ABSTRACT
“Open system” is a way of looking at any organisational entity as a living organism in constant interaction and exchange with its environment. If this exchange is interrupted or stopped, the system becomes a closed system and is bound to die. Systemic concepts provide basic, and yet powerful, tools for approaching and assessing what people experience in the groups, organisations, and institutions to which they belong and within which they live and work. Group relations conferences are where these somewhat abstract concepts become palpable and can be understood and internalised through one’s experience. The group relations approach thus represents the unique, potentially quite powerful and fruitful integration of systemic and psychoanalytic theory. The confluence of these three fields—psychoanalysis, systems theory and group relations theory and practice—has recently been defined as “Systems Psychodynamics”, an emergent new field of social investigation and exploration that combines inner psychic dynamics and experience with group and organisational dynamic processes.
