You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This book is the second volume of Isabel Menzies Lyth's selected essays. Unlike Volume 1, many of these papers have not been previously published. This is mostly because the field-research papers derive from confidential reports to clients that have been purposely re-written for this volume. This makes the book very interesting
to the clinician who is unfamiliar with the field of institutional consultancy, as well as to the expert. The material about the application of psychoanalytic theories of anxiety and unconscious processes applied to such ordinary human activities as road-safety and motorcycling or eating ice-cream and chocolate makes thought-provoking reading. Menzies Lyth succeeds in offering up these areas to psychological inquiry and throwing light on their deeper meaning. At times, I felt she pushed the facts somewhat to fit her theoretical view of a topic, as, for example, in the paper on motorcycling.
One can sense her consultation style from the lucid and straightforward way that she writes — encouraging staff to talk freely and raise questions that concern them in their organisations. In this way she helped the client institution tackle its problems by drawing their attention to the latent content that lies behind the manifest complaints and disruptions that beset their institution.
The first three papers are a statement of Menzies Lyth's theoretical views of social institutions, drawing extensively on Bion's thinking about groups, but also influenced by social science theory. In addition to the papers on pleasure foods and road-safety is one on family breakdown in urban society. Then three papers which describe work with large national organisations: the Fire Brigade, a group of mental hospitals, and local-authority day-care facilities. Here Menzies Lyth shows how, when the diagnosis had been made, the real problem lay in getting the institution to take seriously the required treatment; she thus draws attention to the limitations of consultancy work