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Psychoanalysis is not Ralph Stacey's subject. This book is about “social” behavior, as seen primarily in groups and organizations. But what is important here and “radical”—and relevant to psychoanalysts—is that he sees no distinction between the individual and the social. His key idea is that in human experience there are no objects, only
processes: this is “an action theory that makes no appeal to notions of inside or outside. Mind is not regarded as an internal world inside a person and social is not regarded as a system, field, matrix, or third, outside a person. The theory of complex responsive processes … is a theory of experience understood as direct interaction between bodies” (p. 17).
Psychoanalysis, though not Stacey's focus, has an important dual relevance to his argument. On the one hand, it is an unrivaled source of observation about the complex layering of human behavior. It cannot be ignored, and Stacey devotes considerable space to its historical and contemporary developments. On the other, it is a theoretical bastion of individualism. To the extent it is committed to the notion of discrete and autonomous selves, relying on the notion of an “inner world,” a bounded realm subject to its own laws, it represents a challenge to be overcome. His point is that the clinical phenomena of psychoanalysis are distorted without the context of the social. It is not that the “social” is more important than the personal or individual, or more real. It is that the distinction is false, an artificial construction. For all our talk about “paradigm shifts,” this is “radical” and new.
Professor of Management and Director of the Complexity and Management Centre at the University of Hertfordshire's Business School, Stacey is also a member of the Institute for Group Analysis in London. He teaches, he manages a university institute, he edits a book series, and he runs therapy groups in the national health service. This is an odd mix but, I think, a carefully chosen one, demo