In considering what we can learn from Lance Armstrong, I argued that aside from the moral outrage, we needed to consider if he has something to teach us about the nature of situational resistance –…
Author: philipjboxer
I am particularly interested in organisations that must operate in turbulent environments, in which client-customers must be responded to one-by-one, each demanding a different response designed to address their particular situation. We see the need…
The theory of the enterprise developed based on a largely static and ‘closed’ ontology. This meant that the top management of such an enterprise was assumed to be committed to a form of mental model…
This series of blogs started with a difficulty faced at a research colloquium in addressing the effects of libidinal investment on the way the participants ‘were’ in language. We were getting caught ‘inside’ particular forms…
The previous four blogs on the missing subject-ego relation, symbol formation, sophisticated groups and matrices of thought raise a question of how we are to understand ‘container’ in a structural sense. This blog aims to…
Bion uses the notion of a “matrix of thought which lies within the confines of the basic group, but not within the confines of the individual.”[1],p79 It is this matrix of thought with which the…
The previous blog examined how the process of symbol formation could be read using a 4-term relation between subject, ego, object-signifier and signified-object. In this translation, the ego was a particular organisation of object-relating. It…
The previous blog on ‘the missing subject-ego relation’ described how a 3-term relation was used by Hanna Segal to describe symbol formation – a relation between ego, object and symbol – while her text[1] speaks…
I recently participated in a research colloquium organized by the Independent Social Research Foundation and Tavistock Consulting, which revisited Isabel Menzies-Lyth’s thesis on the ‘Unconscious Defences against Anxiety’. My own contribution to this was a…
The blog on Requisite Authority introduces a diagnostic tool that examines the different possible forms of congruence between role and task, depending on how an enterprise defines its boundaries and its relationships across those boundaries….