Social Dreaming @ Work

W. Gordon Lawrence

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429919312
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

"Social Dreaming" is the name given to a method of working with dreams that are shared and associated to within a gathering of people, coming together for this purpose. Its immediate origins date back to the early 1980s. At that time, Gordon Lawrence was on the scientific staff of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations. He was a core member of the Institute's Group Relations Programme, within which he had developed a distinctive approach centring around the concept of "relatedness" — that is, the ways in which individual experience and behaviour reflects and is structured by conscious and unconscious constructs of the group or organization in the mind...

CHAPTER ONE
"Won from the void and formless infinite": experiences of social dreaming

W. Gordon Lawrence

The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego-consciousness and which will remain psyche no matter how far our ego-consciousness may extend. For all ego-consciousness is isolated: it separates and discriminates, knows only particulars and sees only what can be related to the ego. Its essence is limitation, though it reaches to the farthest nebulae among the stars. All consciousness separates but in dreams we put on the likeness of that more universal, truer, more eternal man dwelling in the darkness of primordial night. There he is still the whole and the whole is in him, indistinguishable from pure nature and bare of all egohood. It is from these all-uniting depths that the dream arises be it never so childish, grotesque, and immoral. So flower-like is it in its candour and veracity that it makes us blush for the deceitfulness of our lives.

Jung, 1953, p. 46

The Blind Architect Dream

The dream was of being at a dinner party in the Paris apartment of friends. During it a visitor arrived from the provinces. He had to get to a new cathedral because he was involved in its construction, and I seemed to be the only person who knew where it was. He was very insistent that he should go by taxi as he had travelled a long distance by train that day. I went down with him to the street where the taxi was waiting and gave precise instructions to the driver. It was only later in the dream when talking with the fellow guests that I realized that the stranger was a blind architect. I remember thinking in the dream, "Who would employ a blind architect?" A deaf composer is possible. Beethoven proved that. But a blind architect?

This dream occurred in Belgium in the autumn of 1990 at the beginning of a conference that included social dreaming as an activity. The next day I offered the dream to my colleagues during what is called the "Social Dreaming Matrix". Among the associations to the dream was the suggestion that I was the blind architect of social dreaming in that I had found a space for thinking about dreaming which no one had used before. What was to be in that space was in the process of being discovered by those who take part in this activity called social dreaming.

In outlining the development of social dreaming, the difference between "discovery" and "invention" is worth clarifying. Invention connotes a completed innovation that is tangible or definable, like a steam engine, or a concept such as "social class". An invention can only be improved through modification. Its essence cannot be altered, or it is a new invention. Discovery is different in that it leads to more and more disclosures and revelations as long as there are people to experience and perceive.

My colleague David Armstrong offered a tighter distinction given by Roger Penrose in his book The Emperor's New Mind (1989). In it, Penrose discusses computers, minds, and the laws of physics and asks if mathematics is an invention or a discovery. He argues that mathematicians are really discovering truths that are independent of the mathematician's existence because they are already "there". The examples he gives are of such structures as the Mandelbrot set and complex numbers.

Penrose discriminates between discovery and invention by saying that discoveries

... are the cases where much more comes out of the structure than is put into it in the first place. One may take the view that in such cases the mathematicians have stumbled upon "works of God". However there are other cases where the mathematical structure does not have such a compelling uniqueness, such as when, in the midst of a proof of some result, the mathematician finds the need to introduce some contrived and far from unique construction in order to achieve some very specific end. In such cases no more is likely to come out of the construction than was put into it in the first place and the word "invention" seems more appropriate than "discovery". These are indeed just "works of man".

[pp. 96-97]

To illustrate succinctly: Freud did not invent "transference", he discovered it.

But how does a discovery generate revelations by others? Bion writes to the effect that if we are to get beyond "memory and desire"—the memory of past experiences and insights and the desire for particular kinds of experience—we have to experience a "blindness" because that is how we discover what is already there but has never been lodged here in our ken. Bion (1975), in the second of his Brazilian lectures, says that Freud, in correspondence with Lou Andreas-Salomé, wrote "that when he was investigating a very dark subject he sometimes found it illuminating to investigate it by artificially blinding himself" (italics added). Bion goes on to say that perhaps Milton's blindness was induced by the unconscious need to be so in order that he could investigate "those things invisible to man", which he reveals in Book III of Paradise Lost. This idea of artificially blinding oneself, which is a creative posture, is a key element of the capacity to be available for discovery (Bion, 1975, pp. 62-63). Such a posture is one that yields the kind of original and intense insights that are "Won from the void and formless infinite".

A gloss on this notion of blindness and creativity would be the deafness of Beethoven. While his deafness made him irascible and had a bad effect on his personal relationships, it had the opposite effect on his capacity to compose. Anthony Storr, in his book The School of Genius, quotes from a study of Beethoven.

In his deaf world, Beethoven could experiment with new forms of experience, free from the intrusive sounds of the external environment; free from the rigidities of the material world; free, like the dreamer to combine and recombine the stuff of reality, in accordance with his desires, into previously undreamed-of forms and structures.

[Solomon, 1978, quoted in Storr, 1988, p. 52]

Social dreaming, it is being postulated, has been a discovery. To discover the dimensions of the conceptual space in which to locate social dreaming, it has been necessary, first, to blind oneself to conventional and received opinions about the ways to understand or interpret dreams, to experience dreams as phenomena in their own right, to rid oneself of a priori frameworks for limiting the nature of dreams. In this, I have not always been successful.

Second, the sense of experimenting with "new forms of experience" has been possible through David Armstrong, who read drafts of this chapter to make links and associations to the ideas that I was offering which generated further thoughts. We continued to discover the text and so to give voice to thoughts unspoken.

What I offer here is a description of a method of working with dreams which is in the making. As yet I do not fully understand what I am doing, but, as more and more colleagues join me, at times I get glimpses. And I am only at the stage of making notes, so to speak, towards a conceptualization, formulating "visions or dreams of conclusions", to borrow a phrase from Robert Jay Lifton (1987). What is written here is exploratory, and the reader may well discover more than I have.

Experiences towards a discovery

There is a particular form of education that uses the capacity to learn directly from experience both the conscious and the unconscious processes of being in group life. It stems from the work of Bion (1961) on experiences in groups. Like anyone who has been involved in understanding the unconscious life of institutions in this Bion tradition, I have had the experience of hearing a dream from a group participant which was clearly a dream that belonged to the group because it spoke in some way to the emergent life of it. With such dreams I had always been very cautious, not wanting to devalue them in any way by naive or wild interpretation. But always I felt inadequate to work with them, and any associations that I might have had I thought to be pedestrian. I called these "group" dreams and sometimes, in my mind, "social" dreams.

This was because I had learned, in some measure, to work with dreams in my own psychoanalysis, and so I was predisposed to see dreams as being a personal possession. Whatever the penumbral associations I might have, they were centred on myself and my past and present life and, as I recall, arose from the sense of deadness of any analysand. Probably like most other analysands, I can still remember the dream that I brought for my first session. Anything more I read on dreams confirmed in me the view that dreams were a gift from the unconscious to be interpreted in personal terms.

Nevertheless, like anyone who has read anthropological texts, I was fascinated by the way that so-called primitive peoples made use of their dreams. The people of the Kalahari desert, written about by Laurens Van der Post (1986), were able to use their dreams to illumine their daily lives and vice versa.

On a trip to Taiwan in 1985 I found through the Maryknoll missionaries that the aborigines of Taiwan told fortunes by means of dreams. In fact, the practice of oneiromancy was common for gauging the future or assessing misfortune in daily life. When tribes went hunting or head-hunting or had a particular religious service, the plan or start was made when the chief, the priest, or the initiator had a good dream. If a hunter had a bad dream after the hunt started, either he was sent home, or the party all rested until someone dreamt a good one. All the key events in life, such as marrying, opening up new land, building a house, were decided by means of oneiromancy. Illness, too, was treated by such means.

The Taiwan aboriginal tribes used their dreams so frequently that they had a taxonomy of good and evil dreams. For example, to dream of the sea was to predict that there would be good crops. To be cut by others or to fall into water was an evil dream. To dream of a freshly cut-off head on the eve of head-hunting was a good dream, as was the dream of having pleasure in sexual intercourse. To dream of having to clean the toilet meant that there would be no game on the next hunt (Ogawa & Asai, 1930).

There is a long history of using dreams in Western civilizations, but this use has tended to be viewed as being superstitious and unscientific. The books for interpreting dreams, of which there have been many over the centuries, were designed for those whose lives were dictated by fate, chance, and hardship. They are still available in various forms and tend to be dictionaries of dream symbolism.

An exception is the work of the Marquis de Saint-Denys, who published in 1867 Les Rêves et les Moyens de les Diriger, which resulted from his study of dreams from the age of 13. His interest was what was later to be called "lucid dreaming", which is the same as the techniques employed by the Tibetan Yogis. Rereading the book recently, I was struck by how ordinary he makes dreaming and how contemporary-sounding is his thinking as he writes about memory and dreams, the association of ideas, how to guide dreams, and transformations and transitions in dreams.

Among all these scattered pieces of information, there were two facts that I held in my mind: the dream that is offered in a group which is beyond the individual dreamer's personal life and which speaks to the life of the group, and the accounts of the use of dreams by primitive peoples. I vaguely felt that there had to be a connection between the two, but it was beyond me.

In addition, I had been very impressed by Jung's experience of having visions about political events, which he describes in the book Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1964). There he recounts that towards the summer of 1913 he felt himself to be in a state of pressure. The source of this pressure he perceived as existing in concrete reality and not coming psychically from himself. He goes on to say:

In October while I was alone on a journey, I was suddenly seized by an overpowering vision: I saw a monstrous flood covering all the northern and low-lying lands between the North Sea and the Alps. When it came up to Switzerland I saw that the mountains grew higher and higher to protect our country. I realized that a frightful catastrophe was in progress. I saw the mighty yellow waves, the floating rubble of civilization, and the drowned bodies of uncounted thousands. Then the whole sea turned to blood. The vision lasted about an hour. I was perplexed and nauseated, and ashamed of my weakness.

[p. 169]

This vision recurred, leading Jung to conclude that he was "menaced by psychosis". Because of this perception, if he was asked by others about the political future of Europe he could only reply that he did not have any thoughts on the matter.

In the spring and summer of 1914, he had three repetitions of a dream in which Europe was covered in ice as a result of Arctic cold. The cold, as he puts it, "descended from out of the cosmos". The end of the dream was of everything flowering in the land, and there was a profusion of grapes which he proceeded to distribute to a large crowd.

In July 1914 he was invited by the British Medical Association to give a lecture in Aberdeen, "On the Importance of the Unconscious in Psychopathology". He says that as a result of this invitation, important in itself, he was prepared for something fateful to happen because it came when he was bombarded by such visions and dreams. As a consequence, his life-work became defined. abroad, where they were kept till she herself left Germany. It was some years later that she came to evaluate her material, when there was a large body of historical facts on the Nazi regime available through documents and research. During the war she published only one paper, called "Dreams under Dictatorship".

On 1st August the world war broke out. Now my task was clear: I had to understand what had happened and to what extent my own experience coincided with mankind in general. Therefore my first obligation was to probe the depths of my own psyche.

[Jung, 1964, p. 170]

If any justification is needed for listening to the messages of one's visions and dreams, it is there in Jung's experiences.

By chance—or serendipity or providence or whatever—the fourth fact presented itself. I read in a footnote in some book a reference to The Third Reich of Dreams by Charlotte Beradt (1968). Before obtaining the book, I felt intuitively that this was the link for which I had been searching. Charlotte Beradt collected 300 dreams by Germans between 1933 and 1939, at which point she had to leave Germany for America. Most of these she took down from people herself, and this was supplemented by a doctor friend who was able to query his patients unobtrusively. These dreams she noted in code and hid in the spines of the books in her library. Subsequently, she was able to send them to different addresses

The events that lie behind the varied dreams she collected were explicit. They sprang "from man's paradoxical existence under a twentieth century totalitarian regime" (Beradt, 1968, p. 15)—that is, Hitler's Germany. Beradt makes the point that these dreams were not the products of unresolved inner personal conflicts either of the present or the past,

... but arose from conflicts into which these people had been driven by a public realm in which half-truths, vague notions, and a combination of fact, rumour, and conjecture had produced a general feeling of uncertainty and unrest. These dreams may deal with disturbed human relations but it was the environment that had disturbed them.... [They] stemmed directly from the political atmosphere in which these people lived. ... They are almost conscious dreams. Their background is clearly visible and what lies on their surface lies also at their roots. There is no facade to conceal associations, and no outside person need provide the link between dream image and reality—this the dreamer himself does.

[pp. 14-15]

In the same book, Bruno Bettelheim writes an essay in which he argues that Beradt is too simplistic in her explanation. He postulates that the dreams "have their roots in the inner conflicts evoked by social realities within the person who dreams them". Be that as it may, Bettelheim concedes that under a system of terror people have to purge even their unconscious mind of any desire to fight back or of any belief that rebellion can succeed, because that is the only way that they can be safe. Any expression of hatred or of resistance endangers one's life. Therefore, Bettelheim argues, we cannot feel safe until we are certain that not even the unconscious can push us towards a dangerous thought or action. This is why Hitler...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• Contents
• ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
• INTRODUCTION
• Prologue
• 1 "Won from the void and formless infinite": experiences of social dreaming
• 2 Dreaming to learn: pathways to rediscovery
• 3 Vision in organizational life
• 4 The use of dreams in systems-centred theory
• 5 The social dreaming matrix
• 6 After Shakespeare—the language of social dreaming
• 7 Thinking aloud: contributions to three dialogues
• 8 Creating new cultures: the contribution of social dreaming
• 9 Social dreaming as a tool of consultancy and action research
• 10 Simultaneity and parallel process: an on-line applied social dreaming matrix
• 11 Social dreaming @ work
• REFERENCES
• INDEX