing was the norm, e.g., my
medical school, Yale, a Cambridge college which I've heard described as 'the best address
in England', the culture of the Sixties and early Seventies, television, the culture of
psychoanalysis and - ironically - in the institutions in which institutional dynamics are
studied. I have in mind, in particular, the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, the
Institute of Group Analysis, the Grubb Institute, The A. K. Rice Institute and similar
organizations in - America, France, Holland, Australia and so on. The histories of most of
these are interrelated, and the founding of many is the result of unresolved splits or
stasis in others, including the expulsion of notable and gifted singletons, who go off to
other places or remain Flying Dutchmen. Think of the trajectories of some of the most
original writers in the field, for example, Eric Trist, A. K. Rice, Alisdair Bain, Elliott
Jaques and Gordon Lawrence. All have moved on from institutions as a result of group
conflicts.. A bleak beginning, but it behoves us to know what we are up against. Otherwise, as the
singer Bruce Springsteen says, there are things that'll knock you down that you didn't see
coming. I have never been in a group or institution in which utterly bewildering and
exhausting difficulties did not arise. In an attempt to shed some light on all this, I want to gather together and draw
attention to the implications of Kleinian and neo-Kleinian ideas for how we think of human
nature, by which I mean, with respect to individuals and all other levels of culture and
civilisation. It turns out that defence against psychotic anxieties is offered by
Kleinians as a deeper explanation than the incest taboo as the basis of that thin and all
too easily breached veneer that constitutes civility and stands between what passes for
the social order, on the one hand, and chaos (or the fear of it), on the other. This turns
out to be a mixed blessing, since our defences against psychotic anxieties act as a
powerful brake on institutional and social change toward less rigid and more generous
relations between individuals and groups. Those of you who are familiar with this
literature will not hear anything new. My aim is to think as hard as I can about what it
would mean to take its conclusions seriously. Freud's theory of civilisation drew attention to the taboo against violent sexual
competitiveness and rapaciousness as the corner-stone of civilisation. The polymorphously
sexual patriarch was said to have been killed by the primal horde, thus establishing the
incest taboo, the basis for all other taboos and the system of custom and legality that
gave birth to civilisation and culture, terms Freud refused to distinguish. He constantly
emphasised that 'man is a wolf to other men', that the veneer of civilisation is thin and
under threat from moment to moment and that all of life is a constant struggle conducted
in the fraught space between erotic and destructive instincts. For Freud the basic
conflicts occurred at this level of the psyche (see Young, 1992, ch. 2). As Meltzer
describes it, Freud's world is 'a world of higher animals', 'creatures seeking surcease
from the constant bombardment of stimuli from inside and out'. He contrasts Klein's world
as 'one of holy babes in holy families plagued by the devils of split off death instinct'
(Meltzer, 1978, part 3, pp. 115-16). This is not merely a difference of emphasis. The difference between the worlds of Freud
and Klein may also be described as one of level of explanation and of causality.
Bion put the point clearly in the conclusion to his essay, 'Group Dynamics - A Re-view',
which, as Menzies Lyth points out, was more explicit about the Kleinian inspiration of his
ideas than his better-known collection of essays, Experiences in Groups. Bion says,
'Freud's view of the dynamics of the group seems to me to require supplementing rather
than correction' (Bion, 1955, p. 475). He accepts Freud's claim that the family group is
the basis for all groups but adds that 'this view does not go far enough... I think that
the central position in group dynamics is occupied by the more primitive mechanisms which
Melanie Klein has described as peculiar to the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions.
In other words, I feel... that it is not simply a matter of the incompleteness of the
illumination provided by Freud's discovery of the family group as the prototype of all
groups, but the fact that this incompleteness leaves out the source of the main emotional
drives of the group' (ibid.). He then summarises the notions of 'work group' and the
'basic assumptions' that assail them - 'dependence', 'pairing', 'fight-flight' - and
suggests that these may have a common link or may be different aspects of each other. 'Further investigation shows that each basic assumption contains features that
correspond so closely with extremely primitive part objects that sooner or later psychotic
anxiety, appertaining to these primitive relationships, is released. These anxieties, and
the mechanisms peculiar to them, have already been displayed in psychoanalysis by Melanie
Klein, and her descriptions tally well with the emotional states' of the basic assumption
group. Such groups have aims 'far different either from the overt task of the group or
even from the tasks that would appear to be appropriate to Freud's view of the group as
based on the family group. But approached from the angle of psychotic anxiety, associated
with phantasies of primitive part object relationships... the basic assumption phenomena
appear far more to have the characteristics of defensive reactions to psychotic anxiety,
and to be not so much at variance with Freud's views as supplementary to them. In my view,
it is necessary to work through both the stresses that appertain to family patterns and
the still more primitive anxieties of part object relationships. In fact I consider the
latter to contain the ultimate sources of all group behaviour' (p. 476). In Bion's view, then, what matters in individual and group behaviour is more primitive
than the Freudian level of explanation. The ultimate sources of our distress are psychotic
anxieties, and much of what happens in individuals and groups is a result of defences
erected against psychotic anxieties, so that we do not have to endure them
consciously. I'll say something about the term 'psychotic' and then turn to the concept of phantasy
and the anxieties which primitive phantasies generate. To most of us 'psychotic' refers to
psychosis, a primary disturbance of libidinal relations with reality, and psychotic
symptoms are an attempt to restore the link with objects (Laplanche & Pontalis, p.
370). When I was trained as a psychiatric aide in a state mental hospital in the 1950s, we
were taught a small number of things about psychosis, and they seemed adequate in those
pre-Laing and pre-Goffman times. Psychotics were 'out of contact with reality' for much or
all of the time. They heard and saw things that were not there - hallucinations - and
wildly distorted things that were - delusions. The notion of 'psychotic' was safely
restricted to the people designated as 'mad'.Their likely diagnoses were schizophrenia
(four varieties: catatonic, paranoid, hebephrenic, simple); true paranoia;
manic-depressive psychosis; psychotic depression; organic psychosis. The categories of
dementia praecox or schizophrenia and of manic-depressive psychosis have been in existence
for less then a century and are more recent than Freud and Breuer's Studies on Hysteria.
Emil Kraepelin coined the term 'dementia praecox' in 1896. What we now call psychosis has always had a special place in practically all cultures,
although that place has varied from divine, to diabolical, to providing special insight,
to links with witchcraft and enviable freedom from social (though not always physical)
restraints. Think of the 'Ship of Fools' and the depiction and expressions of the mad by
Bosch, Breughel, Goya and van Gogh, Magritte and Man Ray, as well as the manifests of the
Surrealists and Dadaists. In their very different ways they all celebrated illumination
coming from the unconscious. Like the critiques of the categories of psychiatry written by
Foucault, Laing and Cooper, these artists pointed to madness as offering a basis for
making critiques of the repressions, sublimations and alienation of conventional society
and put one in touch with something truer and in some senses better (see also Gordon,
1990). These notions remain widespread. In a recent BBC2 television film in a series on
'Madness', Jonathan Miller referred to ideas of the mad as childlike, as direct
beneficiaries of God and to the beatific association between poverty and lunacy, while
that morning's Observer (13 October 1991) alluded to 'the sixties argument that the
mad are truly sane'. I am not analysing or assessing these claims, only noting their
currency. I want to turn now to the mechanisms in question in the Kleinian tradition and their
evolution from the asylum to the nursery. A very different picture of the place and
prevalence of psychotic processes is immediately apparent. Klein described schizoid
mechanisms as occurring 'in the baby's development in the first year of life
characteristically... the infant suffered from states of mind that were in all their
essentials equivalent to the adult psychoses, taken as regressive states in Freud's sense'
(Meltzer, 1978, part 3, p. 22). Klein says in the third paragraph of her most famous
paper, 'Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms', 'In early infancy anxieties characteristic of
psychosis arise which drive the ego to develop specific defence-mechanisms. In this period
the fixation-points for all psychotic disorders are to be found. This has led some people
to believe that I regard all infants as psychotic; but I have already dealt sufficiently
with this misunderstanding on other occasions' (Klein, 1975, vol. 3, p. 1). Meltzer
comments that 'Although she denied that this was tantamount to saying that babies are
psychotic, it is difficult to see how this implication could be escaped' (Meltzer, 1978,
part 3, p. 22). Kleinian thinking evolved in three stages. As in the above quotation, Klein saw
schizoid mechanisms and the paranoid-schizoid position as fixation points, respectively,
for schizophrenia and manic-depressive psychosis. Then the paranoid-schizoid and
depressive positions became developmental stages. Her terminology included 'psychotic
phases', 'psychotic positions' and then 'positions' (Klein, 1975, vol. 1, pp. 275n-276n,
279). Thirdly, in the work of Bion and other post-Kleinians, these became economic
principles and part of the moment-to-moment vicissitudes of everyday life. The notations
'ps' (for paranoid-schizoid) and 'd' (for depressive) were connected with a double-headed
arrow - ps÷d - to indicate how easily and frequently our inner states oscillate from the
one to the other and back again (Meltzer, 1978, part 3, p. 22). In Bion's writings on
schizophrenia an ambiguity remained as to whether the psychotic part of the personality is
ubiquitous or only present in schizophrenics. Meltzer concludes his exposition of Bion's
schizophrenia papers by referring to the existence of these phenomena in patients of every
degree of disturbance, even 'healthy' candidates in training (p.28). Going further, he and
colleagues have drawn on the inner world of autistic patients to illuminate the norm;
Frances Tustin has essayed on autistic phenomena in neurotic patients, while Sydney Klein
has described 'autistic cysts' in neurotic patients. So much for bringing 'psychotic' into the realm of the normal and neurotic. Turning now
to 'phantasy', I'll begin by pointing out that a full page of the index to Developments
in Pychoanalysis (Klein et al., 1952) is devoted to this single term, and the entry
fills half a page in the index of the historical account of The Freud-Klein
Controversies 1941-1945. The essays in Developments in Psychoanalysis are versions of the papers which formed the basis for that controversy. Many things
were at stake, but at the heart of it, in my opinion, was the question of the primacy of
the inner world, as opposed to the more interactive, adaptive framework of ideas which
came to be associated with ego psychology and, in our own time, 'contemporary
Freudianism'. Anna Freud rebuts the claim that she 'has an inveterate prejudice in favour
of the modes of external reality ... and of conscious mental processes' (King and Steiner,
1991, p. 328), but I think it is a legitimate demarcation between Kleinian and Freudian
orientations and became even more so at the hands of Hartmann, Kris, Lowenstein and the
American school epitomised by the systematising work of David Rapaport. As a part of the issue over the primacy of the inner world, I believe that people were
genuinely spooked by the sheer craziness and nastiness of the inner world as described by
Klein and her supporters. Indeed, there is a protest along these lines by Michael Balint,
who drily comments in the discussion of Susan Isaacs' fundamentally important paper (to
which I shall turn next) that 'perhaps Mrs Klein is laying undue emphasis on the role of
hatred, frustration and aggression in the infant' (p. 347). Fairbairn, in contrast, seemed
to feel (at least at that time) that Kleinian accounts of phantasy were so successfully
descriptive of the inner world that he proposed dropping 'phantasy' in favour of 'inner
reality' (p.359). I begin with the elementary point that 'phantasy' refers to
'predominantly or entirely unconscious phantasies', as distinct from the sort of conscious fantasies or imaginings we associate with, for example, Coleridge's
explorations of the imagination (Isaacs, 1952, pp. 80-81). Joan Riviere appeals to Freud's
hypothesis that the psyche is always interpreting the reality of its experiences - 'or
rather, misinterpreting them - in a subjective manner that increases its pleasure
and preserves it from pain' (Riviere, 1952, p. 41). Freud calls this process
'hallucination; and it forms the foundation of what we mean by phantasy-life. The
phantasy-life of the individual is thus the form in which the real internal and external
sensations and perceptions are interpreted and represented to himself in his mind under
the influence of the pleasure-pain principle'. Riviere adds that 'this primitive and
elementary function of his psyche - to misinterpret his perceptions for his own
satisfaction - still retains the upper hand in the minds of the great majority of even
civilised adults' (p.41). I suggest - and this lies at the heart of my paper - that
this point about misinterpreting the reality of the psyche's experience as normal and
basic and hallucinatory is the essential point - the ur-fact - about human nature. It is
also the essential basis for the theory of knowledge and our hopes for better human
relations in groups, institutions, communities and nations. This general function for phantasy is repeated in Susan Isaacs' definition. The
'"mental expression" of instinct is the unconscious phantasy...There is
no impulse, no instinctual urge or response which is not experienced as unconscious
phantasy' (Isaacs, 1952, p. 83). The first mental processes... are to be regarded as the
earliest beginnings of phantasies. In the mental development of the infant, however,
phantasy soon becomes also a means of defence against anxieties, a means of inhibiting and
controlling instinctual urges and an expression of reparative wishes as well... All
impulses, all feelings, all modes of defence are experienced in phantasies which give them mental life and show their direction and purpose' (ibid.). When we turn to the content of the phantasies a problem of communication arises: 'they
are apt to produce a strong impression of unreality and untruth' (Riviere, 1952, p. 20).
This is because when we write or speak about them we are clothing preverbal and very
primitive mental processes in the language of words in dictionaries. My way round this is
to share some images and experience from my own clinical and personal experience.
Phantasies are rendered as black holes, nameless dread, part objects, offal, shit, urine,
a patients' dreams of wet cinders or barren desert mindscapes, pus, slime, feelings of
being overwhelmed, engulfed, disintegrated, in pieces, devoured, falling through empty
space, spiders, bugs, snakes. Language drawn from work with autistic patients includes
dread of falling apart, falling infinitely, spilling away, exploding away, threat of total
annihilation, unintegration (as distinct from the disintegration of
schizophrenia), experiencing a missing person as a hole (rather than 'missing' them as not
present). When I cannot find a piece of paper or go to a room and cannot recall why, I don't just
think of age and preoccupation. The fabric of reality is rent asunder, and I feel in
imminent danger of dying, of disintegration, of unendurable panic. When I was a boy there
was a nearby grand house, set in large grounds in a gully, with walls and a gate with a
heavy chain and a wrought iron sign: 'Driverdale'. I could not go near it without intense
anxiety, so I didn't. (It was a feat of my adolescence to drive my motor-bike at high
speed through the grounds.) The same intense terror was experienced with respect to a
green house we had to pass on the way to the swimming pool. We called the woman who lived
there 'the green witch' and ran past. I believed in and feared the Bogeyman and could not
go to sleep unless the door of my wardrobe was shut. I was mortally afraid of the
Frankenstein monster and the Mummy (of 'The Mummy's Curse'), and until I went away to
university I could not go into the kitchen without first reaching round the door jamb and
turning on the fluorescent light, which took an age to go on. The same was true of the
back porch, while going into the back garden after dusk was simply out of the question. My
childhood and adolescence were filled with terrors, imaginings, fantasies and some
activities about which I would blush to tell - all rending the fabric of civilised
society. Prominent among the terrors was the sheer horror of hearing the word 'Terrell',
the name of the nearby state mental hospital. I cannot recall a time when this word did
not conjure up an unpicturable hell (later well- represented in the film 'Snake Pit'),
into which my depressed mother and I were in imminent danger of being tossed as a result
of my transgressions, in particular, my inability to be sufficiently respectful of my
father. A version of this terror still overcomes me when I am in the grip of an argument
and cannot let up. Behind these conscious experiences, I now know, lay psychotic
anxieties. I offer these reports, somewhat shyly, as a way of inviting you to make similar
searches of your memories to glimpse the tips of the icebergs of your own phantasies and
psychotic anxieties. They are my version of what Klein calls 'a cave of dangerous
monsters' (Klein, vol. 1, p. 272). My general point is that if you ask the question, 'What
is a psychotic anxiety when it's at home and not in the pages of an implausible and nearly
unfathomable text by Melanie Klein?', you'll be able to be less sceptical if you
interrogate the fringes of your own memories and distressing experiences and, of course,
your dreams. I shall offer more illustrations anon, but for the present I want to assert
that psychotic anxieties are ubiquitous, underlie all thought, provide the rationale for
all culture and institutions and, in particular cases, help us to make sense of especially
galling ways of being. I have in mind at the moment Meltzer's idea of the claustrum,
wherein dwell ultra-ambitious and survivalist conformists who live in projective
identification, which he takes to mean that their dwelling place in the inner world is
inside the rectum, thus confirming the colloquial description of such people as
'arseholes'. His analysis shows that this degree of use of projective identification is a
defence against schizophrenic breakdown. This suggests that many of our chief executives
and leaders live perpetually on the verge of madness. No wonder they absolutely must get
their way. Klein's views on these matters are based on Freud and Abraham's notions of oral libido
and fantasies of cannibalism (Gedo, 1986, p. 94). She refers to sadistic impulses against
the mother's breast and inside her body, wanting to scoop out, devour, cut to pieces,
poison and destroy by every means sadism suggests (Klein, 1975, vol. 1, p. 262). Once
again, the projective and introjective mechanisms of the first months and year give rise
to anxiety situations and defences against them, 'the content of which is comparable to
that of the psychoses in adults' (ibid.). Orality is everywhere, for example, in the
'gnawing of conscience' (p. 268). Riviere says that 'such helplessness against destructive
forces within constitutes the greatest psychical danger-situation known to the human
organism; and that this helplessness is the deepest source of anxiety in human beings'
(Riviere, 1952, p. 43). It is the ultimate source of all neurosis. At this early stage of
development, sadism is at its height and is followed by the discovery that loved objects
are in a state of disintegration, in bits or in dissolution, leading to despair, remorse
and anxiety, which underlie numerous anxiety situations. Klein concludes, 'Anxiety
situations of this kind I have found to be at the bottom not only of depression, but of
all inhibitions of work' (Klein, 1975 vol. 1, p. 270). It should be recalled that these are pre-linguistic experiences developmentally, and
sub-linguistic in adults. It is a characteristic of the world view of Kleinians that the
primitive is never transcended and that all experiences continue to be mediated through
the mother's body. Similarly, there is a persistence of primitive phantasies of body parts
and bodily functions, especially biting, eating, tearing, spitting out, urine and
urinating, faeces and defecating, mucus, genitals. Powerful and bewildering examples of
these matters can be found in Klein's analyses of dreams and children's play. Similarly
daunting example could be drawn from Meltzer's account of the dream materials which can be
attributed to unconscious phantasies of anal masturbation (Meltzer, 1988, esp. pp. 104,
106-7). Here is an example of undiluted Klein. She is in the middle of an exposition of the
part which the paranoid, depressive and manic positions play in normal development (Klein,
1975, vol. 1, p. 279) and offers two illustrative dreams, which I shall not quote. (I
should emphasise that I am quoting a passage from the middle of an exposition and
interpretation which is six pages long.) I want to convey the flavour of the primitive
phantasies which I have been discussing. Here is part of the interpretation: 'The
urination in the dream led on to early aggressive phantasies of the patient towards his
parents, especially directed against their sexual intercourse. He had phantasied biting
them and eating them up, and among other attacks, urinating on and into his father's
penis, in order to skin and burn it and to make his father set his mother's inside on fire
in their intercourse (the torturing with hot oil). These phantasies extended to babies
inside his mother's body, which were to be killed (burnt). The kidney burnt alive stood
both for his father's penis - equated with faeces - and for the babies inside his mother's
body (the stove which he did not open). Castration of the father was expressed by the
associations about beheading. Appropriation of the father's penis was shown by the feeling
that his penis was so large and that he urinated both for himself and for his father
(phantasies of having his father's penis inside his own or joined on to his own had come
out a great deal in his analysis). The patient's urinating into the bowl meant also his
sexual intercourse with his mother (whereby the bowl and the mother in the dream
represented her both as a real and as an internalised figure). The impotent and castrated
father was made to look on at the patient's intercourse with his mother - the reverse of
the situation the patient had gone through in phantasy in his childhood. The wish to
humiliate his father is expressed by his feeling that he ought not to do so' (Klein, vol.
1, p. 281). And so on for another half page. Many Kleinians (though not all, for example, Meltzer) have altered their language and
have become more likely to make interpretations in terms of functions rather than
anatomical part objects. Edna O'Shaughnessy has suggested the notion of 'psychological
part objects' as an analogy to bodily part objects. Spillius takes this up and argues
'that we relate to psychological part objects... to the functions of the part object
rather than primarily to its physical structure. It is the capacities for seeing,
touching, tasting, hearing, smelling, remembering, feeling, judging, and thinking, active
as well as passive, that are attributed to and perceived in relation to part objects'.
Spillius concludes her remarks on this change in emphasis in technique by relating it to
Klein's concept of projective identification. The functions 'are frequently understood as
aspects of the self which are projected into part objects' (Spillius, 1988, vol. 1, pp.
2-5; cf. vol. 2, pp. 8-9). This way of writing and representing our inner worlds is veritably hard to bear, hard
to credit, hard to follow. Klein and Meltzer are operating - well and truly - in the most
primitive parts of the inner world, where dream symbolism meets up with primitive bodily
functions and body parts. Their way of describing these phantasies is easy to caricature
and becomes wooden when adopted in a parrot-like fashion by inexperienced acolytes. In the
subsequent history of Kleinian psychoanalysis, however, her outlook on unconscious
phantasy has continued to prevail. Elizabeth Spillius reports that this is one of Klein's
concepts which has been 'very little altered' by subsequent Kleinians (Spillius, 1988,
vol. 1, p. 2). Klein was untroubled by being called an 'id psychologist' (Gedo, 1986, p. 91). She
unrepentantly conceived the analyst's task to be to confront the patient with the content
of the unconscious. She eschewed 'corrective emotional experience', did not encourage
regression and the reliving of infantile experiences, or explicit educational or moral
influences, and kept 'to the psycho-analytic procedure only, which, to put it in a
nutshell, consists in understanding the patient's mind and in conveying to him what goes
on in it' (Klein, 1975, vol. 3, p. 129). She felt that confidently articulating
interpretations of very primitive material in the face of resistance diminishes the
patient's anxiety and opens the door to the unconscious. Nor did she shy away from such
deep interpretations or transference interpretations from the beginning of analytic work
with a patient (Klein, 1975, vol. 2, pp. 22-24; Gedo, 1986, p. 92). Why is all this such an innovation? Riviere points out that anxiety was of great
significance to Freud, but that much of his rhetoric was physiological. He did not concern
himself with the psychological content of phantasies. By contrast, 'Anxiety, with
the defences against it, has from the beginning been Mrs Klein's approach to
psycho-analytical problems. It was from this angle that she discovered the existence and
importance of aggressive elements in children's emotional life... and [it] enabled her to
bring much of the known phenomena of mental disorder into line with the basic principles
of analysis' (Riviere, 1952, pp. 8-9). From that point, Kleinians went on to propose elements of a general psychology,
including the claim that there is 'an unconscious phantasy behind every thought and every
act' (p.16). That is, the mental expression of primitive processes 'is unconscious
phantasy' (ibid.). It is not only a background hum, as it were. Isaacs claims that
'Reality thinking cannot operate without concurrent and supporting unconscious phantasies'
(Isaacs, 1952, p. 109). And again: 'phantasies are the primary content of unconscious
mental processes' (pp. 82, 112). 'There is no impulse, no instinctual urge or response
which is not experienced as unconscious phantasy' (p. 83). 'Phantasies have both psychic
and bodily effects, e.g., in conversion symptoms, bodily qualities, character and
personality, neurotic symptoms inhibitions and sublimations' (p. 112). They even determine
the minutiae of body language (p. 100). The role of unconscious phantasy extends from the
first to the most abstract thought. The infant's first thought of the existence of the
external world comes from sadistic attacks on the mother's body (Klein, 1975, vol. 1, p.
276; vol. 3, p. 5). 'Phantasies - becoming more elaborate and referring to a wider variety
of objects and situations - continue throughout development and accompany all activities;
they never stop playing a great part in mental life. The influence of unconscious phantasy
on art, on scientific work, and on the activities of everyday life cannot be overrated'
(Klein, 1975, vol. 3, p. 251; cf. p. 262). These phantasies and the associated anxieties are not only ubiquitous: they interact in
complicated ways. As Riviere points out, 'It is impossible to do any justice here to the
complexity and variety of the anxiety-situations and the defences against them dominating
the psyche during these early years. The factors involved are so numerous and the
combinations and interchanges so variable. The internal objects are employed against
external, and external against internal, both for satisfaction and for security; desire is
employed against hate and destructiveness; omnipotence against impotence, and even
impotence (dependence) against destructive omnipotence; phantasy against reality and
reality against phantasy. Moreover, hate and destruction are employed as measures to avert
the dangers of desire and even of love. Gradually a progressive development takes place...
by means of the interplay of these and other factors, and of them with external
influences, out of which the child's ego, his object-relations, his sexual development,
his super-ego, his character and capacities are formed' (Riviere, 1952, pp. 59-60). You
begin, I hope, to see the case for my title. Turning to the bearings of these ideas on groups and institutions, I want to begin with
two points. The first is that the move is a simple one. Bion says, 'My impression is that
the group approximates too closely, in the minds of the individuals composing it, to very
primitive phantasies about the contents of the mother's body. The attempt to make a
rational investigation of the dynamics of the group is therefore perturbed by fears, and
mechanisms for dealing with them, which are characteristic of the paranoid-schizoid
position. The investigation cannot be carried out without the stimulation and activation
of those levels... the elements of the emotional situation are so closely allied to
phantasies of the earliest anxieties that the group is compelled, whenever the pressure of
anxiety becomes too great, to take defensive action' (Bion, 1955, p. 456). The psychotic
anxieties in question involve splitting and projective identification and are
characteristic of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, now as group processes
(p.457). The move from the individual to the group does not raise new issues about
explanation. He says a little further on, 'The apparent difference between group
psychology and individual psychology is an illusion produced by the fact that the group
brings into prominence phenomena which appear alien to an observer unaccustomed to using
the group' (p. 461). This is, at first glance, a shocking claim, but be in no doubt that it is a consistent
one in the history of psychoanalysis - that group and social phenomena can and should be
explained on the same principles as individual phenomena. Freud simply did not grant a
separate conceptual space for social science. He wrote in the New Introductory Lectures , 'Strictly speaking there are only two sciences: psychology, pure and applied, and
natural science' (Freud, 1933, p. 179). And again: 'the events in human history, the
interactions between human nature, cultural developments and the precipitates of primeval
experience... are only the reflection of the dynamic conflicts among id, ego and superego,
which psychoanalysis studies in the individual - the same events repeated on a wider
stage' (quoted in Gay, 1988, p. 547). His biographer comments, 'He could not have stated
the essential unity of his thought any more forcefully' (ibid.). I believe that the
shocking reductionism apparently involved in this claim is mitigated and probably on its
way to being eliminated by developments in the wake of Bion's later, strictly
psychoanalytic, work. Rather than lament the difficulties in articulating psychoanalytic concepts with ones
(which ones?) in social and political discourse, it may very well prove more fruitful to
delve, as Bion did, further into the individual psyche. There we find group and
institutional and social structures hard at work - in what Rosenfeld called 'the gang in
the mind' (Rosenfeld, 1988, esp. p. 249), in what David Armstrong calls 'the institution
in the mind' (Armstrong, 1991),and in what a number of writers have described as
'pathological organizations' (Spillius, 1988, Part 4). I suggest that this is a
fundamentally important growth point in the psychoanalytic understanding of groups and
organizations and that these notions are beginning to shed floods of light on why they are
so hard to change. It's another perspective on just how primitive and refractory the
domain Bion designated 'basic assumption functioning' is. My second point is that those of us who have tried to change institutions will be
relieved to have this illumination and to be better informed about what we are up against.
I remember with some chagrin the occasion when Bob Hinshelwood (who has since published
the best book on groups) insisted that I train in group therapy and go to a two-week
residential Leicester Conference on group relations (Miller, 1990). I was offended by his
saying I'd had no experience of groups, since I'd spent my Sixties and Seventies in all
sorts of collectives, co-ops and even a commune. I felt he was being dismissive of some of
my most painful scar tissue, and we had a blazing row about which of us was being
arrogant... Looking back from the vantage point of a number of years of conducting and
being supervised on group therapy, as well as trying to assimilate the experience of a
Leicester Conference (which all acknowledge takes years), I gratefully (and only
residually resentfully) say that unless we understand the psychotic anxieties Bion is on
about, we will never know the magnitude of the task and will be bound to fail. Bion says
that falling into the forms of basic assumption functioning which he describes is
instinctive, involuntary, automatic, instantaneous and inevitable (pp. 449, 458). Elliott Jaques and Isabel Menzies Lyth are also very sober and stoical in their
assessments of the barriers to change. Jaques begins his essay on 'Social Systems as a
Defence against Persecutory and Depressive Anxiety' by reiterating that 'social phenomena
show a striking correspondence with psychotic processes in individuals', that
'institutions are used by their individual members to reinforce individual mechanisms of
defence against anxiety', and 'that the mechanisms of projective and introjective
identification operate in linking individual and social behaviour'. He argues the thesis
that 'the primary cohesive elements binding individuals into institutionalised human
association is that of defence against psychotic anxiety' (Jaques, 1955, pp. 478-9). He
points out that the projective and introjective processes he is investigating are basic to
even the most complex social processes and directs us to Paula Heimann's argument that
they are at the bottom of all our dealings with one another (p. 481, 481n). His conclusion
is cautionary and points out the conservative - even reactionary - consequences of our
psychotic anxieties and our group and institutional defences against them. He suggests
that as a result of these reflections on human nature 'it may become more clear why social
change is so difficult to achieve, and why many social problems are so intractable. From
the point of view here elaborated, changes in social relationships and procedures call for
a restructuring of relationships at the phantasy level, with a consequent demand upon
individuals to accept and tolerate changes in their existing patterns of defences against
psychotic anxiety. Effective social change is likely to require analysis of the common
anxieties and unconscious collusions underlying the social defences determining phantasy
social relationships' (p.498). I turn, penultimately, to the investigator whose work strikes me as the most important
body of writings on the social bearings of psychoanalysis, Isabel Menzies Lyth, who built
her research on the shoulders of Bion and Jaques. (She was in a group with Bion, and he
was her analyst.) She has investigated a number of fraught settings, for example, the fire
brigade, motor-cycling, children's institutions, as well as a number of industrial ones,
and most recently the tripartite group structure of the Institute of Psychoanalysis in
London. The piece of research which has deservedly made her world-famous is described in a
report entitled 'The Functioning of Social Systems as a Defence against Anxiety'. It is a
particularly poignant document, which addresses the question why people of good will and
idealistic motives do not accomplish what they intend, that is, why nurses find
themselves, to an astonishing degree, not caring for patients and leaving the nursing
service in droves. It would be repetitious to review the mechanisms she describes. They
are the ones I have been discussing. What is so distressing is that they operate
overwhelmingly in a setting which has as its very reason for existence the provision of
sensitivity and care. Yet that setting is full of threats to life itself and arouses the
psychotic anxieties I have outlined. She says, 'The objective situation confronting the
nurse bears a striking resemblance to the phantasy situations that exist in every
individual in the deepest and most primitive levels of the mind. The intensity and
complexity of the nurse's anxieties are to be attributed primarily to the peculiar
capacity of objective features of her work situation to stimulate afresh those early
situations and their accompanying emotions' (Menzies Lyth, 1988, pp. 46-7). The result is the evolution of socially structured defence mechanisms which take the
form of routines and division of tasks which effectively preclude the nurse relating as a
whole person to the patient as a whole person. 'The implicit aim of such devices, which
operate both structurally and culturally, may be described as a kind of depersonalisation
or elimination of individual distinctiveness in both nurse and patient. For example,
nurses often talk about patients not by name, but by bed numbers or by their diseases or a
diseased organ: "the liver in bed 10" or "the pneumonia in bed 15".
Nurses deprecate this practice, but it persists' (pp. 51-2). She lists and discusses the
reifying devices which reduce everyone involved to part-objects, including insight into
why the nurse wakes you up to give you a sleeping pill (p.69). There is a whole system of
overlapping ways of evading the full force of the anxieties associated with death, the
ones which lie at the heart of the mechanisms which Klein described (pp. 63-64; cf.
Riviere, 1952, p. 43). Menzies Lyth also draws a cautionary conclusion: 'In general, it may be postulated that
resistance to social change is likely to be greatest in institutions whose social defence
systems are dominated by primitive psychic defence mechanisms, those which have been
collectively described by Klein as the paranoid-schizoid defences' (Menzies Lyth, p. 79).
In recent reflections on her work and that of her colleagues, she has reiterated just how
refractory to change institutions are (Menzies Lyth, 1988, pp. 1-42, and personal
communications). It is obvious to me that these findings apply across the society and
culture and to left organizations particularly, where the risks of going against the grain
of hegemony can often feel life-threatening and in some societies are. The Leicester Conferences on group and organisational behaviour, with particular
emphasis on authority and leadership, have been held at least once a year since 1957. They
are heir to the traditions discussed above, especially the work of Klein, Bion, Jaques and
Menzies Lyth. (Other influences are mentioned in Miller, 1990, pp. 165-69.) One among
several interrelated ways of characterising the two-week residential conferences is that
they are so arranged as to facilitate experiential learning about the ways in which group
processes can generate psychotic anxieties and institutional defences against them (p.
171). The struggles that ensue in the members' minds between individuation and
incorporation, as a result of the conference group events, is hard to credit by anyone who
has not taken part in a Leicester Conference or related 'mini-Leicester' events.
Similarly, descriptions of occurrences and feelings are likely to seem odd to anyone not
familiar with the sorts of activities around which the conferences are structured. I
believe, however, that the relevant emotional points will be sufficiently clear without a
(necessarily) long description of the conference rubric. My own experience involved feeling continually on the edge of disintegration as a
result of what happened in the various group events (ranging in size from a dozen to over
100 people) which I found appalling and from which there seemed no escape, while efforts
to persuade people to behave well produced flight, sadism collusive lowering of the stakes
or denial. The potential of the group for uniting around (what was called on occasion)
'cheap reconciliation' or for cruelty, brought me to the point of leaving at several
points, and I frequently had the experience of having to use all my resources to hold
myself together against forces which I experienced as profoundly immoral, amoral or
pathetically conformist. No appeal to standards of group decency was of much avail. I ended up forming a group in my mind which consisted of all the people I admired in
history and in my lifetime, e.g., Socrates, Lincoln, Gandhi, King, Bonhoeffer, Marcuse,
Mandela, who had stood up to intolerable social forces without quitting the field or
having their spirits broken. I dubbed this 'The PS÷D Solidarity Group' and, armed with
their mandate, managed to talk my way into a meeting with the staff, for the purpose of
mounting a critique of the rubric of the exercise. I felt contained by the inner
solidarity provided by my imagined group, while I was, in truth, actually on my own in the
phenomenal context of the conference events. I had blown out of a group in considerable
distress, because it had utterly failed to live up to its self-designation of advocating
and practising decency and civility among its members and urging such standards on the
larger group of conference members. Just as I was on the point of sitting down to confront the staff group in the name of
my inner world group (vainly hoping they would show some interest in its name, membership
and values), a representative of the group I had left appeared and bestowed
'plenipotentiary powers' (one of the designated forms of delegation of authority) on me,
freeing me from the dreaded status of 'singleton'. A singleton is a person with no role
status in he large group (see Miller, 1990, p. 179 and Turquet, 1975, where the plight of
the singleton is insightfully and poignantly described). I had felt unutterably alone,
almost totally in the grip of paranoid persecutions, holding on for dear life to my
hallucinated historical group. The bestowal of my conference group's trust reincorporated
me into the social whole on terms I could accept. My confrontation with the staff group, acting in this exercise as 'Management, was
predictably without issue, but I went away feeling that I had spoken my piece without
suffering the humiliation that many others had experienced. I had offered my analysis of
the situation and their role in it, one dimension of which was that they would - as
a part of the exercise's point - continue to behave as that were doing, i.e., act as an
immovable object on to which the groups would project their phantasies about authority and
(hopefully) begin to take responsibility for themselves. I felt that I had done that and
negotiated my own rite of passage - just. Having gone some way toward resolving my own temporary insanity (though not my
omnipotence or my paranoia, which included the belief that the conference Director had
slept with my partner) I was only able to bask pleasantly in group membership for a few
minutes before members of another group, who had sought refuge in being regressed and
silly (they called themselves 'The Potty Training Group'), stormed into the room where the
staff/Management group were holding court. The person whom I had considered to be the
mildest member of that group proceeded to physically attack a German member of staff with
shouts of 'fascist' and other violent epithets. He was aided and cheered on by other
members of his group, until one, a woman I felt sure was a Jew but I now recollect was
probably not but was a German, broke down sobbing and shouted for all this to stop. The descent from work or task-oriented groups to groups in the thrall of psychotic
basic assumptions is, as Bion pointed out, spontaneous and inevitable, even in a situation
which all concerned know to be temporary and 'artificial'. I continue to find this
profoundly sobering. I also continue to ruminate it and am far from having digested the
experience, though I have found it increasingly helpful in my work and related activities
- and in my reflections on what has happened in recent politics, especially the people on
the left who have tried to work in relatively non-hierarchical groups. After canvassing the literature on psychotic anxieties and reflecting on it and my own
personal, clinical and political experience, I am left with a daunting sense of the power
of the inner world and an awesome awareness of how very deep, primitive, abiding and
alarming its nether regions are. The anxieties I have attempted to outline (and, to a
degree, evoke), exist throughout human nature - in all of life from the cradle (some say
earlier) to the grave, in all of play and culture, and act as a brake on benignity and
social change which it is hard to imagine releasing, even notch by notch. The history of psychoanalysis has left us with a small number of ideas about the veneer
of civilisation. Freud said it was thin and under threat. One reading of those who still
speak in his name and quote his slogan: 'Where id was, there ego shall be. It is a work of
culture - not unlike the draining of the Zuider Zee' (S.E. 22, p. 80), takes this
to mean that the result can be a dry, flowering land, i.e., that there can be a
'conflict-free sphere of the ego'. A second, rather disparate, group proffer a continuum
extending from Reich's advocacy of desublimation and a promise of a return to Eden, to the
Winnicottian position that eschews Klein's undoubted stress on the power of thantic,
destructive forces, and sees rather more decency and hope in liberal society than the
Kleinians discern. I dare say that Klein wrote rather less about the other side of human nature - the
constructive or erotic impulses - because she found herself in mutually critical dialogue
with colleagues who she felt overemphasised those aspects. Finding the twig bent, as she
thought, too far one way, she bent it the other way, perhaps to leave it straight for
those that followed. A third group are orthodox Kleinians and point out that the veneer of
civilisation is very thin indeed and that the maelstrom beneath is perpetually and rather
pathetically defended against. It can be argued that this provides the basis for a
psychoanalytic rendering of Gramsci's optimism of the will, coupled with a pessimism of
the intellect and, I say again, a belief that it is essential to know what is bubbling
away underneath the surface if we are to have any hope of cooling some of the crust and
sharing some of the fruits of human endeavour more equitably. I also believe that this position is consistent with a careful reading of Freud's Civilisation and Its Discontents, written half way through his sixteen-year struggle
with cancer. He says there that the history of civilisation is 'the struggle between Eros
and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction, as it works
itself out in the human species. This struggle is what all life essentially consists of...
And it is this battle of the giants that our nurse-maids try to appease with their lullaby
about Heaven' (S.E. 21, p. 122). In conclusion, my view of the connection between psychoanalysis, therapy and
institutional and social change - and the impediments to change - is that human nature is
far more ambivalent and refractory at a much deeper level than we ever imagine when we
embark on changing the world. As I have said before, I find myself thinking increasingly
of Sisyphus, whom Albert Camus urged us to imagine as happy. Perhaps he comforts himself
with the stoical maxim: 'It is not given to us to complete the task, yet we may not give
it up'.
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