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In this concluding volume of David Lawlor and Mannie Sher's magisterial account of the origins and development of systems psychodynamics their focus shifts to voices from inside, captured in a finely crafted series of interviews with the practitioners: researchers, consultants, and clients, drawn into the field across three generations.
Each generation faced distinct challenges, dependent partly on context, partly on the related developmental chain from innovation, through consolidation to renewal.
The constant in this sequence was as much institutional as professional, embodied in the history of a particular and unique “composite work group”, from diverse backgrounds, social, academic, and professional, brought together by the urgency of addressing the human and social challenges of a
nation at war and recovery from war. For this reason the emergence of “systems psychodynamics”, as a discrete field of enquiry cannot be separated from the history of its institutional “container”, the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations.
Across the interviews, it is fascinating to trace how it seems to have been this “institutional container” that people found their way to, through chance acquaintance or contact, or when seeking a way of “going deeper” into some area of application or study that didn't fit neatly into the boundaries of any single uniprofessional perspective or practice, This cross boundary orientation, however, for many, may have expressed more than simply an interdisciplinary preference, itself a quasi inevitable accompaniment to any field theory. James Krantz, for example, at the outset of his interview “before jumping in”, comments:
I feel it's important to appreciate that this is not a profession … Even more than a method of enquiry system thinking is a world view, which privileges interdependence and interconnectedness as opposed to cause and effect relationships. The unit of analysis is not the organism but the organism in its environment. (pp. 125–126)
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