"Work, & be our bed in working!" Liber AL vel Legis, II:66.
Back when i started writing in my livejournal, i had just learned about Melanie Klein's theory of "projective identification." Recently, my friend yoginibare mentioned the "Bowen Theory of Triangles" and we talked about how such theories can be applied to organizations/communities. This exploration has also led me to discover the work of Wilfred Bion, who wrote extensively on group dynamics. These concepts are useful in analyzing the process where friendship groups lead to the institutionalization of elitism, which was described in "The Tyranny of Structurelessness," by Jo Freeman.
--
I found a good summary of projective identification in a (terribly formatted) essay called, "Intersubjective Dimensions of Terrorism and Its Transcendence," in the section called, "Reenactment Through Projective Identification:"
` ` “Projective identification” is a term introduced by psychoanalyst Melanie Klein and developed further by others (Ogden, 1989). It is a common aspect of intersubjective experience, a form of unconscious communication in which one transmits one’s own internal experience to another, like a psychic infection. It can be euphoric or it can be frightening or enraging.
With trauma, projective identification is an unconscious mechanism by which one evacuates intolerable affects and deposits them into the Other. The Other may feel possessed by alien psychic contents, and may be pulled into the reenactment. This way a person may influence and control others through this unconscious process.
In therapy, the analyst may be provoked by the client’s toxic, unassimilated affects, and be pulled to retaliate through rejection or hostile interpretation. Intersubjective psychoanalysts are trained to resist the pull to reenact and retaliate. The analyst provides a “ container”, a safe “holding environment”, in the words of pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott (Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983) and can receive this as a communication about preverbal experience. At the most difficult moment, the analyst can sense what their client must have felt like as a child. They use this awareness for empathy, which has a healing effect and helps metabolize the negative affect. It makes the unconscious conscious, remembers the forgotten, and empowers one to master affects that previously gripped the person. One no longer need reenact the drama, and is freer to have more satisfying relationships. The goal is consciousness and liberation from the cycle of suffering. ' '
--
And this paper examines some possible applications, "of projective identification ... at a number of levels of individual, group, institutional, cultural, political and international relationships:"
"Benign and Virulent Projective Identification in Groups and Institutions" by Robert M. Young
--
Here's some information concerning application of the Bowen Theory of Triangles to the sterotyping process in popular media, from Charles Ramirez Berg's, "Latino Images in film: Stereotypes, Subversion, and Resistance"
"When the anxiety level is high enough, two powerful family members, in order to reduce their anxiety and insecurity, pick a defect in a third person and position the third as deficient."
"Two people get together and enhance their functioning at the expense of the third, the 'scapegoated' one."
"At social gatherings, people would clump in small groups, each talking about someone outside that clump, and each apparently unaware that all the clumps were doing the same 'triangling' gossip about them."
` ` ...when a group is not being actively scapegoated, its members are presented with an exacting Hobson's choice: align themselves against the current scapegoat or remain stigmatized at the negative end of the social pyramid. Thus the stereotyped role passes among out-group Others. One after another the various subgroups are temporarily aligned with the dominant against the targeted subgroup, until they themselves take their turn as the object of social stigmatization. ' '
--
Here are more resources for Bowen's 'Theory of Triangles:'
This passage seemed to elucidate a familiar process:
` ` Anxiety is a basic human condition. There are two categories of anxiety, chronic and acute. Acute anxiety is "real" anxiety, generated by stressful occurrences. Chronic anxiety is the "fretting" people do over imagined worries. How well an individual manages anxiety has a strong impact on ability to function. An individual's "definition of self" is closely related to the ability to manage anxiety. A well-defined self is an understanding of one's own principles, and an ability to think about one's own feelings and decide how to behave before acting. Individuals interact in relation to others in terms of "relationship systems". Like individuals in families, individuals in organizations spend enough time together to form relationship systems. The primary unit of the relationship system is the triangle. Triangles are the most stable emotional unit for people, as intensity in one-on-one relationships often causes one or the other person to bring in the third to bring the anxiety down to a manageable level. ' ' -- from "Anxious Response to Change: the Leader's Role in Calming the System"
Bowen Theory FAQ
Bowen Theory on Three Sheets
This one from a 'self-help' perspective: An introduction to relationship triangles, and suggestions on how to dissolve and avoid them"
Here is "A Clinical Application of Bowen Family Systems Theory"
And this puts Bowen's ideas to more contemporary application: History and Systems of Psychology: Feminist Family Therapy
--
This article explores both 'triangling' and projective identification in the context of intimate relationships: "Intimate Partners, by Maggie Scarf"
--
And I also found this Jungian-inspired, yet also fairly comprehensive analysis of "Metaphors in Relationship"
--
This page contains a good summary of Key Elements of Bion's 'Experiences in Groups:'
"Beyond Bion's 'Experiences in Groups'" by Robert M. Lipgar
From, "Group Relations -- A Review of the Literature" by James Sempsey, I found this excerpt to be descriptive of an eerily familiar situation:
` ` The lack of sophisticated understanding about group behavior reinforced the prevailing perspective which sought to explain the behavior of a particular individual exclusively in terms of his psychology and the political issues dividing staff. Groups were thought to be mere aggregations of individuals, the group behavior therefore the expression of cumulative individual behaviors, or the consequence of several "strong" or "sick" persons. The result was a climate of anxiety, and helplessness, punctuated by crises focusing on part of the organization with intense scapegoating attacks on the "integrity" or "pathology" of the individuals most prominently identified with the crises group or issue. This ad hominem approach to organizational problems intensified the helplessness and fear of all those involved, and nearly always obscured the underlying institutional problem which desperately needed resolution. ' ' Menninger, Roy W. "The Impact of Group Relations Conferences on Organizational Growth" - Group Relations Reader. page 266.
--
That last excerpt about group dynamics reminds me of a passage by Jo Freeman:
` ` For those groups which cannot find a local project to which to devote themselves, the mere act of staying together becomes the reason for their staying together. When a group has no specific task (and consciousness-raising is a task), the people in it turn their energies to controlling others in the group. This is not done so much out of a malicious desire to manipulate others (though sometimes it is) as out of a lack of anything better to do with their talents. Able people with time on their hands and a need to justify their coming together put their efforts into personal control, and spend their time criticizing the personalities of the other members in the group. Infighting and personal power games rule the day. When a group is involved in a task, people learn to get along with others as they are and to subsume personal dislikes for the sake of the larger goal. ' ' -- from "The Tyranny of Structurelessness"
--
The initial solution that my research provided, was the vague concept that organizations with problems like these need to be restructured so that individual participants will be encouraged to recognize these patterns and choose not to re-enact them... instead, they would be motivated towards opting to work on developing mutual understanding and synergetically beneficial solutions.
But i suppose I should remember Hacker's Law:
"The belief that enhanced understanding will necessarily stir a nation or an organization to action is one of mankind's oldest illusions."
...which reminds me of what Wittgenstein said to people who philosophize about saving the world: "Don't shit higher than your arse."
Nonetheless, i am intrigued by Bion's observations that:
` ` "Through silence, and often without awareness, we give support to various initiatives, thereby colluding anonymously: . . . there is no way in which the individual can, in a group, 'do nothing' -- not even by doing nothing." (p. 58) " . . . all members of a group are responsible for the behaviour of the group." ( p. 118) ' '
...if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice...
So, how do we construct a system that allows for the ideals of anarchic freedom, but does not succumb to the "The Tyranny of Structurelessness?"
Bion also suggested that:
` ` The sophisticated group is one in which members are able to manage the human need to belong, to express their "groupishness," in ways that enable them also to advance the group's realistic and adaptive work. "Action inevitably means contact with reality, and contact with reality compels regard for truth and therefore imposes scientific method, and hence, the evocation of the work group." (p. 135-136) Here Bion links sophisticated work in groups, learning from experience, with seeking truth and the scientific method. ' '
This is the way that I have always preferred to develop relationships with others... through sharing in the labor of a collective project. That way, we can all offer each other praise for our unique talents, learn skills from one another, and celebrate in the bounty of our communal work.
I seem to have attempted to explore similar applications of this idea previously, in my posts on:
reciprocal altruism as a holarchy of love
contemplating the function of government
(09/15/04 @ 00:59 addendum) ...and related issues have been considered subsequently in these posts:
community organization
concerning game theory
--
I must say... I find it mildly creepy that this process has led me to investigate projects conducted at the National Institute of Mental Health -- which of course, I first learned about through the Newbery Award-winning book, "Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH" by Robert C. O'Brien, and its' adaptation to animated film, The Secret of Nimh.
--
And this quote from Wilfred Ruprecht Bion. Past and Future, sounded quite ominous:
Psycho-analysis itself is just a stripe on the coat of the tiger. Ultimately it may meet the Tiger - The Thing Itself - O.
(W. R. Bion, A Memoir of the Future, 1991)
--
I found a good summary of projective identification in a (terribly formatted) essay called, "Intersubjective Dimensions of Terrorism and Its Transcendence," in the section called, "Reenactment Through Projective Identification:"
` ` “Projective identification” is a term introduced by psychoanalyst Melanie Klein and developed further by others (Ogden, 1989). It is a common aspect of intersubjective experience, a form of unconscious communication in which one transmits one’s own internal experience to another, like a psychic infection. It can be euphoric or it can be frightening or enraging.
With trauma, projective identification is an unconscious mechanism by which one evacuates intolerable affects and deposits them into the Other. The Other may feel possessed by alien psychic contents, and may be pulled into the reenactment. This way a person may influence and control others through this unconscious process.
In therapy, the analyst may be provoked by the client’s toxic, unassimilated affects, and be pulled to retaliate through rejection or hostile interpretation. Intersubjective psychoanalysts are trained to resist the pull to reenact and retaliate. The analyst provides a “ container”, a safe “holding environment”, in the words of pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott (Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983) and can receive this as a communication about preverbal experience. At the most difficult moment, the analyst can sense what their client must have felt like as a child. They use this awareness for empathy, which has a healing effect and helps metabolize the negative affect. It makes the unconscious conscious, remembers the forgotten, and empowers one to master affects that previously gripped the person. One no longer need reenact the drama, and is freer to have more satisfying relationships. The goal is consciousness and liberation from the cycle of suffering. ' '
--
And this paper examines some possible applications, "of projective identification ... at a number of levels of individual, group, institutional, cultural, political and international relationships:"
"Benign and Virulent Projective Identification in Groups and Institutions" by Robert M. Young
--
Here's some information concerning application of the Bowen Theory of Triangles to the sterotyping process in popular media, from Charles Ramirez Berg's, "Latino Images in film: Stereotypes, Subversion, and Resistance"
"When the anxiety level is high enough, two powerful family members, in order to reduce their anxiety and insecurity, pick a defect in a third person and position the third as deficient."
"Two people get together and enhance their functioning at the expense of the third, the 'scapegoated' one."
"At social gatherings, people would clump in small groups, each talking about someone outside that clump, and each apparently unaware that all the clumps were doing the same 'triangling' gossip about them."
` ` ...when a group is not being actively scapegoated, its members are presented with an exacting Hobson's choice: align themselves against the current scapegoat or remain stigmatized at the negative end of the social pyramid. Thus the stereotyped role passes among out-group Others. One after another the various subgroups are temporarily aligned with the dominant against the targeted subgroup, until they themselves take their turn as the object of social stigmatization. ' '
--
Here are more resources for Bowen's 'Theory of Triangles:'
This passage seemed to elucidate a familiar process:
` ` Anxiety is a basic human condition. There are two categories of anxiety, chronic and acute. Acute anxiety is "real" anxiety, generated by stressful occurrences. Chronic anxiety is the "fretting" people do over imagined worries. How well an individual manages anxiety has a strong impact on ability to function. An individual's "definition of self" is closely related to the ability to manage anxiety. A well-defined self is an understanding of one's own principles, and an ability to think about one's own feelings and decide how to behave before acting. Individuals interact in relation to others in terms of "relationship systems". Like individuals in families, individuals in organizations spend enough time together to form relationship systems. The primary unit of the relationship system is the triangle. Triangles are the most stable emotional unit for people, as intensity in one-on-one relationships often causes one or the other person to bring in the third to bring the anxiety down to a manageable level. ' ' -- from "Anxious Response to Change: the Leader's Role in Calming the System"
Bowen Theory FAQ
Bowen Theory on Three Sheets
This one from a 'self-help' perspective: An introduction to relationship triangles, and suggestions on how to dissolve and avoid them"
Here is "A Clinical Application of Bowen Family Systems Theory"
And this puts Bowen's ideas to more contemporary application: History and Systems of Psychology: Feminist Family Therapy
--
This article explores both 'triangling' and projective identification in the context of intimate relationships: "Intimate Partners, by Maggie Scarf"
--
And I also found this Jungian-inspired, yet also fairly comprehensive analysis of "Metaphors in Relationship"
--
This page contains a good summary of Key Elements of Bion's 'Experiences in Groups:'
"Beyond Bion's 'Experiences in Groups'" by Robert M. Lipgar
From, "Group Relations -- A Review of the Literature" by James Sempsey, I found this excerpt to be descriptive of an eerily familiar situation:
` ` The lack of sophisticated understanding about group behavior reinforced the prevailing perspective which sought to explain the behavior of a particular individual exclusively in terms of his psychology and the political issues dividing staff. Groups were thought to be mere aggregations of individuals, the group behavior therefore the expression of cumulative individual behaviors, or the consequence of several "strong" or "sick" persons. The result was a climate of anxiety, and helplessness, punctuated by crises focusing on part of the organization with intense scapegoating attacks on the "integrity" or "pathology" of the individuals most prominently identified with the crises group or issue. This ad hominem approach to organizational problems intensified the helplessness and fear of all those involved, and nearly always obscured the underlying institutional problem which desperately needed resolution. ' ' Menninger, Roy W. "The Impact of Group Relations Conferences on Organizational Growth" - Group Relations Reader. page 266.
--
That last excerpt about group dynamics reminds me of a passage by Jo Freeman:
` ` For those groups which cannot find a local project to which to devote themselves, the mere act of staying together becomes the reason for their staying together. When a group has no specific task (and consciousness-raising is a task), the people in it turn their energies to controlling others in the group. This is not done so much out of a malicious desire to manipulate others (though sometimes it is) as out of a lack of anything better to do with their talents. Able people with time on their hands and a need to justify their coming together put their efforts into personal control, and spend their time criticizing the personalities of the other members in the group. Infighting and personal power games rule the day. When a group is involved in a task, people learn to get along with others as they are and to subsume personal dislikes for the sake of the larger goal. ' ' -- from "The Tyranny of Structurelessness"
--
The initial solution that my research provided, was the vague concept that organizations with problems like these need to be restructured so that individual participants will be encouraged to recognize these patterns and choose not to re-enact them... instead, they would be motivated towards opting to work on developing mutual understanding and synergetically beneficial solutions.
But i suppose I should remember Hacker's Law:
"The belief that enhanced understanding will necessarily stir a nation or an organization to action is one of mankind's oldest illusions."
...which reminds me of what Wittgenstein said to people who philosophize about saving the world: "Don't shit higher than your arse."
Nonetheless, i am intrigued by Bion's observations that:
` ` "Through silence, and often without awareness, we give support to various initiatives, thereby colluding anonymously: . . . there is no way in which the individual can, in a group, 'do nothing' -- not even by doing nothing." (p. 58) " . . . all members of a group are responsible for the behaviour of the group." ( p. 118) ' '
...if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice...
So, how do we construct a system that allows for the ideals of anarchic freedom, but does not succumb to the "The Tyranny of Structurelessness?"
Bion also suggested that:
` ` The sophisticated group is one in which members are able to manage the human need to belong, to express their "groupishness," in ways that enable them also to advance the group's realistic and adaptive work. "Action inevitably means contact with reality, and contact with reality compels regard for truth and therefore imposes scientific method, and hence, the evocation of the work group." (p. 135-136) Here Bion links sophisticated work in groups, learning from experience, with seeking truth and the scientific method. ' '
This is the way that I have always preferred to develop relationships with others... through sharing in the labor of a collective project. That way, we can all offer each other praise for our unique talents, learn skills from one another, and celebrate in the bounty of our communal work.
I seem to have attempted to explore similar applications of this idea previously, in my posts on:
reciprocal altruism as a holarchy of love
contemplating the function of government
(09/15/04 @ 00:59 addendum) ...and related issues have been considered subsequently in these posts:
community organization
concerning game theory
--
I must say... I find it mildly creepy that this process has led me to investigate projects conducted at the National Institute of Mental Health -- which of course, I first learned about through the Newbery Award-winning book, "Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH" by Robert C. O'Brien, and its' adaptation to animated film, The Secret of Nimh.
--
And this quote from Wilfred Ruprecht Bion. Past and Future, sounded quite ominous:
Psycho-analysis itself is just a stripe on the coat of the tiger. Ultimately it may meet the Tiger - The Thing Itself - O.
(W. R. Bion, A Memoir of the Future, 1991)