Group analysis is based in psychoanalysis, gestalt psychology and an early systems theory. It assumes that people are substantially affected by their unconscious process and that many individuals can develop an enhanced level of personal and social functioning through analysis by bringing that which is unconscious into consciousness. Group analysts use the traditional techniques of free association, dream analysis and transference, although these are modified for the group situation (Foulkes and Anthony, 1967.).

Foulkes's work attracted a number of supporters; the Group Analytic Society (GAS) was established in 1952 and the Institute of Group Analysis (IGA) was formed in 1971 to take responsibility for the growing demand for training. The Society encourages research; it holds regular scientific meetings and publishes the journal "Group Analysis". The Group Analytic Society and associated societies have organized programs on such topics as "Leadership", "Consultancy in Organizations" and "Gender in Groups". The Group Analytic Society's introductory course is open to people with a non-clinical background. Indeed, the organizers welcome people who do not come from the professions of medicine, nursing or social work because group analysts have always had an interest in the applications of group analysis in other fields.

So far group analysis has made only a limited contribution to the psychoanalytic study of organizations.Yet, psychoanalytic theory has addressed organizations for over 40 years (see for example Jaques, E., 1955, Levinson, H., 1972, and Menzies, I., 1960). The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, a Hampstead neighbour of the Institute of Group Analysis, was a pioneer in this field (Trist, E. and Murray, H., 1990). More recently there has been a resurgence of interest with major anthologies from Kets de Vries, M. (1991) and Hirschhorn, L. and Barnett, C. (1993) and several accessible introductory texts on the psychodynamics of organizations (Hirschhorn, L., 1988, de Board, R., 1977 and Diamond, M.A.,1993). In Gould’s (1991) view there is a growing and impressive literature on the psychodynamics of organizations. Yet the impact of psychoanalysis on organizational life has been limited. Menzies Lyth (1991) writes of her frustration at people’s resistance to psychoanalytic research and consultancy; top management in organizations has been slow to adopt the insights of theorist and consultants.

In addressing this issue Gould (1991) suggests that what would make a difference would be to move beyond observation and theorizing to develop techniques and methods based on the ideas. He offers several factors which inhibit this development. Psychoanalytic organizational psychology is still its early stages; there are few consultants who have the clinical preparation to deal with the critical technical problems that arise in practice; psychoanalysis is often seen as having a narrow interpersonal (diadic and triadic) basis; and the organizational context in which theory and technique have to develop is so much more turbulent than the consulting room.

Group analysis with its extensive clinical experience of applying psychoanalytic theory to groups, can meet some of the difficulties noted by Gould. Group analysts have had a fertile context in the small therapeutic group to develop their theories and techniques. This has been the essential praxis which enabled group analysis to establish itself in the field of psychiatry. We must acknowledge at once, however, that what we know about working with therapeutic groups does not translate directly to work groups (Stock Whitaker, 1992) Groups in organizations are more formal and impersonal than therapeutic group, and this must be taken into account in developing strategies for working with the emotions of management learning.

From a group analytic perspective, to deny the emotional qualities of social encounters is destructive to ourselves and to our relationships. We must be aware of our feelings, as well as those of others, to understand when it is appropriate to give expression to them, when to work on them and when to contain them. When we make an important public presentation it is reasonable to contain our anxiety from the audience. However, it is entirely appropriate to talk about this anxiety in some other context, in order to understand its origins and meanings and develop ways of coping with this distressing feeling. If I become angry with a colleague in a committee meeting, it may be expedient to exercise control at the time. Later, however, for our long-term working relationship, it may well be necessary to discuss and resolve my feelings about the issue with the colleague involved.

Yet in most organizational life we are inclined to overlook the need for emotional sensitivity, and to underestimate the importance of emotions themselves. Stephen Fineman (1993) in "Emotions in Organizations", observes that the emotional dimension of organizations has been largely ignored in the research literature. He suggests that it is as if the researchers into organizations have been incorporated into the myth of an ideal bureaucracy as one staffed by people with their emotions carefully buttoned down. Max Weber’s (1958) early characterisation of bureaucracy claimed the control of emotions as a strength, "the more perfectly [the organization] is ‘dehumanized’, the more completely it succeeds in elimination from official business love, hatred, and all purely personal, irrational, and emotional elements." (1958: 215-6). Employees’ emotions are restricted in organizations, "their emotions virtually banned and their relations to their fellow human beings substantially stripped of spontaneity, affection, and passion." (Gabriel, 1991: 324).

Because they go unacknowledged does not mean that feelings do not exist. An important contribution of psychoanalysis has been to demonstrate that feelings which are denied and suppressed have a way of leaking out in destructive ways, both inside and outside the organization. The failure of managers to appreciate this dimension of organizational life has been described by Menzies (1960) who revealed how organizations evolve working procedures to cope with anxiety which are analogous to the defense mechanisms of an individual. As with individuals so to with organizations, these defenses in practice often create more problems than they protect us from. In many groups, anger which is denied a legitimate channel for expression turns into scapegoating. At other times, unwanted feeling can be projected unconsciously on to other or organizations, so that another department may come to be regarded as an enemy rather than a friend. Hirschhorn (1988) has identified "splitting", a primitive defense mechanism, as a root of much of that is destructive in organizations. Individuals and groups get caught up in disowning those parts of themselves that they cannot accept, projecting them on to other individuals and groups. They then proceed to relate to the other as if all this "badness" was actual rather than their fantasy.

"... attempts to honour feelings that are generated in sets, while they remain tacked on to the end of the set meeting provide little support for managers to bring together the emotional and intellectual realities of action learning." (1993: 207)

They point out that failure to provide emotional support is not necessarily the case for the action learning model. However, the model is not explicit about this, and Revans gives only rudimentary guidance to trainers on the role of emotions in relation to the learning set.

Vince and Martin propose a model for the psychological processes of management learning to complement the action learning model. They suggest that a learning approach that moves away from dependency on a teacher and shifts the responsibility for learning to the learner creates anxiety. On some occasions, our response is to accept the anxiety and take the risk of learning with the associated struggle that this entails (See Figure 1, showing the cycle of emotions promoting learning). On other occasions, we defend ourselves against learning and consequently fail to develop new insights (Figure 2 - The cycle of emotions discouraging learning).

The scene the managers are invited to enact involves an employee asking her manager for a day off to attend a lunch-time birthday party with a group of friends. The subordinate believes that this is a legitimate request, under the organization's "personal days" policy. Her manager does not think the reason justifies a day off. She shows the relevant section of the personnel policy manual to her subordinate, suggesting that she take a day's holiday or leave without pay. The subordinate appears to accept the refusal, but the next day does not show up for work. She does not agree with the policy, and feels that she works hard enough to justify a day off.

The participants who act the part of the manager attempt various strategies to deal with this situation. Invariably they feel angry and manipulated by the subordinate; their reactions range from wanting to punish her, to turning a blind eye to her disobedience, to attempting to work the issue through. Dealing with incidents similar to this is a routine feature of managerial work, and the role play produces intense discussion. Yet, at the same time, the role play often produces strong feelings in the here-and-now of the classroom. It is quite common for some participants to feel angry with Hirschhorn (ostensibly because he will not tell them what the right answer is in this situation). Hirschhorn suggests that the course members' anger arises from feelings of persecution induced by the role play. The role play makes them feel frustrated and powerless, evoking the superego voices; voices we all acquire early in childhood which scold us for being worthless and helpless (Hirschhorn, 1988:113). The course members are unable to bear the feelings of persecution and project the source of the persecution on to Hirschhorn, whom, in turn, they attack.

It may seem prudent to avoid using volatile role-plays like this, opting for less disturbing alternatives. However, the dynamics unleashed by this role-play, both in the fantasy of the scene and the reality of the classroom, are vital for management development. Can management trainers put their head in the sand about issues which generate such powerful emotions, opting for sanitized alternatives? With proper training and preparation, they can introduce emotionally laden issues and help the learner to work them through to a satisfactory conclusion.

However, there is no denying that emotional dynamics can prove hard to control or guide. A trainer in North Carolina described to me a session on communication skills (part of an induction course for new employees) that she had conducted in an electronics company. The participants were a mixed group in terms of race, gender, age and status. She had encouraged participants to list the various ways that we communicate verbally and non-verbally. Her own brief stipulated that she should cover the ways people we communicate through our appearance, including aspects related race, gender, and dress. As the group had not offered any observations in this category the trainer asked them to think about it. She then offered the suggestion that the skin colour is a communication. The group became upset; a black woman was angry, saying that how she looked should not matter to anybody. The trainer attempted to talk it through, but the woman was so angry that she was quite incapable of discussing the issues of perception, attitudes and stereotyping that the trainer wanted to discuss. None of the other participants were willing to join in and work on the subject; it clearly did not feel a safe topic in the group. The trainer had to extricate herself and the group from the mess as best she could. Unfortunately, because this was her only meeting with this group, there was no possibility of working through the painful feelings.

The group members had unconsciously colluded in defending against anxiety-provoking issues by attacking the group leader, in a way reminiscent of Wilfred Bion’s (1961) fight/flight mode of psychological defence in groups. This case is a good illustration of the Vince and Martin model (Figure 2). The group coped with the anxiety of having to address uncomfortable issues of race and gender by blaming the trainer for her insensitivity. Sessions such as this are the antithesis of learning; the participants' understanding of their reality is distorted and frozen in psychological defenses. Emotions then are a very real and important part of management training and trainers must understand them in order to work effectively with them.

In my own work as a trainer, there are times when I become aware of a group atmosphere which inhibiting the teaching/learning process. On one occasion, I was teaching a course on group behaviour to young National Health Service administrators. I had met the group for first time the previous day, and had been happy with the work we had done together. Yet, the session was very different; the group members seemed distracted and almost sullen. I was carrying through my program, but it felt like walking through treacle; I was finding myself feeling a mixture of anxiety and anger. I could have blamed myself for what was happening - the course was not going well because I was having an ‘off day’ - but that did not fit, and I knew that I was picking up feelings which belonged to the group as a whole. As I was teaching leadership and group process, I thought that not to acknowledge that something was up would undermine my purpose. What I did was to make a group process intervention. I knew from the group atmosphere and flatness of the participants’ responses that there was an unconscious issue interfering with the work of the group. My thought was that it was best to encourage the group to articulate the feelings that were incapacitating them. In this instance, I initiated the discussion by sharing my own feelings about what was happening in the group; ‘I am finding it difficult to talk with you. I wonder what might be happening in the group?’ The group members were silent at first, and I felt willing to let them adjust to my re-framing the situation. Then one member responded and gradually we were able to have a discussion; it emerged that in the bar the previous evening a serious row had developed and was still going on. The opportunity to talk about it, although it did not resolve the issue, at least freed enough of the group's attention for the remainder of the session.

On this occasion my intervention was evidently appropriate because it achieved the intended outcome; on another occasion I might not succeed in overcoming the group’s defences. In groups, when an issue arises which distracts the members from the group’s task, a first step towards resolving the issue is to enlist the members’ resources by directing the group’s attention to the dynamic. Sometimes the group will continue to defend itself, but an experienced group worker has a range of types of interventions - including doing nothing - that can be used to help the group move forward ((2)).

As we noted earlier, relatively little from psychoanalytic theories for understanding emotions in human relationships has entered the world of management. It is a remarkable compartmentalization of knowledge that a significant theoretical discourse of human relationships, valued by one group of professionals, is denied by another group. Why then have psychoanalytic theories failed to become part of the discourse of managers? A social phenomenological perspective (Berger & Luckmann 1971) would suggest that psychoanalytic knowledge does not fit into the ‘overarching system of belief’ of industrial and commercial organizations, and is therefore excluded by a managerial elite. In Thomas Kuhn’s (1962) language we say that psychoanalytic theories, i. e. those theories that are capable of addressing emotions in organizations, are drawn from a paradigm which is fundamentally different from the prevailing paradigm of management. The basic assumptions with which managers understand social reality are incompatible with theories which attribute significance to emotions, consequently, the theories are ignored in the managers’ organizational life world. By contrast, in dealing with their personal problems and relations these same managers may be using concepts drawn from psychoanalysis. Clearly there are managers who recognise the emotional dimension of organizational relationships, but the dominant paradigm (including its variants in hospitals and social service departments) is at odds with sophisticated theories of emotions.

Management trainers wanting to work with emotions must appreciate the institutional forces which are working against the integration of the emotional and cognitive dimensions of management learning. In addition to studying psychodynamic theories to develop their ability to work with emotions, they must appreciate their role in introducing ‘new’ knowledge into organizations, and must develop long term strategies to achieve their goals.

If this seems a daunting task, they can take encouragement from the experience of group analysts. Several decades ago, psychiatric services were by no means universally receptive to psychotherapy. Although group analysis is now widely practiced in the United Kingdom, efforts to bring about change in hospitals and social service departments with no tradition of group therapy continue. Group analysts working in such bureaucracies have met similar resistance to their work as management trainers meet when they work to incorporate emotional experience into management learning.

A training officer in local government told me about the problem of getting self-development groups for managers to work in her organization. Although the idea of these groups had seemed attractive to the training department, they were experiencing difficulties in establishing healthy groups. They found that managers dropped out and groups collapsed.

Pedlar's (1986) study of self-development groups throws light on this issue. Management self development assumes that learning involves the whole person and not just the person in his or her role as a manager. The researchers discovered that managers in self development groups did not only discuss work related matters but also worked on issues in their private lives; evidently an important value of these groups was their capacity to give emotional support to their members. Pedlar reviewed the dynamics of such groups from their beginning to their ending. He studied crises periods, when the feelings of group members intensified and threatened to overwhelm the group. Some of the groups were more successful than others in dealing with such crises, and in most cases such groups had been assisted by an experienced facilitator.

From a group analytic perspective, it is probable that groups fail if they are not able to contain the strong currents of feeling which are an inevitable part of group life, but intensify during crises. As we know, a group does not come into being merely because a number of individuals have been brought together in the same room. It takes time for relationships between members to grow and for the members to develop a sense of group identity. Forming groups is a primary issue for group analysts - unless they get a group to form and function as a group, they cannot use their expertise to help their clients. The group analyst's task at the beginning of a group is to enable the members to develop relationships so that they become attached to each other and to the group as a whole. They are concerned to contain the high levels of anxiety that members experience in the early sessions. They work to establish strong group boundaries which help to contain this anxiety (Zinkin 1989). The group analyst gives careful attention to the selection and preparation of individuals for the group. If people are brought together without attending to these factors, we can predict that there will be early dropouts3 which, in turn, complicate the dynamics of any group. The outcome may well be the collapse of a group. A group-analytic training can help the management trainer with the understanding and skills needed to develop effective work groups more reliably.

The philosophy of self development might imply that self development groups should not need an expert group facilitator. In this instance, however, self directedness and expertise are not contradictory - helping a group to develop autonomy is part of a group worker's skill.

The group analytic training model (Figure 4) used in training group analysts adds a further element, the experiential group.

There is a limit to how far individuals can take psychoanalytic theories without having the direct experience of their own analysis. In many instances, the absence of the direct experience makes the concepts themselves unintelligible or devoid of practical implications. By contrast, the direct experience of personal or group analysis colours and qualifies in a radical way what the individual can gain through reading and study. For this reason , Kets de Vries (1991) has called for more clinical training of consultants, in order for the psychodynamic study of organizations to have more practical impact on organizations. Management teachers or consultants who want to work with psychoanalytic theory of organizations will be greatly helped through entering a training analysis or by joining a group analytic experiential group.

Analysis, whether in the traditional dyadic setting or in a group setting, is a demanding personal journey. Although it can be a remarkable experience to work with unconscious processes through free association, transference and dreams, facing aspect of ourselves which have been repressed involves, at times, considerable psychological stress. The process is a difficult one as we struggle with fears of facing aspects of ourselves that we would rather not know, and the hopes that are raised by a sense that our quality of life will be significantly enhanced through the experience. The therapists’ expertise, their interpretations and other interventions are important in this struggle, the success of which depends on the sense of psychological safety and trust they are able to establish with us. Times of stress are balanced by times when we enjoy what we learn about being human. This process is an important element in training a consultant to work psychodynamically with organisations. The concepts of psychoanalysis and group analysis assume deeper meanings when they grounded in the consultant’s own experience. For example, consultants will be more sensitive to working with the resistance of their clients when they have experienced their own resistance to change.

Experiential groups are facilitated on the basis of a psychodynamic theory of groups. Participants experience the experiential group at first hand, observing their facilitator's interventions and the effects of those interventions. They gain additional understanding from the related theoretical seminars. They conduct their own groups and use their experience as case material in coaching sessions. This integrated approach helps trainees to develop a greater awareness and confidence with the range of emotion in themselves and others, and this helps them to separate their own feelings from those of others. They learn how group moods can shift and change, and how individuals can give expression to the mood of the group. They develop direct experience and knowledge of unconscious group phenomena. They gain understanding of the dynamic processes underlying individuals' relationships to the group and how they become attached to the group. They can learn to facilitate the process of group formation and to intervene to modify destructive developments.

An important aspect of this training model is that each of the elements requires certain conditions to support the learning tasks involved in that particular element of the program. With regard to practice, the assignments chosen by or for the trainees should not be so demanding that they are overwhelming, nor so lacking in challenge that they offer little opportunity for learning. In relation to the experiential group, the group facilitator works to develop the conditions of psychological security which enable the participants to risk being open to their emotional and unconscious experience.

We do experience in our group relations - in our families, our communities and at work - love and hate, envy and jealousy, grief and loss, anxiety and fear. These feelings have a profound effect on our behaviour and attitudes. Much as some organizations may wish that people kept all this for their private lives, we do not, because we are human. Psychoanalysis attributes significance to feelings in human relationships and helps us to learn about their meaning and to work with them in groups in a constructive rather than destructive way.

Group analysis has developed effective programs for training group analysts and offers an effective, accessible and economic training for those management trainers and consultants who want to develop a psychodynamic approach to their work.