GROUP RELATIONS - Key Persons
Allan Shafer (1951- ) grew up in South Africa during the Apartheid era, which significantly shaped his experience of authority relations, and of splitting as a cultural norm. His interest in the Group Relations field was then a natural extension of his curiosity about group processes and authority relations.
During his early academic life, he developed a focus on literature and psychology through a BA degree at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. There, he discovered psychoanalysis and decided his future professional path - psychotherapy. Eschewing his other interest, to work in theatre, he obtained an Honours degree in Psychology, a Masters in Clinical Psychology (cum laude), and a Doctorate of Literature and Philosophy at the University of South Africa. During this time, he also taught English literature at secondary-school level.
Ed Shapiro graduated from Yale College in Russian Language and Literature in 1962. After traveling in the Soviet Union and Europe for a year, he received a Master's degree in cultural anthropology from Stanford University. He did fieldwork in Tobago, West Indies, studying the delivery of health care in a primitive society by working in the government clinic and learning from the local witch doctor.
Returning to Boston, Ed graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1968, receiving an International Fellowship to Israel where he studied the epidemiology of suicide in Israeli and Arab villages. After an internship in internal medicine, Ed did a residency in psychiatry at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center. Trained in psychoanalysis at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute, he served as Clinical Associate at the National Institutes of Mental Health and worked with Roger Shapiro studying the relationship of family experience to adolescent personality development. Roger introduced Ed to group relations thinking and he attended residential conferences in the United States and England, joining the Washington Center of the A.K. Rice Institute. During this period, Ed began writing a series of papers on adolescent development in the context of the family, using group relations and psychoanalytic ideas.
Returning to Boston, he founded the Adolescent and Family Treatment and Study Center at McLean Hospital and joined the faculty at Harvard. While serving on the staff of group relations conferences in Washington and elsewhere, Ed first met Wesley Carr, then a young canon at Chelmsford Cathedral (subsequently Dean of Westminster). This began a long working relationship, culminating in their jointly authored book, Lost in Familiar Places (Yale, 1991). Wesley and Ed consulted to each other in their various settings and did several pieces of joint consultancy to law firms and businesses.
In 1982, Margaret Rioch invited Ed to help found the Boston Center of the A. K. Rice Institute, which began to do conferences in the Tavistock tradition. Ed felt strongly that the future of both psychoanalysis and group relations work was not in formal psychoanalytic treatment or increasing numbers of group relations conferences, but in the application of these powerful ideas to the larger society. Serving on staff and directing over 30 conferences between 1980 and 2006, Ed increasingly developed his thinking, applying his ideas in over fifty papers and two books to the study of family, group, organizational and societal dynamics. He served as Director of the AKRI National Conference for two years.
In 1991, Ed was appointed Medical Director/CEO of the Austen Riggs Center, a small psychoanalytically oriented psychiatric hospital and residential treatment center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. He helped develop the clinical program and the institution in a changing health care environment and founded Riggs' Erik Erikson Institute for Education and Research. In addition to clinical research and education, the Institute has engaged in application of these ideas through college counseling center conferences, creativity conferences, a study of relations between Islam and the West and consultation to human service agencies. Ed and others at Riggs described this work in a series of papers and books.
Ed is married to Donna Elmendorf and has two sons and a stepson.
Shapiro, ER. The maturation of American identity: a study of the elections of 1996 and 2000 and the war against terrorism. Organizational and Social Dynamics, 3(1), 121-133, 2003.
Shapiro, ER. The effect of social changes on the doctor-patient relationship. Organizational and Social Dynamics 2:1-11, 2001.
Eric Miller also helped to establish other institutions, including group relations organisations, in America, Finland, Denmark, Israel, India, South Africa and elsewhere. Eric was a co-founder of OPUS (an Organisation for Promoting Understanding in Society), a small educational charity which helps individuals recognise their relatedness to society.
He continued to be a member of staff of the Tavistock Institute until his death, aged 78, on 5 April 2002. Eric's wife, Olya Khaleelee, with whom he often collaborated, directs the Tavistock group relations conference Leaders in Changing Organisations. Eric also had one daughter, Sue, from a previous marriage.
Gordon Lawrence was schooled at Robert Gordon's College, and Aberdeen University; later educated at Leicester, Edinburgh and Bergische (Wuppertal) Universities, where he gained his doctorate. After a career in the Army (captain with a short service commission), a period in industrial banking, and teaching in further education, he ended as senior lecturer in sociology at Bede College, then of Durham University.
He attended his first Tavistock conferences in 1975 and '79, both directed by Kenneth Rice. The conferences were an epiphany for him - never having encountered such a truthful methodology for discerning the unconscious in systems. But gradually becoming aware, in time, that it is such a powerful methodology that individuals on conference staffs, inadvertently, have to sabotage its scientific purity through narcissism and ambitions for 'stardom'.
In 1971 he joined the Tavistock Institute, from about 300 applicants, as a project officer, after a War Office Selection Board type selection, originally devised by Wilfred Bion. Two were selected, the other being Penny Jones. It was the last time for such a selection process.
He underwent advanced training in groups with Pierre Turquet and Isabel E. P. Menzies. He counts himself fortunate to have had Pierre Turquet and Eric Miller as mentors; the former in groups, the latter in social science, as he gained competitive grants from the Leverhulme Trust, the Department of Employment, The European Foundation in Dublin, and in the Quality of Working Life as a research fellow; as well as consultancy assignments. He was appointed to 'consultant' two years after joining.
Then, it was exciting to be in group relations with Turquet being a brilliant intellectual adventurer, Menzies perspicacious, and Miller as the surest of directors; steadfast in his belief that authority came from the ability of individuals to manage the boundary between their inner world and the realities of their external environment. (Before Lawrence joined the Tavistock, Miller memorably had said to him at a conference at Manchester Business School, 'All authority is there to be examined!') During the '70s and into the '80s, Lawrence represented annually for a decade the Group Relations Training Programme (GRTP) in India for Gouranga Chattopadhyay, often sponsored by the British Council, and in Germany, France, Canada and Ireland.
When Turquet was accidentally killed in 1975, Miller invited Lawrence to be joint-director of the GRTP, which he did till 1982. They ran the Leicester Conferences with whoever was director representing the 'Establishment', the associate being the 'mystic/genius' 1. It was a partnership that worked, e.g. the innovation that separated 'consultants' from 'management' in the Institutional Event; the introduction of the Very Small Group; Role Analysis within the Application Event; and the Politics of Relatedness to explore Turquet's concept of 'management in the mind'.
Lawrence was sedulous in recruiting new staff members for the GRTP, e.g. Brendan Duddy, whom he mentored from the mid '70s while Duddy forged a mediatory role as a peace-maker between the IRA and the British Government. They still work together.
In 1977 Lawrence took conferences to France, having contacted Georges Gueron, then President of The International Foundation for Social Innovation. There he devised the Praxis Event, an attempt to devise a contrapuntal event within the frame of the conference - to make a potentially creative space outside of the task-orientated activities of the conference (Lawrence, 1985: 306-329). This was taken to Leicester Conferences in the late '70s and early '80s.
Lawrence, W.G. (2005). The infinite in business: the transformation of thinking. Socio-Analysis, Vol. 7.
Emeritus Professor Gouranga P. Chattopadhyay, a scion of the families of Raja Rammohun Roy, Pundit Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar and Prince Dwarkanath Tagore, was born in his ancestral home at 2 Palm Place, Kolkata. All the families living in Palm Place in those days were related. The life style of that period amidst a vast joint and extended family, with regular literary and musical evenings, indoor and outdoor games galore, vanished forever during the communal riots of 1946 engineered by the British colonial government and its puppet Bengal (also Punjab) ministry to justify the division of the empire in to India and Pakistan. All the families had to leave the neighbourhood and their houses were looted and vandalised. Only the Chattopadhyays returned to 2 Palm Place in 1948. By then, inspired by his freedom fighter father, Gouranga had entered student politics. It led to his getting beaten up by British police in the early forties and by Indian police in the early fifties and spending two short terms in jail. Gouranga graduated with a first class honours degree in social anthropology from Calcutta University and followed it up with a first class Master's degree as a Jubilee Scholar of the same university. After being an employee of the Anthropological Survey of India for two years, pursuing research as a Senior Research Scholar of Calcutta University he received a doctoral degree in anthropology. Gouranga then switched over to sociology, taught in the Delhi School of Economics and then did a stint with the Calcutta Metropolitan Planning Organisation as a Senior Community Organiser. There he met Colin Rosser, a Welsh social anthropologist working for the Ford Foundation, who persuaded Gouranga to go for the Leverhulme Fellowship that resulted in his spending a little over one year with the Social Administration Department of University College of Swansea. Thereafter he reinvented himself as a behavioural scientist and joined the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta. He took leave of absence from IIMC for two years twice and taught at the Manchester Business School and worked as a UNDP/CFTC Advisor in East Africa. Eric Miller happened to be a professorial fellow at the Manchester Business School at that time and he invited Gouranga to be on the staff of a working conference for students, under the impression that Gouranga had the requisite skills. For Gouranga it was an invitation to make yet another foray into the unknown. The result was Gouranga's fights with all his staff colleagues till at last the penny dropped for him and he applied to be a member of the "A" Conference at Leicester in 1971. Also they discovered that had the authorities not put an end to the Calico Mills project in Ahmedabad, Eric and Gouranga would have become colleagues there during the late nineteen fifties! After Leicester 1971 he was on the staff of several working conferences directed by John Allaway and one directed by Pat Beahan. As an external consultant on the long-term change project for the Carrington Works of Shell International, led by Michael Armstrong, part of which was a series of working conferences, he had the opportunity to work with John Bazalgette and Jean Hutton. Back in India he directed working conferences sponsored by the IIMC from 1973 to 1992. After retiring from the IIMC (1991) at the statutory age of 60 he continues consulting and counselling work by creating Chattopadhyay Associates. He also both directs, and works as staff of, working conferences sponsored mainly by industry, several NGOs and two business schools. From 1996 to 1998 he was a visiting professor of management with Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne. In his present incarnation he calls himself a socio-analyst. He has worked as a teacher and consultant in five continents and contributed to the group relations movement in Australia, Holland, UK and Trinidad. He is a Karma Sannyasin (Tattwaratna) of Bihar School of Yoga initiated by Paramahamsa Niranjanananda Saraswati. He has no religion. His hobbies include translating Bengali literature into English and making walking sticks.
Job Titles:
- Organizational Researcher and Consultant
James Krantz is an organizational researcher and consultant practicing in New York City. His work is grounded in the socio-technical perspective. Among the central principals that inform his practice and applied research are that: organizations are shaped jointly by social and technical forces; they exist in increasingly dynamic and unstable environments; clarity of purpose is required to produce high performing systems; authority in contemporary organizations is continuously negotiated, and that adapting to emerging conditions requires people in organizations to be able to learn from experience.
Jim grew up in Nebraska, leaving the Midwest to study at Wesleyan University where he majored in Philosophy and Economics. There he was first introduced to systems theory, which became a lifelong interest and basic foundation of his thinking. Interrupting his University studies in 1971, Jim worked with the New York Police Department in its effort to address police corruption from a systemic standpoint. His first exposure to the "group relations approach" was in 1975 upon joining the staff of a psychiatric hospital whose management relied upon the systems psychodynamic approach. As a result he started attending conferences and has since then participated in many throughout the world, taking his first directorship in 1989.
In 1979 Jim joined the staff of the Wharton Center for Applied Research and also enrolled in the Wharton's Systems Sciences Ph.D. program, where he worked closely with Eric Trist and other action researchers trying to explore the interpenetration of different levels of social, psychological and organizational reality. In 1982 - 83 he was at the Tavistock Institute where he had further opportunities to deepen his understanding of systems psychodynamics through his work with Eric Miller, Isabel Menzies Lyth and other staff of the Institute and Clinic.
From 1984, when he received his doctorate, through 1995, Jim's work was based primarily in University settings -- the Wharton School, where he was also Assistant Director of the Wharton Leadership Program and Yale University's School of Organization and Management. Since 1995, when he left University employment, Jim has continued to teach as faculty in numerous programs and Institutes, including the McKinsey Center for Asian Leadership, INSEAD, the William Alanson White Institute, OCD Israel, RMIT University in Melbourne, and the Universidad de Santiago in Chile.
At this point, Jim works primarily as a consultant, where he is a Principal of the Nautilus Consulting Group LLC, a firm that assists organizations confronting the need for significant change. His engagements include working with organizational and role design; advising executives and teams; strategy implementation; problem diagnosis and intervention; supporting merger integration; and bringing about greater alignment of subsystems to support overall effectiveness. He also serves as President of the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations, is also a Fellow of the A.K. Rice Institute, and a member of OPUS.
Mannie Sher consults in the social and political domains, in organisational development and change and in the international group relations network.
Mannie has consulted variously to health, education and social services, the construction industry, vehicle manufacture, social care enterprises, financial institutions, prisons, constabularies, art and faith organisations in the United Kingdom, Australia, Israel, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the USA.
In his group relations role, Mannie has directed the Tavistock Institute's flagship group relations conferences: Authority, Leadership and Organisation: the Leicester conference, and other group relations conferences for specific client organisations, like local government. He liaises and supports fledgling and established group relations organisations in the UK and other countries.
Mannie has held senior management positions in local NHS and voluntary organisations from where many successful consultancy government assignments have been conducted. His expertise in these fields has led colleague consultants to seek his supervision and he runs seminars, workshops and conferences for organisational development consultants and leaders from business, industry, commerce, government, international agencies, universities, the armed forces, the health, social and education services, the arts etc.
Mannie's approach to organisational consultancy and group relations work focuses on producing change through re-defining organisational aims, creating inter-dependent systems of work, and introducing efficient operational strategies. His approach is based upon principles derived from "Tavistock" open systems socio-technical methodologies which examines political influences and relatedness of new technologies, evaluates group belief systems; inter-and intra-group conflict; motivation and productivity; individual, group and organisational identity; role, task, boundary and authority and the exercise of effective leadership. Consultancy to individuals and to small and large organisations focuses on "culture", resistance to change, designing and implementing new strategies, practices and technologies. The thrust of his consultancy is to strengthen leadership and facilitate creative thinking and decision-making among leaders, front-line managers and staff.
Olya Khaleelee trained as a social scientist and began her career at the London Business School in the field of organisational behaviour research. She moved into organisational consultancy with BOC focusing on acquisitions and mergers and later became the manager of an internal consulting resource group. It was while engaged in this work that Olya met and worked with Eric Miller in his role as external consultant. This was the start of an enduring working relationship and, later, a happy marriage which sadly came to an end with Eric's death in April 2002.
During the late 1970s, Olya trained as a psychotherapist and developed a private practice working with adults. She was Chairwoman of the Council of the London Centre for Psychotherapy, her training organisation, from 1995-7.
In 1980 she became self employed and began to develop a portfolio of roles. This included being Director of OPUS: an Organisation for Promoting the Understanding of Society, of which Eric Miller had been a founder member and continued to support strongly. She led OPUS from 1980-95, bringing together a group of colleagues interested in the idea of unconscious processes operating at the societal level. With them, she set up Listening Posts focussing on the role of the citizen. She and Eric wrote and published quarterly Bulletins on the ensuing discussions.
Her interest in group dynamics and group relations continued and Olya was regularly on the staff of the ‘Leicester Conference', a two-week residential experiential learning event, sponsored by the Tavistock Institute. The focus was on the themes of authority, leadership and organisation. In 1995 she was the first female director of this conference and she successfully directed it for a second time in 1998. During this period she was appointed Programme Adviser to the Group Relations Training Programme of the Tavistock Institute. She has regularly taken up staff roles on similar conferences in Germany and Israel and was the first director of a new venture sponsored in Autumn 2004 by the Institute, a six day conference on the theme of ‘Leaders in Changing Organisations'.
Her other roles have included teaching and designing workshops, working as a consultant in the field of organisational development, as a partner in The Coaching Practice, which offers executive coaching to a range of commercial and voluntary organisations and as a corporate psychologist carrying out assessment of senior managers with Pintab Associates for the purposes of selection, development and career strategy. She embodies a broad range of training and experience with individuals, groups and organisations, takes a systemic approach and operates in most business sectors.
Ross A. Lazar, psychoanalytic psychotherapist, consultant, coach and supervisor, was born and grew up in New Jersey, USA. He graduated from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, Germany with an Honours B.A. in the History of Art in 1967, and then won a graduate scholarship from the DAAD (Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst) to return to Germany for graduate work. In 1970 he completed a Master's degree in Early Childhood and Special Education (M.A.T. = Master of Arts in Teaching) at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education. Returning to Europe, he worked first as a Visiting Lecturer in the History of Art at Leeds University and Leeds Polytechnic, then as a teacher in a school for maladjusted children in the East End of London. Subsequently, he trained as a child psychotherapist at the Tavistock Institute and Tavistock Clinic. During this clinical training he took part in many Group Relations Training activities. He completed his official Tavistock training in 1978.
Returning to Munich, Ross then became the Head Child Psychotherapist at the Biederstein Centre for Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy, an outpatient community mental health service of the Department of Medical Psychology, Technical University of Munich, Faculty of Medicine. Since 1982 he has been working in Munich in private practice as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist with children, adolescents and adults, as well as with couples and families.
As a teacher, supervisor and mentor, he travels regularly to various centres of psychoanalytic training as well as teacher education and other training programmes in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Sweden and Italy. One of his main activities over the past years has been the initiation and development of Infant Observation Seminars along the lines of the Tavistock Clinic's Observation Course Curriculum, and as originally conceived by Dr. Esther Bick. In the context of this observational work, he serves on the International Editorial Board of the Journal of Infant Observation and Its Applications. Of late he has extended this interest to include the observation of organisations and its relevance to the practice of organisational consultancy and action research. Currently he is involved in a multi-dimensional research project whose aim is to study and improve the quality of life of senior citizens suffering from Alzheimer's Disease, and which is being financed and executed by the University of Vienna. In the past few years he has also had the privilege of serving several times as guest professor both at the University of Vienna and the Alpen-Adria University in Klagenfurt.
His practice of clinical team supervision, coaching and consultation to hospitals, clinics, social services agencies, teaching establishments, architecture and law practices, local government bodies and industry is widespread. And, starting in 1980, he was one of the main initiators and founder member of both the Wilfred R. Bion Forum for the Furtherance of Psychoanalysis and of MundO (which in German stands for "Menschen und Organisationen"), a working group dedicated to the furtherance of learning from experience in people and their organisations.
He has published many and various articles in German and English on topics such as infant observation according to the Tavistock-Bick method, (including one on the observation of a premature infant, published in English in the Journal of Infant Observation with the title Learning to Be), as well as on the clinical practice of child analysis along the lines of Bion's "Container-Contained" theory. Also he has applied both this model and Bion's theories of group dynamics to the consulting and supervising situation. In addition, he has published a key encyclopaedia article in German on the historical and philosophical roots of Bion's model "Container-Contained", a paper on the experience of psychoanalytical work with emigrant patients and a historical-theoretical exposition of the Kleinian roots of Bion's work and ideas.
Ross has been married to his wife, Gisela, since 1969. They have two grown children.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Creative and Sustainable Organisation at RMIT University
Susan Long (Ph.D.) is Professor of Creative and Sustainable Organisation at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia where she leads a research concentration in ‘Sustainable Organisation', teaches in postgraduate programs in Organisational Dynamics and supervises research candidates. Originally trained as a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist, she has worked as a group and organisation consultant and researcher for over twenty-five years. As an organisational consultant she works with organisational change, executive coaching, role analysis, team development and management training. She has worked with government departments, hospitals, prisons, professional associations, financial institutions, insurance companies, airlines and the travel industry and a wide range of service industries.
She is Past President of Group Relations Australia, a past President of the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organisations (ISPSO), past Executive member of the Australian and New Zealand Academy of Management and past member of the clinical college of the APsS. Her research interests involve participatory action research projects in industry, government organizations, health, education and correctional services and have attracted grants through the Australian research Council and industry.
Professor Long also has extensive experience within the field of group relations and has directed several working conferences. She has been a staff member of group relations conferences in Australia, the USA (Bridger Workshop), UK (Leicester), the Netherlands and in Israel; is on the editorial board of two international journals and is editor of Socio-Analysis. Her publications include five books and many articles in collections and scholarly journals.