ABSTRACT
This chapter is a critical reflection on activities in the Exploratory Event at the Belgirate V conference in 2015. Participants were invited “to engage with the conference themes in different ways to those that have been used thus far, in order that the nature of our business is viscerally experienced and embodied and the meaning of our discourse is extracted afresh.” For the existence of a dominant discourse in a community immediately raises the question of that community’s capacity for change. If central assumptions and central tenets of the discourse are operational and unquestioned, this can amount to a stuck-ness and an unconscious enactment of the discourse. Attempts at innovation and change may certainly be hindered if the enacted discourse is liable to engender guilt in the participants. The challenge, then, for Group Relations practitioners is to develop ways to understand its discourse “afresh” without sinking into its own gravitational forces of complacency.
