The Group Perspective: Tradition and Innovation

WORKING WITH GROUPS: THE CONSULTANT STANCEbjp_1168 161..166

David Armstrong

abstract The paper recalls experiences as a member of groups taken by IsabelMenzies Lyth during the 1960s and the significance of matters of ‘presence’ andstance. It sketches out ways in which she was to extend Bion’s frame of reference totake account of the institutional contexts in which groups were located and herinsistence on the two-way inter-relation between individual and group work, psycho-analysis and group relations.

Key words: Isabel Menzies Lyth, group relations, presence and stance, institutionalcontexts, binocular vision

I first met Isabel Menzies, as she was then, near on 50 years ago, when I firstjoined the staff of the Tavistock Institute, hot foot from Cambridge, as a raw,inexperienced, rather opinionated apprentice. I wanted to become a socialpsychologist, a branch of the subject which did not then figure in the Cam-bridge Psychology syllabus. I knew little or nothing about the work of theTavistock, except that my Professor, Oliver Zangwill, had persuaded me thatit was the only place worth considering in the field. My role was that of aJunior Project Officer, working under the leadership of Eric Trist, HughMurray and, later, Eric Miller, on socio-technical explorations of the impactof automation on the patterning and dynamics of work and working rela-tions in heavy industry.

Isabel was not herself active in this field, but she was very much a presencein the Institute at the time, friendly if somewhat daunting. She seemed torepresent, perhaps more immediately and currently than anyone else, thelink between psychoanalysis and social enquiry that had been at the heart ofthe founding vision of the Tavistock Institute in the early post-war years, alink in which Wilfred Bion’s pioneering studies of group dynamics hadplayed a formative, though not exclusive, role. Isabel had herself been amember of the weekly group Bion had run for students and younger staff atthe Tavistock in the early 1950s and subsequently had entered analysis withhim.

It was, I think, largely through Isabel that I was encouraged to dip asomewhat reluctant toe into this psychoanalytically informed group world.

david armstrong is a Principal Consultant at the Tavistock Consultancy Service,The Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, London. Address for correspon-dence: [darmstrong@tavi-port.org]

© The authorJournal compilation © 2010 BAP and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road,Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. 161

Sometime in the mid-1960s, Ken Rice, who had by then largely taken overthe leadership of the Institute’s group relations ventures, mounted a GroupRelations Programme at the Institute, spread over four months, includingweekly evening meetings and two weekends. He had engineered quite acoup in persuading Bion to return and take one of the Study Groups and Ihad been lucky enough to be included as a member. I cannot now recallwhether or not Isabel was taking the other Study Group, but she was cer-tainly present at both weekends, when everyone took part in what was thencalled an Inter-Group Event. In the first of these events, when the entiremembership fled from the opening plenary meeting within, Ken Rice latersaid, one minute 40 seconds after he had, as Director of the staff group,stopped speaking, I had found myself in a group which steadily refused toask for consultancy throughout more or less the whole show, becomingincreasingly isolated and forlorn.

Come the second weekend, the group I joined, with a fair sprinkling of thesame members, made a pre-emptive bid for a consultant within minutes offorming. Isabel arrived and, as I recall, never left (and was certainly neverpressured to leave: a situation which apparently was to produce considerabledissension within the staff group).

This was to be my first but not only experience of Isabel at work withgroups.Towards the end of the 1960s, when I had left the Institute to take upa research post in the Department of Humanities at Chelsea College, thenpart of the University of London, a close friend, training as a psychiatrist atthe Maudsley Hospital (which in those days was seen as a rather rivalrousand hostile camp vis-à-vis the Tavistock) and myself concocted the idea oftrying to bring together a number of people, from the Maudsley, the Tavis-tock and Chelsea, to form a Study Group and seek for someone from theTavistock to work with us. We approached Bob Gosling, then Chair of theProfessional Committee at the Clinic, and he proposed asking Isabel. Wemet with Isabel to discuss our idea and whether she would be willing to takeus on. She seemed intrigued. The arrangement was that the two of us, myfriend and I, would invite people to join the group, which would meet onTuesday evenings at the Tavistock, from 5:30 p.m. to 7:00 p.m., on a termlybasis, but without predetermining an end-point. Each member, Isabelagreed, would pay just £1.00 per session (O tempora, O mores!).

The group was to last for something like 18 months. It was, as might havebeen anticipated, pretty turbulent, alternately cantankerous and needy.From time to time, members would quit or just stop coming. We would theninvite others to join, a move which Isabel accepted, indeed contributed to –something, incidentally, which indicates a rather more flexible stance thanshe has often been credited with. I believe this group became known aroundthe place as the group-that-refused-to-end. Eventually, of course, end it did,as the remaining members found other developmental trajectories: intopsychoanalysis, or further training, or simply the working world.

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Looking back, across 40 years, it is hard to summon up the detail of thisexperience and the impact of Isabel’s way of working. What I most nowrecall are matters of ‘presence’ and a certain consultant stance, for example:

• great steadiness under fire

• an unwavering focus on the group as a whole, as she was later to put it,the ‘group per se’

• the avoidance of technical jargon; anything worth saying she seemedto imply can be said in ordinary language

• the refusal of ‘knowingness’, even under pressure

• a combination of distance and involvement that seemed simultan-eously containing and disturbing.

I have said these are what I most now recall, as if this were perhaps alimitation. But an alternative view would be that such matters of presenceand stance are the fundamental building blocks out of which the grouprelations tradition both developed and is sustained.That is, that this traditionis as much methodological as conceptual, arising out of a practice of dis-ciplined attention to the experiences both present and presented in thepresence of groups; a practice in which the boundaries of the ‘known’ aresuspended, the distinctions between individual and group or consciousawareness and unconscious undertow held in abeyance, in the service ofwhat Wilfred Bion famously and paradoxically named ‘scientific insight’(Bion, 1970).

Isabel, I would think, never departed from her conviction that the devel-opment of this mode of insight was at the heart of the practice of grouprelations, as indeed of psychoanalysis, irrespective of the external motiva-tions and/or issues which might frame any particular event. As she put it ina short paper prepared as an introduction to a seminar at the Group Ana-lytic Society in 1974, referring to the ‘so called “training” groups we run atthe Tavistock Institute . . . the “training” I am talking about is, at least intheory, solely the growth of insight and understanding about the self andgroup processes, leading to personal development’ (Menzies Lyth, 1989a, p.1). I suspect, by the way, that quite a lot lies hidden in that phrase ‘at least intheory’.

Within this field of work, Isabel, in contrast to her more organizationalengagements, was a conserver rather than an innovator, deeply indebted,both in her practice and in its conceptual underpinning, to Bion’s formula-tions. But not I should say to ‘Bion in aspic’. For example, in the short paperI have just cited (a paper which has not been sufficiently given its due), sheextends her frame of reference to the institutional contexts in which thegroup may exist, the ‘use it makes of its environment and how it is used byit’ (Menzies Lyth, 1989a, p. 10). Here, Isabel was to move onto radical new

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ground, both methodological and conceptual.Within an institutional setting,she came to see that one could no longer regard the small group as ‘more orless encapsulated within its own boundary’.As she put it, referring to experi-ences in conference settings:

The members of the small group interact with each other between sessions andenter into all kinds of collusions, often unconsciously and in basic assumptionways, that are then fed back into the small group meetings and affect thedynamics of the small groups themselves. (Menzies Lyth, 1989a, p. 13)

Such interaction affords a context which stimulates dynamics of splittingand projection that require working through and qualify any over-restrictive interpretation of the ‘here and now’ situation that the groupfinds itself in.

Similarly, she was to become keenly alert to the ways in which transfer-ences to the group consultant were influenced by perceptions and phan-tasies about the relations between staff and the differences in staff’scharacteristic valencies, that is their sensitivity to and tendency to elicitone or other particular basic assumption, often intuitively recognized andused by members. In this connection she notes her own ‘preference forgroups which are predominantly characterized by basic assumption depen-dency’ and how:

I have had repeated experiences at Leicester conferences when my group wasof the quiet, constructive variety, while the group of a particular colleague wasalways noisy, aggressive and hostile to him, and he was in despair. I can onlyconclude that he preferred fight/flight and that our groups were perfectly awareof our preferences and used them in mutual, collusive interaction with eachother and with us. (Menzies Lyth, 1989a, p. 14)

This growing awareness of the institutional context of group functioningwas profoundly to influence and in turn be influenced by Isabel’s mostoriginal and creative formulation, or rather re-formulation, of ElliottJaques’s earlier account of social systems as a defence against anxiety(Jaques, 1957). It has sometimes been suggested that this formulation, aspresented in her seminal study of the nursing service of a general hospital(Menzies, 1960), is independent of a more strictly group perspective. Icannot, however, see how this suggestion can be sustained. Rather, in myview, what the organizational perspective adds is a uniquely elaboratedaccount of the ways in which anxieties generated from the nature of theparticular work that an organization undertakes and its psychic meaningpattern, both the to and fro of basic assumption functioning and the ways inwhich these become structured in the service of defence (cf. the contributionfrom Bob Hinshelwood later in this issue (pp. 177–83).

There is one further comment I would like to make, touching on thenature of what I referred to earlier as Isabel’s indebtedness to Bion. Unlike

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some of her contemporaries, both in psychoanalysis and in group relations,Isabel was always insistent that Bion’s group perspective did not simply fallout of sight as his focus shifted to more individual work. Rather, just as hispsychoanalytic experience, certainly from the mid-1940s, was to inform hisaccount of experiences in groups, so also his group experience, in particularas she was to put it, ‘the importance in normal and neurotic individuals ofpsychotic elements’ (Menzies Lyth, 1989b, p. 23), was to inform his later,more psychoanalytic work, notably, for example, in the way he draws ongroup theory (in the guise of ‘fables constructed in terms of the group’) inthe last of his specifically psychoanalytic writings, Attention and Interpreta-tion (Bion, 1970, especially Chapter 6,The Mystic and the Establishment andChapter 11, Lies and the Thinker).

I believe that it is the steadfastness of Isabel’s insistence and deploy-ment of this dual focus (Bion’s ‘binocular vision’) on the group in theindividual and the individual in the group that is her abiding legacy to thepractice, both of group relations and, I would think, though I cannot herespeak from personal experience, of psychoanalysis. Without this dual focus,brought into the practice of group relations, individually or collectivelyamongst staff, that practice, as I see it, risks losing its distinctive voice. Butthe argument cuts both ways, or, returning to my starting point, the linkbetween psychoanalysis and social enquiry, at least in principle, is not justa one-way street.

In an interview with Branca Pecotic, towards the end of her life, whenasked by Branca how far her understanding of social phenomena helps herwhen sitting with the patient in an individual setting, Isabel responds:

I think what it does do is to make you more aware of the fact that the patienthas got an internal society and that your room is populated with a groupsometimes . . . the patient has brought a world, also so has the analyst . . .(Pecotic, 2002, p. 18)

Paraphrasing Donald Winnicott, one might suggest that there is no suchthing as just an individual patient or just an individual analyst. There isalways simultaneously a group-in-the-mind. Or maybe this should becouched less as a statement than as a question, a question it seems to me thatIsabel’s work again and again prompts us, if not to answer, at least to ask.

References

Bion, W.R. (1970) Attention and Interpretation. London: Tavistock.Jaques, E. (1957) Social systems as a defence against persecutory and depressive

anxiety. In: M. Klein, P. Heimann and R.E. Money Kyrle (eds), New Directions inPsychoanalysis, pp. 478–98. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Menzies, I.E.P. (1960) A case-study in the functioning of social systems as a defenceagainst anxiety: A report on a study of the nursing service of a general hospital.Human Relations 13(2): 95–121.

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Menzies Lyth, I. (1989a) A personal review of group experiences. In: The Dynamicsof the Social: Selected Essays, Vol. 2, pp. 1–18. London: Free Association Books.

Menzies Lyth, I. (1989b) Bion’s contribution to thinking about groups. In: TheDynamics of the Social: Selected Essays,Vol. 2, pp. 19–25. London: Free AssociationBooks.

Pecotic, B. (2002) The life of Isabel Menzies Lyth: An interview. Organisational andSocial Dynamics 2(1): 2–44.

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