ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes to draw on two icons to frame what authors have to say, exploring how iconic images have shaped the modern world and both helped and hindered their understanding of it. It explores the differences between the anxieties mobilised by these images and the boundary markers of interpretation, which encoded those images with meanings designed consciously and unconsciously to contain anxiety. The chapter investigates the relevance of the methods and shorthand explanations for our own and others’ behaviour. Yet, icons can also be dangerous. “Group relations” is an approach to the study of human behaviour within and between groups, growing out of the work of the Tavistock Institute in the mid-1950s. The underlying discipline has applied psychoanalytic concepts of unconscious behaviour, drawing especially on the thinking of Melanie Klein. Bringing together thinking about the function of religion in society viewed from the two perspectives of the human sciences disciplines of psychodynamic and systemic thinking.
