IMAGINARY GROUPS

            This book offers a perspective for understanding groups. It has one of its origins in my first experience in a “Tavy” group in 1979. A “Tavy” group, or a group in the “Tavistock” tradition, is a group process group aimed at examining unconscious processes in groups and institutions. It focuses on group-as-a-whole dynamics. Decades later, that experience is still fresh and baffling. For many years, I attempted to come to grips with the “Tavy” way of understanding groups.

            For me, progress was slow—years as a member, then as an administrator, finally as a small and then a large group consultant. Piece by piece, order started to emerge. Given the nature of this work, such order is to be regarded with some suspicion, for too much is lost if our understanding of groups becomes formulaic. However, a perspective, at least, may help those who are exploring or are about to explore this vital and ever more important domain. It is my hope that this book is useful in this flexible, living way, and useful to people who work with groups in many modalities: therapeutic, organizational, educational, and political.

            The ideas presented here are based on the following postulates:

a)                  Groups have an unconscious life;

b)                  this unconscious serves as a matrix into which part selfobjects are projected;

c)                  these part selfobjects themselves form groups in the unconscious: imaginary groups;

d)                  these imaginary groups have their own internal dynamics and interact with one another;

e)                  imaginary groups interact also with the manifest conscious group and its task, affecting group dynamics and outcomes;

f)                   these imaginary groups are hierarchically arranged and can be classified according to the scheme outlined in the Theory of Positive Disintegration;

g)                  many group processes can be very profitably viewed from a Lacanian perspective.

            Accordingly, the book is arranged in three sections. Section I deals with theory; examining unconscious processes in groups, imaginary groups, Dabrowskian and Lacanian perspectives on groups. Section II offers ideas on group process with a view to method. Section III gives descriptions and rationales for specific applications for this approach to groups.