ABSTRACT
In psychotherapy training we often talk about mirroring and reflecting. The person centred approach mirrors back the experience of the client through empathic understanding of her frame of reference, the psychoanalytic approach holds up a mirror to the revealing world of projections. Diamond wrote about the unconscious life of organisations and the inherent instability of work groups, expanding on the theme by using a psychodynamic developmental framework. Diamond suggests that the unconscious actions and covert goals in a work group correspond to the degree of development of the leader. Very often the people at the top of our institutions have little or no managerial training and are juggling part-time teaching with successful private practices. Psychotherapy institutions are expensive to run and an enormous amount of voluntary time and hard work enables them to survive. Emotional literacy is at the heart of psychotherapy.
