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Sometimes trauma creates conditions for heightened curiosity and sustained self-inquiry. Gabriele Junkers, a psychologist and training analyst of the German Psychoanalytic Association, the editor of and contributing author to this volume, responded to the enforced restriction of in-person contact with her professional colleagues, imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, by reflecting on the paradox of painfully missing the opportunities to meet with colleagues in various institutional contexts while simultaneously being aware of the profound discontents experienced by many members living their professional lives in and with those institutions, a unique instantiation of Bion’s trenchant observation that the individual is a group animal at war, both with the group and with those aspects of his personality that constitute his “groupishness”.
This volume resonated strongly with me because of my experience in leadership roles in various psychoanalytic organizations and my longstanding interest in applying psychoanalytic perspectives to understand organizational dynamics and leadership challenges. I find Bionian and post-Bionian field theory to be particularly helpful in locating myself and other(s) within complex fields of intersubjective processes. I also appreciate the conceptual power of systems psychodynamics, a hybrid of psychoanalytic perspectives and open systems theory, growing out of Bion’s pioneering work on groups and its elaboration through the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations over the past 75 years.
As psychoanalysts we are familiar with the intersubjective field of the clinical dyad (group of two). We are becoming increasingly aware of the porous boundaries between our internal and external worlds, and the mutual influencing and shaping of our psyches (at conscious and unconscious levels) and our social and cultural surround. Extending these ideas beyond the dyad to working within larger constellations in group