Attachment, Trauma, and Organisations

During … adult life a measure of attachment behaviour is commonly directed not only towards persons outside the family but also towards groups and institutions other than the family.

In June 2011 I was asked to present a paper at the Open Forum for The Bowlby Centre. The Open Forum is a bi-annual event held by The Bowlby Centre to provide its membership of attachment-based psychoanalytic psychotherapists an opportunity to reflect together on the issues facing the organisation. At this Forum, I was asked to present some of my thoughts on the relationship between attachment, trauma, and the nature of The Bowlby Centre. The Bowlby Centre is an organisation, like others, that works with people who have experienced severe unresolved relational trauma and whose membership bring to it aspects of their own, sometimes insecure and anxious, attachment histories. I hope this introductory paper adds something to the thinking about the significance of attachment and trauma in the life of organisations, including especially, the human tendency towards the systemic re-enactment of trauma-based relational patterns. Like the study of an individual client, I am going to be presenting an attachment based understanding of The Bowlby Centre as an organisation which I hope will provide readers with an example of how attachment principles can be utilised to understand the dynamics of organisations that you may be involved in.

Thank you for the chance to present a paper about our organisation here at the Open Forum. It is a privileged opportunity. I am imagining that other people will have different insights and contributions to make. I hope we can create a safe enough space among ourselves to have a constructive experience. The purpose of this paper is to try and get helpful conversations going between us. The conversations I would like to have are those that lead to a more developed attachment-based understanding of The Bowlby Centre, which also includes mos