Systems, Culture and Experience: Understanding the Divide between the Individual and the Organization

Group relations is more than sixty years old, formed from two roots - psychoanalysis and Kurt Lewin's field theory. The latter has subsequently been replaced by systems theory. The two roots do not necessarily live easily together, and tension remains between them, focusing either on the individual or on the organization of the system. This tension has endured from the beginning, evidenced by the difficulty in finding an effective bridging concept between the two approaches. When the understanding of reality demands acceptance of emotionally difficult ideas that may represent conflict - the ‘development threatening idea’, as Bion called it - then a schism can develop in the culture. This has been exemplified in many cases, including the classic study by Miller and Gwynne (1972). I also consider, from this point of view, Elliott Jaques's journey in the course of his career from a deeply psychoanalytic view in the 1940s-1950s based on the discoveries of individual psychoanalysis, to his ‘recanting’ in 1995. Finally, I attempt to make some comments on the basic fracture line in systems psychodynamics and whether there is a developmental idea that can lead to a separation along it.