ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how the understanding of unconscious processes in groups and organisations has been enriched by Bion's theory of basic assumptions, which illuminate resistances that change generates. This chapter also focuses on the importance of the primary task in organisational design. A set of concepts form the ‘socio-technical system psychodynamics’ framework in consultancy practice in which the consultant and client work together in gaining a deeper understanding of the system and generating possible courses of action in the form of action research. There are two specific influences – (i) the transference, in which the consultant becomes a screen onto which the client projects underlying and perhaps unconscious feelings that were present in relation to key figures in the client's earlier life and (ii) countertransference, the consultant has the experience of becoming the fantasised character in the client's internal drama, a process also referred to as projective identification. The feelings evoked in the consultant provide data about underlying processes in the client system. All this involves providing a ‘holding environment’ by serving as a safe container who can accept and survive the anxieties and sometimes hostile projections coming from the client system. Philip Stokoe provides a section on a psychoanalytic contribution to systems psychodynamics.
