Group Dynamics & Parallel Process
American Individualism, Biological Reductionism, and Denial of the Unconscious
American psychology has been profoundly influenced by individualism and is “quintessentially a psychology of individuals unrelated to the history, structure, and unverbalized world views of the social order” (p.ix)[1]. Mental health practice today is extremely individualistic, with little if any time given to understand much less work with, the complex context of each individual’s life. And for sure, if you go to a therapist you do want them to care about you as an individual – as your own unique self with your own hopes, aspirations, dreams, needs, and injuries.
Individualism as a philosophical position has been defined as a “political doctrine which declares that the aim of a political order should ultimately be to satisfy individual needs, wants, and goals, rather than the common good, the general will, or the public interest” and that when applied to the social sciences individualism asserts that “scientific explanations must be grounded in the actions of, or facts about, individuals: that is, the actions of social collectivities must be ultimately decomposable into acts, intended or otherwise, of individuals” (p. 376-377) [2]. Individualism is a fundamental concept governing our present mental models and adapts nicely to a model that views people and their organizations as machines. It also fits well with the current dominant psychiatric focus – that most psychiatric problems can and should be solved with medications that change or stabilize neurotransmitter function in the individual brain.
But the relationship between the individual and larger systems has been a central question of the last century and continues to be one for this century, as it becomes increasingly apparent that the solutions to such problems as global warming will have to be collective, not individual solutions. Much of the consciousness of the last century - and our wealth as well - has been tied up in the debate between individualism and collectivism. The American inclination is to view any mention of communal interests with grave suspicion [3] and there are good reasons for this – collectivism has too easily led to totalitarianism in the past (fascism, communism, religious fundamentalism) and that problem continues to haunt the present.
There is, however, another side of the story, an American commentary on the social nature of human nature that has radically expanded in the last decade because of the availability of new brain studies. Although individualism has long dominated our philosophical premises in the United States and in all of Western culture, there is a growing body of evidence to suggest that groups are a basic form of social and cognitive organization that is essentially “hard-wired” into our species and that our “group-self” is the core component of our sense of personal identity [4]. There is also another side to the psychiatric story, one of many dedicated professionals who did not believe that all of human nature or experience, much less the solution to human problems, could be found exclusively in biology. Their names and contributions are now largely forgotten in mental health practice, but the world they saw, talked and wrote about has not changed all that much, nor has human nature, and would be easily recognized by them today.
For the last several hundred years, tension has existed between views of mental illness as largely biological illnesses and a recognition that interpersonal interactions and social factors are major determinants of a wide variety of dysfunctions. This is the nature/nurture false dichotomy that still plagues our human service delivery systems. The combined forces of biological reductionism and behaviorism have made it impossible for even highly trained professionals to understand their clients, their organizations, or themselves. In a world reduced to biological causality, all problems can be attributed to biological or genetic abnormalities. In one reduced to behaviorism, all things which human being do — including acting, thinking and feeling—can and should be regarded as behaviors that can be described scientifically without recourse either to internal physiological events or to hypothetical constructs such as the mind and there is no such thing as the unconscious.
This is not the first historical period that has tried to reduce complexity to simple explanations. But just as we see today, each period of extreme biological bias has been succeeded by a period of reform. In the 18th - 19th centuries, Pinel’s advancements and the era of Moral Treatment attempted to undo the terrible damage of treating the mentally ill as criminals or as demonically possessed. In the 19th- 20th centuries social psychiatry sought to reform the strictly biological premises that supported inhumane treatment in state hospitals. Today, reform movements are afoot again to rehumanize the strictly biological premises of current psychiatric practice and demonstrate that effective treatment depends on an integrated approach to individuals, families and organizations that takes into account biological, psychological, social and existential components of reality. Let’s briefly review some of these historical ideas.
The Inextricable Nature of Social Existence
Western civilization attributes its origins to ancient Greece, and for the Greeks, individual and social experience were united [5]. Throughout the last two centuries, historians, sociologists, philosophers, and psychologists wrestled with the question of how the individual relates to the group. By the end of the nineteenth century, while Freud and his followers were developing a complex theory of individual development and pathology, other thinkers were focusing on the massive social disruptions of the Industrial Revolution. In doing so, they were compelled to look at the connection between individual maladjustment and social forces.
Emil Durkheim, considered the founder of scientific sociology, tried to understand the unconscious sources of social existence as Freud was trying to understand the unconscious sources of personal existence. For Durkheim, society is the source of morality, personality, and life itself at the human level. Durkheim saw modern societies as being sick, and a sign of the sickness was not only the rising suicide rate but also the appearance of a growing cynicism and despair [6]. George Mead another social philosopher of the late nineteenth century saw human group life as an essential condition for the emergence of consciousness. He described the dialectical relationship between the individual and society, pointing out that the development of individuality and the development of social institutions are both part of human evolutionary experience and that Individuals change and are changed by social institutions [7]. Another sociologist, Charles Cooley, declared in 1909 that human nature cannot exist separately in an individual but is, in fact a “group-nature,” a “social mind,” and that wherever there is an individual aspect of human function there must also be a social fact [8]. In 1920, McDougall asserted that “We can only understand the life of individuals and the life of societies, if we consider them always in relation to one another. . . each man is an individual only in an incomplete sense” (p.6)[9]. John Dewey, one of America’s most influential philosophers, saw the individual as so embedded in the social milieu, that mind is capable of operating only by the continual stimulus of the social group and that the origins of the self lie within the social context [10]. Alfred North Whitehead noted that philosophy has been haunted by a misconception throughout the centuries, the notion of independent existence: “There is no such mode of existence. Every entity is only to be understood in terms of the way it is interwoven with the rest of the universe” (p.3)[11].
Early Psychiatry and the Social
The Concept of Groupmind
A key question underlying our belief in organizations as living systems is: Can a group take on an identity that is some way distinct from the individuals that comprise it? Can a group develop a “groupmind”? Is there something else, something more than the simple sum of individuals, that is real and not just a metaphor used whenever a journalist refers to the “soul” or the “heart” or the “character” of the nation?
Groupmind is the word that has been used to describe the concept of a supra-individual nature and independence of the collective mind of a social group. The concept goes back at least to the German philosopher Hegel, who felt that individual minds are active participants of a larger social mind, concepts that later influenced Marx and Engels (and this latter influence may help explain why this concept has evoked such controversy over the year)[9, 12]. It was Durkheim who first used the term “groupmind” to refer to collective consciousness. He suggested that large groups of people sometimes acted with a single mind and that rather than being merely collections of individuals they were linked by some unifying force that went beyond any single individual, a force so strong that the will of the individual could be completely dominated by the will of the group [13]. William McDougall, a psychologist at Harvard and one of the first social psychologists, was convinced that a society is more than the mere sum of the mental lives of its units, “a complete knowledge of the units, if and in so far as they could be known as isolated units, would not enable us to deduce the nature of the life of the whole” (p.7)[9].
This is a premise that has been historically controversial and debatable and continues to be so today. Floyd Allport, considered the founder of social psychology, termed the idea of “groupmind” the “group fallacy” in the 1920’s and fiercely defended the premise that the actions of all are nothing more than the sum of the actions of each taken separately and that all one needed to do to understand the behavior of groups was to understand the behavior of individuals within the group [13].
The reality of a “groupmind” is difficult to prove - or disprove for that matter. There are some hints that point to a reality beyond that of the individual that come out of social psychology, group therapy, family therapy, and the therapeutic community. We can only cautiously generalize from the study of dyads, small and medium size groups, to the study of large groups and whole societies, and yet it is vitally important that we open up a larger discussion about similarities just as we may be open to differences (Moses, 1995). Our national and global problems have simply become too big and too interconnected for individually-based solutions. As Robin Skynner pointed out, “In common with most students of large-group phenomenon I am impressed with their power for good or ill. Though as yet we do not have even the rudiments of a truly scientific explanation, it is as if some form of energy is generated when a number of people interact, proportional in some way to the numbers involved and available, like any other form of energy, for constructive or destructive purposes”.
Studies of military units convincingly demonstrated that individuals would sacrifice their own lives for the well-being of the group. Grinker and Spiegel noted that this result could not be explained by the simple sum of individual motivations but of some intense loyalty stimulated by close identification with the group. “The relationship between the individual and his group is like a pulsation that varies in amplitude under different conditions. There seem to be optimum degrees of independent individualization and dependence on a group for each person... in times of danger the pulsation extends further out to the group; in times of peace it remains closer to the individual” [14]. We know that attachment behavior is increased in times of danger. This has been well-documented in many mammalian species and makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. For a highly social animal like homo sapiens, it also makes sense that danger would evoke a group response as well, so that increased danger would lead to increased identification with and loyalty to, the group.
If he were alive today, Dr. Allport might be a little uncomfortable with such fierce denial of collective experience because of a number of converging discoveries, advances, and dialogues: out of chaos and complexity theory has come the idea of emergence; the concept of collective intelligence is a vibrant area of exploration; the Internet, cell phones, and all communication technologies are wiring together people from around the globe in unexpected and unpredictable ways; and a long list of hard-core scientists have been demonstrating the relational and molecular substrate for social interactions that takes us out of the realm of speculation or science fiction and plunges us right into brain science [15].
Containing Anxiety As A Role for Organizations
Because an understanding of unconscious processes has been almost eliminated from our social service systems, the problems that systematically plague our organizations, create enormous stress in the workforce, and undermine performance are largely incomprehensible. Problems in organizations are often attributed to specific trouble-makers and if only we could eliminate the problem people, everything would be ok. We organize our social institutions to accomplish specific tasks and functions, but we also utilize our institutions to collectively protect us against being overwhelmed with the anxiety that underlies human existence. We are, after all, the only animal that knowingly must anticipate our own death, fear loss and fear insanity.
In every organization there is the level of “what we say we do” and the levels of “what we really believe we are doing” and also “what is going on” – and the members of an organization may be completely unaware of this third level [16]. Depending on what institution we are addressing, the more unconscious motivations vary. In the health care system, the third level can be addressed as “keeping-death-at-bay” and in a variety of ways denying that death will inevitably occur. In the mental health system, this third level presents in a variety of ways, all attempts to reject the enormous complexity of emotional and our relative helplessness in affecting cure: denying that there is anything but biological causality; idealizing the latest fashion and forgetting and denigrating ordinary forms of therapeutic caring; denying that there is anything but social causality; believing everything is due to trauma; believing nothing is due to trauma; believing that dissociation and multiplicity does not exist; believing that everyone has dissociative identity disorder; believing that people with mental illness are the “answer” to the problem; believing that people with mental illness have nothing to offer.
The collective result of this natural inclination to contain anxiety becomes a problem when institutional events occur that produce great uncertainty, particularly those events that are associated with insanity, death or the fear of death. Under these conditions, containing anxiety may become more important than rationally responding to the situation. But this motivation is likely to be denied and rationalized. As a result, organizations may engage in behavior that may serve to contain anxiety but that is ultimately destructive to organizational purpose [17-19]. One of the ways in which this happens is when a group feels threatens and projects the reason for their fear onto an external enemy who then becomes dehumanized. This is typically what happens in situations that are confusing and complex. We call these people deviants.
The Shadow and the Shadow-Group
Earlier we described the “shadow” as a Jungian term applied to those parts of the self that are disowned and disavowed. Groups also have a shadow side. The “shadow group” has been defined as the collection of all the shadow parts of the various members of a work group or other group. “The shadow group is no phantasm, but rather a hidden reality that parallels the normal functioning of work groups and which takes over their interaction when one or more individual members are engulfed by their shadow selves during emotionally-based interpersonal conflict” (p.25) [20]. Jung pointed out that no one can become conscious of their own shadow self without considerable moral effort. The same can be said of the shadow-group – looking at the way we behave in a group setting and how much that may contradict the way we see ourselves consciously is disturbing. Instead of doing this difficult emotional and relational labor, we are more likely to stay in chronic conflict with whoever has become the embodiment of our shadow self and if we are in positions of leadership, we may do our best – and be successful – at extruding that person from the workplace entirely.
One author who has written about the shadow group has identified six main triggers for the emotional reactivity that can cause members of a group to be engulfed by their shadow side and these triggers are particularly pertinent to social service and mental health settings:
- Commonly called ‘having one’s buttons pushed’, this occurs when things about another person cannot be tolerated – the result of seeing in another the qualities one unconsciously despises about oneself
- One group member reminds another of someone responsible for a previously abusive or otherwise traumatic event in their past
- Threat of any kind – to status, to integrity, to power
- Verbal abuse
- Frustration as when ideas or values are rejected or blocked by another group member
- Shame and guilt – when someone draws attention to another’s mistakes or failings
These authors propose that in organizations, people tend to seek out the one person who most resembles their own opposite. This is the person they are most likely to have interpersonal conflicts with and these are likely to manifest as strong and apparently “unreasonable” dislikes that are not based on what the person has actually done to them. It is easy to imagine how in this kind of a scenario, a self-fulfilling prophecy could easily emerge [20].
Other authors have looked at the ways in which a group unconsciously selects a “troublemaker” who then performs a function on behalf of other members of the group as well as themselves. This is the person who always challenges administration, who constantly argues, who gives off nonverbal signs of frustration in meetings but never does anything positive, who is always tardy, who bullies other people [21].
“Many groups and organizations have a ‘difficult’, ‘disturbed’, or ‘impossible’ member whose behavior is regarded as getting in the way of the others’ good work. There may be a widely shared belief that if only that person would leave, then everything would be fine. This view is very attractive, hard to resist and tempting to act upon…. As happens very often, no sooner had one troublesome person left, than another one appeared. … this unconscious suction of individuals into performing a function on behalf of others as well as themselves happens in all institutions (pp.130-131) [21].
The “shadow organization” is the organization that grows up informally alongside or perhaps more accurately, within the overt organization to provide services and benefits not provided by the overt organization. These arrangements can parallel, complement or even replace formal organization structures and processes [22]. Of all the explanations of conflict in organizations, it is these shadowy, largely unconscious sources of conflict that are likely to be the most problematic in caregiving organizations. We may be relatively good at solving many task conflicts and even resolving overt interpersonal conflicts and misunderstandings, but we get blindsided by the unconscious group forces of which we are only minimally aware.
We often only observe in retrospect, the damage that has been left in the wake of these shadow experiences. The destructive parallel processes that we describe in this volume - collective disturbance, traumatic reenactment, groupthink, the Abilene paradox – all are part of this shadowy world of group interactive dynamics, the “social defense systems” that rarely get discussed in the social service and mental health world of today. That lack of discussion, of course, makes the influence of the unconscious conflicts at the individual and at the group level, much more powerful.
Therapeutic Community
See Special Section on the Therapeutic Community in the 21st Century
Social Defense Mechanisms
Isabel Menzies, building on the work of the noted group theorist, Eliot Jaques, described the ways in which mental health systems create “social defense systems”[23, 24]. She described how systems develop specific and static protective mechanisms to protect against the anxiety that is inevitably associated with change. The defense mechanisms she describes sound uncannily like those that we see in victims of trauma - depersonalization, denial, detachment, denial of feelings, ritualized task-performance, redistribution of responsibility and irresponsibility, idealization, avoidance of change.
Guidelines for Social Immune System
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