You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The world of psychoanalysis would be much improved if its inhabitants more frequently emulated the flexible activity of its founder's mind. Freud's openness to new ideas arising in divergent fields and his willingness to reformulate his thoughts as they developed are qualities not easy to maintain within an existing academic or professional discipline. David Armstrong is a Freudian thinker in this sense. He is also a close reader of Wilfred Bion, who had some ideas about why thinking is so uncommon. “Learning from experience” can be excruciatingly difficult, because new experience can disrupt what we are comfortable thinking we know already, and therefore, according to Bion, we hate it. David Armstrong emphasizes (as he exemplifies) the other side, the fact that we are driven, or “hopelessly committed” (p. 144), to learning, even as we hate it.
Organization in the Mind: Psychoanalysis, Group Relations, and Organizational Consultancy is a collection of Armstrong's papers written over the course of 15 years, during which time he worked at the Grubb Institute and, after 1994, with the Tavistock Consultancy Service. He works in the “group relations” tradition, and he has been around long enough to have worked and studied with some of its pioneers at the Tavistock Institute. Drawing from psychoanalytic and systems theories, these thinkers understand groups as whole systems and explore the often unconscious ways in which individuals are affected by the nature of our membership in groups. Experiential conferences, in which group life is examined as it unfolds in the here-and-now, have been a central part of this work, beginning at the Tavistock Institute in 1957 and in the United States in 1965. This is an explicitly interdisciplinary field, without firm subject boundaries that could risk excluding relevant ideas. Equally, its applications have been wide ranging, and include attempts to understand education, politics, social conflict, and the life of the workplace. In the l