ABSTRACT
The impetus for this book is that the co-author and I are Tavistock group enthusiasts. We teach, consult, and spend a great deal of time thinking about these kinds of groups. Over the past fifteen years, we settled into a pattern of running Tavistock groups and then processing the events that transpired. That left an impression on us. Letting a significant amount of time pass between the groups’ events and the discussion of them seems to have afforded us both a certain intellectual distance and flexibility. Over the years, we further fell into an informal habit of spending our time less processing our subjective experiences and more time offering very specific working hypotheses about what the theoretical and applied learning of a given group or group interaction might belie. We tended to focus on the extremes— groups that went especially well, groups that went especially poorly, and groups that performed especially curiously. Our “working models” of these notable events made their way into the courses we taught, our future group work and permeated our psychology world views. I took to writing shorts essays for my classes about the phenomenon in question and attaching vignettes about group interactions that seemed especially illustrative. Clive had done similar work previously in a more formal manner, culminating in a number of books on topics ranging 2from Imaginary Groups (2005), to Alterity (2009), to The Experience of Emptiness (2003). It is the intention of this effort to share some of our thoughts on these Tavistock-related sub-topics: at times revisiting established ideas, at times partnering the Tavistock model with other aspects of psychology or social science, and to along the way offer vignettes that we believe captured these conceptual ideas.
