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This paper looks back to one of the founding strands in the psychoanalytic study of organisations: a tradition of innovative and action focused practice that came out of the wartime experiments initiated by Wilfred Bion and a multi-disciplinary group of colleagues, often later referred to as the “Tavistock group”, between 1940 and 1945. It is argued that this tradition was rooted in a unique bringing together of psychoanalytic insight and an “ethical imagination”, applied to the social and organisational challenges of war and post-war reconstruction: that is, the capacity actively to imagine new forms of group and organisational life in the service of human resilience and flourishing.
This imaginative capacity was to inform the creation and early work of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, set up as a “sister” enterprise of the Tavistock Clinic in 1947. Within this emerging tradition, notably in its early days, the “ethical imagination” was as much found as made, captured in, and generated through the collective experience of an ordinary work group, responding creatively to changing social and technological conditions. In turn, from the outset, it was subject to powerful resistances, societal, organisational, and personal. Over time, it is argued, the combination of resistance and an increasingly dependent culture was to function as a regressive pull, foreclosing potential development at the interface of theory and practice and leading to an imaginative loss, in which the more radical origins of the tradition tended to be replaced by more neutral and adaptive modes of enquiry.
Given the challenges of a radically changing social and organisational environment, the paper argues a need for the rediscovery of this tradition and its implications for the ways in which, as practitioners, we think and work, our modes of engagement.