Mind the 20 years gap: Situations all over the world have been changing dramatically over the past years. Starting with breakdown of the Wall of Berlin (1989).Twin Towers 2001, to Covid (2021). Natural disasters are turning the globe upside down. In the Canary Islands Volcanos are leaving hundreds of people homeless and contamination is growing. With globalization, complexities increased. Vulnerability arose in the heart of the planet. Crisis, corruption in organizations, and breakdown of the financial systems, cropped up. (2008-2012).

Citizens have feltl like orphans not represented by the Politicians that are in charge. There will be opportunities in this presentation to consider what has unfolded and to reflect about regression in population in front of sitting in the unknown and the incapacity of power to help people to sustain uncertainty, develop reflective capacity in order to think what actions can be taken to stop or transform this trend.

Popular journalists (e.g., Roger Harrabin, George Monbiot) are echoing the concern of climate change and green alliance groups; that the British government will not meet the target of reducing our economy’s carbon footprint by 2050. Their view is the political elite have an inappropriately close relationship with large corporations, who have a commercial interest in keeping business as usual. With weak opposition parties, and a first past the post electoral system, influencing this close relationship inevitably requires citizen pressure via action groups. Drawing on my experiences as a clinician, organisational consultant, teacher and climate group member this paper is a psychoanalytic exploration of this paralysis, ending in a brief assessment of prospects for it being remedied.Using Bion’s (1961) concepts work group and basic assumption mentality the paper gives examples of the tension between crisis awareness, and denial that contributes to the paralysis. The paper’s main theme centres on Freud’s (1924.1927.1940) term disavowal which is examined through three ideas about the perceived closeness of governments and corporations, and citizen action to counter this.

In the paper, an exploration will be made of the phenomenon of ecological disaster through the perspective of relationships and intersubjectivity using a psychosocial lens. The presentation argues that fragmentation and hyper-individualism in late modernity are the root causes of ecological disaster. Fragmentation and disconnection from the consequences of humankinds actions allows exploitation of our finite resources, as if infinite, with catastrophic consequences for our ecosystems. The hyper-individualism we have become acculturated to today and socialised into believing denies the reality of our interconnectedness and interdependence on one another. In the context of climate change, the logical conclusion of fragmentation results in a fatal kind of disconnection, akin, Anna argues, to suicide and genocide, which the climate change campaigner Polly Higgins referred to as ‘ecocide’. To highlight her argument Anna will make some links between the concepts of suicide, genocide and ecocide in an attempt to understand the psychosocial dynamics of fatal self destructiveness, using personal experiences to explore aggression, in the hope that personal insights may shine a light on dynamics that lie at the heart of climate change brought about by fragmentation and disconnection.

Innovation is regularly cited as a technical solution to the overwhelming challenges of the Anthropocene. Rarely addressed are the social processes of how one does, or does not, function as a leader effectively in the face of overwhelm.
This session shares systems psychodynamic research completed at INSEAD mapping how de repeat innovation leaders work with anxiety, authority and frustration. Central to this psychodynamic perspective  of innovation is object relations.  This lens differentiates two different positions of frustration to explain how leaders are able to contain themselves and others in the highly charged leadership situation of innovation.
This session will be part talk and part discussion of how we move past the paralysis of talking about the problems of the Anthropocene to do the “on-task” work of realizing fair and just solutions. We will look at how innovation leaders negotiate the boundary of innovation tolerance of their organisation or society. As well, how they create a holding environment for subversive acts of innovation.

At a time of cultural devastation, the reality a courageous person has to face up to is that one has to face up to reality in new ways (Lear, 2008)

In this presentation we deploy our Diogenes Paradigm (Scanlon and Adlam, 2022) to explore relations of domination and fraught encounters played out between the imperialist minority in-group of the Global North and the dispossessed and displaced populations of the majority South in the traumatised planetary system in late modernity. We argue that climate disaster is a profoundly psycho-social phenomenon in which un-housedness and un-settledness in and in relation to the Gaian home of our species threatens to displace us all. We foreground the global dominance of the post-Industrial Revolution, carbon-fuelled, capitalistic socio-economic model that has bought humankind to the very edge of this existential precipice; and we explore what happens to humans and to human mobility in the complex planetary system when, in the poet’s words, ‘things fall apart’ and ‘the centre cannot hold’.

In the presentation we set out to describe and explore multiple complex intersections between globalisation and climate disaster as revealed through the Keeling Count, recorded at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii: the implications of which suggest or signify that, in the Anthropocene Age, we are all increasingly unsettled in our social bodies as well as our minds. We will go on to show how this unsettlement is made manifest by the movement of human populations across the now increasingly inhospitable environment of the ‘Earth System’. In developing this argument we will build upon Bruno Latour’s work on the New Climatic Regime and his depiction of the ‘migrations without form or nation’ of ‘climate, erosion, pollution, resource depletion, habitat destruction’ (Latour, 2017) – and to these we might add the now very real threat of the present and future pandemics?.

This presentaiton will explore the outcomes of Energy, Creative Collaboration and Wellbeing (ECW) conferences and how traditional group relations formats in conjunction with more embodied and explicitly creative processes can provide new insights on how to enliven and enlighten the work environment.  One of the sources of the parallel crises characterzing the Anthropocene is the ability of increasing numbers of people in the so called developed nations to live detached from the environmental consequences of their lifestyles. Those with privilege can get access to the remaining oasis of the natural environment and maintain physical health with access to healthier food and medical care. Increasing use of technology to supplant or replace physical presence ultimately leading to the potential of “virtualizing reality”. Essentially a split between mind and body that has catastrophic consequences. ECW  was created and co-directed  by Franca Fubini and Luca Mingarelli 12 years ago. The design incorporated elements of traditional group relations methodology along with various forms of structured and un-structured movement practices, such as a social dream matrix followed by “dreams move”, intentional group walks through nature, singing and music making, visual arts and food preparation.   This creative collaboration based on both conscious and unconscious forces (which are not without some level of chaos) generates a sense of wellbeing and will be discussed.

This paper describes the experience of hosting a series of 4 Social Dreaming Matrices between March and May 2020, at the time of the first lockdown caused by the Covid 19 emergency in Italy. In the workshop we will share with the participants the findings of the 4 stages of the explorative journey, through maps and images elaborated that combine an imaginal and a semiotic approach; we’ll discuss the results of the interviews with some of the participants about the impact on their individual experience of surmounting of trauma; eventually, we’ll debate some hypothesis about Social Dreaming as a technique to overcome a collective traumatic experience. Trapped in an a-temporal dimension of eternal present, unable to imagine some kind of future post-pandemic, without a real connection to our past and a clear understanding of how we had got to this point, the nightmares and fears that for long time had remained unheard suddenly awakened, reveal-ing the fragility and powerlessness of our contemporary society. Something in the most recent years went out of control, the faith in an unlimited progress had vanished, the hope for a better world turned into a nightmare; the very idea of the future as a linear progression of constant improvements that could enhance the life conditions of many thanks to the technological and scientific development, which had driven the Western world for centuries, sounds now problematic, vague, threatening.
In such an apocalyptic scenario, the desire for a different kind of sociability, for different forms of intimacy,  made the space for new potential discoveries.

Climate change and growing wealth inequality are already having drastic impacts on people around the world and creating social unrest. Whereas governments at various levels have enacted policies to address these challenges, the private sector’s role remains unclear. Over the last four decades, the world’s businesses have largely failed to pursue the systemic changes required to achieve sustainability. Addressing this situation through a systems psychodynamic lens provides a more human-centred approach to understanding the forces and challenges that have prevented corporations and their corporate social responsibility (CSR) professionals from moving beyond Milton Friedman’s view that the sole purpose of business is to generate profits. The presenter will share his research findings and address the question “How do we challenge ‘business as usual’ whilst curbing environmental destruction?” This workshop will explore experientially new thinking and new approaches which examine all aspects of the unconscious mind (individual, group, organizational, and societal) and consider which themes may be further preventing business’ from adopting a sustainable approach to their endeavors.

Climate change, globalisation and new technologies are profoundly disrupting old ways of working. Organisations and individuals are operating in increasingly turbulent and uncertain times. They must keep focus on being relevant, vital and on task. Nurturing workers’ wellbeing is vital for them to focus on their roles. Conservation organisations and their workers are on the frontline in the Anthropocene. Preventing the extinction of species is critical and challenging, and this paper proposes that this might be thought of as an impossible task (Chapman 1999). The rate of species extinction is now hundreds of times higher than base line, with 15,000 species facing extinction (Smithsonian 2020). The case study organisation must also manage the ethical dilemma of keeping animals in captivity. Applying Chapman’s theory means both these aspects of the organisation’s work may be hated by workers, and this could potentially lead to corruption of task (Chapman 1999). The data presented comes from a small action research study with a conservation organisation. Action research methods were used to work with staff and volunteers who are representative of the organisation’s functional and hierarchical layers. Consideration of why conservation organisations have more success in remaining true to purpose and can carry out its aims so effectively will be explored discussing the following points:
• That Jane Chapman’s theory of Corruption and Hatred of Task (1999, 2019) helps us to understand how and why this organisation functions so well.
• That Chapman’s work may be extended in two ways. Firstly, ambivalence may contribute to the hatred of task. Workers both enjoy and hate holding animals in captivity. Secondly, Staff are aided by animals in coping with the challenges of the work.
• The central presence of the animals in the workers’ experiences, thoughts and emotions and how the animals contribute to the dynamics of the organisation, as this plays a unique role in assisting its workers to cope with the stresses of their work.

This presentation begins with digestion of the impact of Covid on mental health and well-being, using the work of Camus’ ‘La Peste’ (The Plague) to draw parallels. Camus’ novel is also a metaphor; he was drawing attention to the movements sweeping Europe at the time – Nazism and Fascism; we can think of the pandemic as a forewarning of what is coming in terms of the impending ecological and climate emergency, indeed, what is already upon us. The paper tracks ‘The Plague’ and its parallels with experiences during the last two years of the pandemic and I offer short experiential exercises to explore our thoughts and feelings both then and now with space in the presentation to share some of those feelings with others. We can think of the ‘underlying conditions’ of which we were so acutely aware at the beginning of the pandemic but now, we can expand our understanding of these: Covid has exposed the ‘underlying conditions’ of our societies very starkly: the racism, sexism, social injustice, poverty, greed, growth fantasies. Perhaps we have been shocked and shamed to think about how these injustices have played out and the fatal consequences of them.
The presentation will then focus particularly on eco-anxiety, using a short video, and how we experience it. From a psychoanalytic perspective, I make use of the concepts of containment, ‘negative capability’ and the capacity to ‘play’, and the presentation draws on the work of Donald Winnicott, particularly his papers ‘Fear of Breakdown’ and his understanding of ‘Play’ in order to explore together how we can begin to build resilience, firstly within ourselves and then in the clients we work with, whether individuals or groups. There will be time to explore the experience of the workshop and to share thoughts, feelings, experiences and work vignettes and to consider how we can use the learning and shared experiences going forward.

Society and business, especially knowledge intensive work, has come to rely much more extensively on online communications platforms such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Webex, since the onset of the global pandemic and associated lockdowns. The shift to online work has many implications for group formation and behaviour as well as the whole organisation. How are the conscious and unconscious dynamics affected by the use of a specific platform? What are the specific anxieties of people when they try to work in the virtual world and how are these impacted by the platform? We find ourselves curious about how the platform moulds our experiences and influences the development of systems and practices, particularly at unconscious and social levels.

In a series of online experiential study events on Zoom, using an adaptation of group relations methodology, the three person research team explored how participants’ identities, relationships as well as boundaries were affected by the platform. The paper summarises our experiences and hypotheses derived from these events.

Kalina Stamenova, Irene O’Byrne-Maguire, Bryan Maguire

This paper examines certain problems in thinking about our world where global extinction threatens: the Anthropocene. The author suggests that certain conditions foster the disavowal of scientific realities associated with climate change, and denigration of experts. These conditions are internal, external and organisational. Explored is the unholy alliance exists between the enduring experience of ‘cradle life’ (the protomental) and the need for ‘herd membership’ : combining in social groups (valency). This unholy alliance creates a fertile seedbed for exploitation by wayward, and often obscure, socio-political elites of global capitalism, especially in a context of low levels of mass literacy and knowledge, and powerful social media.
Marilyn explores this primitive ‘group think’ and how it operates at the level of myth and dream, as in advertising, offering infantile and perverse forms of illusory wish fulfilment in line with the pleasure principle. A ‘manufactured consent’ follows which promotes denial, mimicry and homogeneity at the expense of curiosity, difference and ‘otherness’, particularly challenges from undesirable scientific facts about climate change from experts. These internal and external forces of propaganda also undermine a discriminating moral sense and discourage the higher intellectual levels required for critical thinking and independent-mindedness: namely facing conflict, reality and making informed judgments.
Individuality and the acquisition of a nuanced moral sense are always hard won.
This paper argues further that certain forms of social combination found in specialist membership organisations (closed ‘silos of knowledge and practice’) create narcissistic cultures, with their constricted world view necessarily operating at a part-object level. This applies as much to bee-keepers, horse trainers and literary critics, as it does to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists. This ‘narcissism of small differences’, often creates deadening factional strife (against the ‘enemy within’) at the same time as it limits knowledge and curiosity about the ‘whole object’ of a more complex world picture with its own potential ‘enemies without’. The different ‘tongues’ (jargons) of alien discourses also inhibit interdisciplinary enquiry because they diverge from the comforting familiarity of the silo’s ‘mother tongue’. Understanding the causes of climate change requires major interdisciplinary effort: speaking in different tongues, feeling lonely, lost and uncontained, and encountering terror. Leaving the comforting familiarity of cradle and herd, and forgoing the illusions of the pleasure principle, have little allure. History shows, however, that civilisations always rise and fall, and are replaced by the new; also that we now face not the first but the sixth extinction. The Anthropocene, however is by definition, manmade.

The recent Netflix film Don’t Look Up – in which scientists try to warn of an impending extinction-level event caused by a huge comet hitting the earth – was an unexpected success in some quarters recently. Climate scientists and campaigners said they felt ‘seen’ by the film’s representation of ‘knowing but not able to make the knowing matter’. My recent doctoral work explored the nature of this experience at organisational level: I convened a group of leaders in organisations that engage the UK public on climate change (climate change communication) in seven meetings over eleven months, and explored the experience using a systems-psychodynamic lens.

I found that at the heart of working in climate change communication is a traumatic epistemological, social, and emotional experience. The fact of the traumatic experience, and the fear of annihilation that its elements carry, is Bollas’ ‘unthought known’ in this work. Organisations that engage the public on climate change may unconsciously activate a version of Paul Hoggett’s ‘internal establishment’ that exists to defend against the unthought known, with the establishment unleashing perverse dynamics and other defensive mechanisms such as shame, with a particular focus on maintaining the split polarities and thereby preventing genuine connection with others who are different. The emotional flavour of these social defences resonates with the climate emotions proposed by the existing body of climate psychology literature. The trauma-influenced basic assumption Incohesion proposed by Earl Hopper is explored along with scholarship on climate trauma to suggest a theoretical framing for the study’s findings.

In the session, I propose to present vignettes from the study, and some of the discussion of its findings, and invite participants to explore their responses in the here and now. There will also be a discussion of the steps that could be taken to support organisations working in climate change communication and related fields. How does trauma scholarship illuminate the experience and help us to consider what organisational interventions may be valuable?

The presentation begins from one of the key ideas explored in Yuval Noah Harari’s “Homo Deus: a brief history of tomorrow”: “Home Sapiens has conquered the world” in the age that he, among others, is calling the Anthropocene. This sense of self-authorisation and destructive omnipotence to subject earth’s natural resources to human desires and dominance leaves none of us with clean hands around inflicted damage. Members of mankind in a post-structuralist world are neither omnipotent nor the centre of the universe, particularly if they carry leadership responsibilities. This pressurises consulting to shift focus in a way that makes psychodynamic approaches to consulting redundant in the pursuit of systems problem analysis and systems resolutions. Yet such an approach risks rendering the subject wised-up, but helpless. The presenter will argue that this need not be the case and will provide some key ideas from new psychoanalytic practice that draws on the idea of the unconscious field and its emerging characters that is a multi-verse larger that its participants. This in turn will open up new understandings for the transferential and counter-transferential field as resources for here and now interventions linked to enlarging the task and focus of a consultancy.The presentation will trace the development of field theory in psychoanalysis from Kurt Lewin through Bion and the Barrangers in Argentina, to Italian “post-Bion Field Theory” including Ferro, Civitarese, Neri and Foresti. Presentation interspersed with interruptions for discussion and case material. Examples will be drawn from the presenter’s consulting and members will be invited to explore some of their own narrative derivatives from the field.

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world.  The point is to change it.” – Karl Marx.

As a climate concerned citizen since the late 1990’s, Rob Stuart has tried everything to raise the profile of the climate and ecological emergency.  Last year, he tried blocking motorways and was arrested multiple times.  This talk is about his experiences on the frontline of the climate and ecological resistance.

In September 2020, a new direct action group by the name of Insulate Britain began a campaign of protests aimed at disrupting traffic on the nation’s motorways, in particular the M25 ring road around London.  The campaign was a huge success, raising the profile of decent home insulation across the country, warning of fuel poverty and predicting the current energy crisis.  Of course, at that time, no-one wanted to hear it but only a few months later, Insulate Britain was vindicated.

In an astonishing campaign of sustained anti-protest propaganda, led by the UK government and the right wing media, both of which are inextricably linked with the fossil fuel industry, the role of peaceful protest in this country was systematically undermined, leading to harmful divisions in society.  It was impossible to have a reasonable conversation with the nation, although face to face human contact remained rewarding.

As the normal judiciary was cynically cast aside with the imposition of a civil injunction, the activists found themselves stripped of their right to protest, harassed and ultimately punished without trial by a corrupt UK government.  The handful of activists that were sentenced by a judge found themselves subject to harsh punishments, including imprisonment, the likes of which would have been unheard of only a few years ago.

It can no longer be denied that we are witnessing the decline of democracy in the UK and climate activists are on the frontline risking everything to sound the alarm.  This talk will be a personal account of one climate activist’s attempt to prevent climate catastrophe and survive the Anthropocene.  What sacrifices must be made in order to safeguard the future?  Is it too late already?  What individual, group and social dynamics are at work?  What is the function of protest in a democratic society?

Join us for what promises to be a lively discussion.

In this period of the Corona blockade which continues without knowing till when, and arouses complains about the solitude and lack of activity which bother so many of us reverberates the pessimistic lines of David Avidan in his poem “Power of attorney”: “What justifies most of all the loneliness, the great despair, the strange caring of the great loneliness and the great despair is the simple indisputable fact that we don’t really have anywhere to go”.
Shmuel will peruse Les poems en prose “La solitude” in “Le spleen de Paris” of Charles Baudelaire and provide his commentary linked to the conference theme.