Supporting co-sponsor: The Fielding Graduate Institute
This conference has been approved for 32 hours of CEU for psychologists through The Fielding Graduate Institute.
The conference will begin promptly at 2:00 p.m. on Friday, August 6 and end at 3:30 p.m. on Wednesday, August 11.
All events will be held on the campus of Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.
Housing and all meals are included in the conference fee and refreshments will be provided. Conference participants will be housed in college dormitories with individual air-conditioned private rooms.
Room registration: 11 a.m., Friday, August 6
Conference registration: 12-1:30 p.m., Friday, August 6
Conference opens: 2 p.m., Friday, August 6
Conference ends: 3:30 p.m., Wednesday, August 11
Continuing Education Units:
This conference has been approved for 30.5 hours of CEU for psychology. Please contact the conference administrator for additional information.
Fear has pervaded the discourse and experience of contemporary life. Daily we are bombarded with images of danger and threats, from the foods we ingest to the enemies that roam amongst us. As we work and live in groups, we no longer know whom to trust and who or what may harm us.
Categories such as gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, social class, nationality and age are created through group life, and their formation and definitions are often influenced by unconscious processes. Groups create images of themselves and others and then behave as though properties ascribed to individuals belonging to these groups were somehow inherent in the individuals rather than a product of complex group forces. At the root of these attributions are the anxieties of living and working together and, taken together, they can create cultures of fear.
Our emotional, intellectual and spiritual engagement with the world, through whatever roles we occupy in whatever groups we take part in, is always marked by our capacity to tolerate and explore what is uncertain, unknown or unthought in ourselves and in our situations. The unknown is at the same time what is hidden and feared in each of us and what is unknown and feared in the realities of our lives and workplaces.
The Tavistock tradition of group relations conferences is a means to explore how anxieties affect group life and all the individuals within those groups. In viewing group life through the anxieties that are structured both at conscious and unconscious levels, we can become more aware of how fears, both rational and irrational, influence our ability to live and work with others. Today, this means of analyzing group life has extraordinary relevance.
The primary task of the Conference is to create a temporary institution as a laboratory in which participants can experience and study group and institutional dynamics typical of organizations, broadly construed. The temporary institution thus created shares, at both practical and metaphoric levels, aspects of the larger social world in which we live, and insight gained is transferable to a wide variety of real world settings.
Conference participants will have the opportunity to
This conference offers an experiential means of studying unconscious processes of group life, processes that are ubiquitous in our lives, but are seldom available for examination. Indeed, meaningful scrutiny is only possible where members of a group devote themselves to this task in such a way that shared systems and the dynamic rules that power them can be observed.
In organizational life, people may gossip or commiserate, but because individuals hold only their unique piece of the organizational experience, it is difficult for any subgroup to see how all the parts fit together to form a system - a system that is usually impossible for any single individual to change - even when change is sorely needed. Through shared, collective understandings of such systems, transformation becomes possible.
Tavistock Group Relations conferences offer an opportunity to study and reflect on these processes through real-time experiential learning. The focus of these conferences is on groups, rather than upon individuals, and specific attention is paid to those unconscious or covert forces that foster or obstruct the capacity to work together in groups. Of special importance are the nature and function of boundaries - between inner and outer reality, between role and person, between individual and group, between groups, and between organizations and their environments. We will also give special attention to the effects of individual differences such as gender, race, age, class, nationality and sexual orientation on leadership and the capacity to work in organizational systems.
This learning model provides an opportunity to study what happens within and between groups at the time it is occurring. Participants may explore the complex and often covert processes of organizational systems as they experience them directly, in ways that are usually not open for discussion in organizations and clinical settings. Inevitably, the temporary institution created in this conference mirrors the patterns and personalities of our work life, allowing us to engage, reflect and learn on both individual and institutional levels.
Learning in this model involves disciplined attention to one's own experience, openness to the experience of others, toleration of uncertainty, the readiness to interpret what is happening and the courage to test one's interpretations through communication and action. It also requires being alert to both conscious and unconscious aspects of behavior and the ways in which action is shaped by the broader social, political and economic contexts of the contemporary world.
This model of working
and learning evolves from the work of Wilfred R. Bion and others associated with
the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London. (See Readings
for more description). Conferences such as these take place throughout the world.
In the United States, the A.K.
Rice Institute for the Study of Social Systems (AKRI) is the national organization
that sponsors, through its regional centers, these group relations conferences.
This conference is sponsored by the Washington-Baltimore
Center of the A.K. Rice Institute and it has been authorized by the Executive
Committee of the Washington-Baltimore Center.