Social Dreaming Philosophy, Research, Theory and Practice

1st Edition

Visit the link below to download the full version of this book:

https://medipdf.com/product/social-dreaming-philosophy-research-theory-and-pract
ice-1st-edition/

Click Download Now

First published 2019
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2019 selection and editorial matter, Susan Long and Julian Manley; individual
chapters, the contributors
The right of Susan Long and Julian Manley to be identified as the authors of the
editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to
infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book

ISBN: 978-1-138-32733-7 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-32735-1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-44927-7 (ebk)

Typeset in Bembo
by Taylor & Francis Books
Dedicated to the memory of Gordon Lawrence

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil…1

1. (Hamlet, Act III, Scene 1, lines 66–67, p. 886. The Oxford Shakespeare, 1943)
This page intentionally left blank
CONTENTS

List of figures ix
Author Biographies x
Preface xvi
Jonathan Gosling

Introduction 1
Susan Long and Julian Manley

SECTION I
Towards a philosophy of science in support of social
dreaming 7
1 Dreams and dreaming: A socioanalytic and semiotic perspective 9
Susan Long
2 Associative thinking: A Deleuzian perspective on social
dreaming 26
Julian Manley

SECTION II
The nature and processes of social dreaming: Theory and
research 39
3 The dreaming body yearning to belong to a larger social body 41
Richard Morgan-Jones with Angela Eden
viii Contents

4 ‘Renewing the Land’: The dreaming mind in community 55

Laurie Slade
5 An integrative theory of dreaming underlying social dreaming 69
Rose Redding Mersky
6 An action research study of dream-sharing as socially-
constituted practice 81
Ruth Balogh
7 Festino di San Silvestro: Rites and social dreaming 97
Domenico Agresta
8 Looking for treasure in dream water 112
Francesca La Nave

SECTION III
Social dreaming practice 129
9 “Are you sharing a dream?”: Social dreaming in a community 131
Hanni Biran, Judith Ezra, Or Netanely and Hanan Sabah-Teicher
10 London dreaming 144
Nuala Flynn and Ruth E. Jones
11 Social spaces for social dreaming 155
Mannie Sher
12 Peripatetic social dreaming: St Paul’s Cathedral, London UK
Oct 2011 – Jan 2012 167
Jacqueline Sirota
13 Dreams, space, context and identity in the workplace 177
Franca Fubini
14 What now? Future dreams 195
Julian Manley and Susan Long

Index 203
FIGURES

8.1 Dream reflection: Art Making Response 122

13.1 The crusaders 186
13.2 The Raft 187
13.3 The sea port 189
13.4 The tired washerwomen 191
13.5 Merging is chaos 192
13.6 The four services together 193
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES

Domenico Agresta
Domenico is a Trustee of the Gordon Lawrence Foundation and works with social
dreaming studying rites of passage, religious rites, and cultural contexts linked with
historical events. He has used social dreaming in clinical fields and psycho-oncology
vocational training in public health. He is a clinical psychologist, group-analyst and
psycho-oncologist. He works as a group-analyst in private practice and teaches at
university and at schools of psychotherapy. He is president of the Centre for the Study
of Psychology and Psychosomatic Medicine (CSPP) and studies the correlation
between mind and body, links to anthropology and group processes using dream
icons. He is Chair of Family Section in IAGP and OPUS. He is an Academic Member
of AGPA (American Group Psychotherapy Association) and Board Member of SIMP
(Italian Society of Psychosom Med). He lives and works in Pescara, Italy.

Ruth Balogh Ph.D.

Ruth studied psychology at Bristol University as an undergraduate, modern social and
cultural studies at Chelsea College, London University and was awarded her doctorate
in 1993 from University of London Institute of Education. It was there that she gained
her first opportunity to practise action research. As Ruth Davies she edited the anti-
psychology journal ‘Red Rat’ in the 1970s. She has continued to support the rights of
mental health service users whenever the opportunity has arisen in her long career as a
social researcher at various higher education institutions in the UK, eventually
becoming a Reader in Health Research & Practice Development. She is currently
Associate Senior Research Fellow at Glasgow University and Co-ordinator of the
international Collaborative Action Research Network (CARN), the scholarly asso-
ciation linked with the international journal Educational Action Research. A long-time
 Author Biographies xi

environmental campaigner, she was awarded the Friends of the Earth (England Wales
& Northern Ireland) Earthmover Award 2017 for Exceptional campaigning on
nuclear waste and sustainable economies based on renewables.

Hanni Biran
Hanni is a clinical psychologist, a training psychoanalyst and a group analyst teaching at
the Tel Aviv Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis. She is a lecturer at the pro-
gram for psychotherapy of the Tel Aviv University, and at Magid Institute, the
Hebrew University. She is a lecturer at the Israeli Institute of Group Analysis. She
supervises many teams and staff members in public clinics and hospitals involved in
group psychotherapy. Hanni worked for many years with Gordon Lawrence and
together with a group of colleagues, she hosted the first SDM in Israel in 1988. Hanni
has published many papers and also chapters in books dealing with social issues. She
published the book The Courage of Simplicity (Karnac, 2015) about Bion's ideas.

Angela Eden
Angela works as an organisational consultant from her own practice EDEN
EVOLUTION. Through her original training in theatre, education and organisa-
tional consultancy, she has used metaphor, symbols and dreams. Over the last fif-
teen years working with social dreaming she has developed training workshops
with the Gordon Lawrence Foundation. Through ISPSO annual meetings, she has
hosted a series of social dreaming matrices in Philadelphia, Toledo, San Diego and
recently in Copenhagen. Additionally, she has opened another creative stream,
working as an artist with a range of mixed media and abstract images.

Judith Ezra
Judith is a social worker, a group analyst, a staff member at the Bar Ilan School of
Social Work and an individual, couple and family therapist. She is the former co-
head of the Israeli Association of Group Psychotherapy. She was a member of the
Editorial Board and published papers in The International Journal of Group Analytic
Psychotherapy and in “Mikbatz”, The Israeli Journal of Group Psychotherapy.

Franca Fubini
Franca is the newly elected Chair of the Gordon Lawrence Foundation and Vice Chair of
Il Nodo Group. She trained and worked with Gordon Lawrence since the 1980s: toge-
ther they developed social dreaming in Italy. She has published articles about social
dreaming and its applications, she has also taught social dreaming at universities and
hosted social dreaming programs internationally and in a variety of work contexts as a
consultant to the organisations. She has designed a one-year social dreaming training. She
is an experienced and qualified psychoanalytic psychotherapist, organizational consultant
and group analyst, who works both privately and for the public administrations.
xii Author Biographies

Francesca La Nave MA AP GAP HCPC UKCP

Francesca La Nave is an art psychotherapist and group analytic psychotherapist with a
background combining science and fine arts and over twenty years of clinical experience
in both, adult mental health and special education. She works for the NHS, with patients
with complex needs, integrating her interest and experience in attachment theory, object
relations, creativity and mentalization. She also manages all arts therapies training place-
ments for her Trust. She has a private practice providing art psychotherapy for adults and
children, as well as supervision and training. She is a visiting lecturer on a number of art
psychotherapy and group analytic psychotherapy training courses, in the UK and in
Europe. She trained as a Social Dreaming host with Gordon Lawrence and Angela Eden.

Nuala Flynn
Nuala is a depth psychologist, clinical supervisor, dream-worker, artist and social
dreaming matrix host. She has an MA in Imaginal Studies from Chichester Uni-
versity, completed Marion Woodman Foundation Body-soul Leadership training,
and is an Embodied Imagination therapist in training with Robert Bosnak. She runs
dream workshops and an ongoing dream group for therapists, combining personal
and professional development via dreamwork. She is in private practice in East
London and works as a designated “Towards Healing” trauma therapist, working
with Irish survivors of clerical and institutional abuse. www.nualaflynn.co.uk

Jonathan Gosling
Jonathan Gosling is co-founder of One Planet Education Networks (OPEN) and of
the One Planet MBA at Exeter University where he is Emeritus Professor of Lea-
dership. He is currently supporting malaria control and elimination efforts in South-
ern Africa and is faculty of The Forward Institute in the UK. He holds visiting
positions at universities in Australia, Canada, China, Denmark, India and Slovenia,
and recently completed a study of leadership development in healthcare in these and
other countries. He has designed and directed programs for many commercial and
humanitarian organisations. He is co-author of Sustainable Business: A one planet
approach (Wiley, 2017) and several other books and articles. Jonathan has an ongoing
interest in social dreaming and has conducted social dreaming matrices at academic
conferences and integrated within leadership development programs.

Ruth E. Jones
Ruth first trained as an art therapist, and is now a UKCP registered Psychoanalytic
Psychotherapist and Clinical Supervisor, and an Energy Psychotherapist (DCEP).
Publications include Foreshoring the Unconscious, Living Psychoanalytic Practice (2010)
and Psychodynamic Art Therapy Practice with People on the Autistic Spectrum (2014). At
the time of writing, Ruth was working primarily in private practice in North Kent.
www.ruthejones.co.uk
 Author Biographies xiii

Susan Long Ph.D.

Susan is Director of Research at the National Institute of Organisation Dynamics in
Melbourne, Australia. She is also a visiting professor at INSEAD in Singapore and
supervises doctoral candidates in Melbourne. She is president of the Gordon Lawr-
ence Foundation and has been involved with social dreaming since the 1990s, host-
ing matrices in a variety of settings. She is a past president of the International Society
for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organisations and founding president of Group
Relations Australia. Her interests lie in the study of organisations. Together with
Maurita Harney, she has outlined the “Associative Unconscious” as a philosophic
foundation to psychoanalytic and socioanalytic studies.

Julian Manley Ph.D.

Julian works at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan), England. He holds
qualifications from Cambridge University, Middlesex University and the Uni-
versity of the West of England (UWE), where he completed a PhD on social
dreaming. He was awarded college and university prizes for academic excellence
at both Cambridge and UWE. Since then, he has pursued research using psy-
chosocial methods applied to a diverse range of research areas, including climate
change, the socially engaged arts, substance misuse and co-operative principles
and values. He is Module Leader for Psychosocial Studies at UCLan. He has
previously worked in organisational consultancy, and was founder and Director
of Ecowaves, an organisational and ecological consultancy business in Spain. He
is Vice Chair and Trustee of the Gordon Lawrence Foundation for the Promo-
tion of Social Dreaming; Executive Committee member of the Climate Psy-
chology Alliance (CPA); Co-Chair of CPA Scotland; and Chair of the Preston
Co-operative Development Network.

Rose Redding Mersky Ph.D.

Rose has been an organisational development consultant and executive coach for
over 25 years. She offers workshops in various socioanalytic methodologies,
such as Organisational Role Analysis, Social Dream-Drawing, Organisational
Observation, Social Photo-Matrix and Social Dreaming. She is an Honorary
Trustee of the Gordon Lawrence Foundation for the Promotion of Social
Dreaming. She has been a member of the International Society for the
Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations (ISPSO) for almost 30 years and served
as its first female president. Her publications have focused primarily on the
practice of consultation and the utilisation of these methodologies in both
organisational and research practice. She recently received her doctorate from
the Centre for Psycho-Social Studies at the University of West England in
Bristol, UK She lives and works in Germany. E-Mail: rose.merky@dream-
drawing.com; website: www.dream-drawing.com.
xiv Author Biographies

Richard Morgan-Jones
Richard is involved in group relations, organizational consulting and executive
coaching. He is a supervising and training psychoanalytic psychotherapist with British
Psychotherapy Foundation; a registered member of British Psychoanalytic Council
(BPC); elected board member of International Society for Psychoanalytic Society of
Organizations (ISPSO); mentor and member of the AK Rice Institute (USA);
member of the Organization for Promoting the Understanding of Society (OPUS);
visiting faculty member at the Indian Institute of Management at Ahmedabad, India
and associate consultant of Work Lab, New York. He is director of Work Force
Health: Consulting and Research. His work is explored in consultancies, an inter-
national workshop and a book entitled: The Body of the Organisation and its Health
which explores on how organisations get under the skin and reveal personal and
team development opportunities and organisational strategic choices.

Or Netanelyis
Or is a psychologist in clinical internship and an online blogger. In his private practice
in Tel Aviv, he combines psychoanalytic psychotherapy with practical counselling. In
his online writing, he is interested with current readings of psychoanalytic texts, and
the applicability of psychoanalytic logic to mechanised forms of therapy. He is one of
the younger generation partners in the initiative to bring social dreaming to Israeli
communities, in order to allow dialogue in a split society. He views his work in
hosting these matrices as a vital personal need to talk about the reality beyond politics.

Hanan Sabah-Teicher
Hanan is a clinical psychologist who works with children and adults. He combines
his practice of psychoanalytic psychotherapy in a variety of settings, including mental
health services, educational institutions, and his private clinic. Hanan promotes
socially engaged psychological work. He is one of the founders of the therapist’s
cooperative "Mekomi" in Tel-Aviv - a democratic and egalitarian collegial clinic that
provides an accessible psychotherapy for the public. He is also one of the initiators of
social dreaming matrices gatherings which are open to the community, offering a
facilitating space for dialogue in the complex political reality of Israel.

Mannie Sher Ph.D., TQAP, FBAP

Mannie is Principal Researcher and Consultant in Organisational Development and
Change; executive coach; former Director of the Group Relations Programme,
The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, London; trustee of the Gordon
Lawrence Foundation for the Promotion of Social Dreaming; a psychoanalytical
psychotherapist; a member of OFEK, Israel and a former board member of ISPSO.
Relying on a total systems approach of open systems thinking, socio-technical
 Author Biographies xv

systems theory and systems psychodynamics, integrated with action learning, group
relations and traditional organisational and culture change methods, Mannie has
delivered successful change programmes to many private and public sector organi-
sations in the UK and internationally.

Jacqueline Sirota MSc BACP Senior Registered Practitioner UKRC

Jacqueline is an independent psychodynamic counsellor and organisational con-
sultant. She gained her MSc at the University of the West of England, Bristol
studying Group Relations and Society, the psychodynamics of groups and orga-
nisations. She is an experienced Social Dreaming Host and has employed this
methodology in research projects. This has included a series of social dreaming
matrix events during the ‘Breaking the Chains’ exhibition commemorating the
abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in Bristol. With Dr Julian Manley, she
co-wrote and presented a paper on this research to the ISPSO Annual Meeting in
Toledo, Spain.
She has worked with colleagues from the Tavistock Institute facilitating
Social Dreaming Events at ‘Occupy’, Finsbury Square Tent City and St. Paul’s
as a peripatetic researcher. She is an associate of the Tavistock Consultancy
Service, a member of ISPSO, the International Society for the Psychoanalytic
Study of Organisations, an associate member of OPUS, Organisation for the
Promotion of Understanding of Society. She was, until relocating to Kent,
chair of the Bridge Consultancy Group and Director/Trustee of Avon Psy-
chotherapy Service.

Laurie Slade
Laurie is a UKCP registered analytical psychotherapist, in private practice in West
London. He is a member of the Guild of Psychotherapists, the Confederation for
Analytical Psychology, and the International Neuropsychoanalysis Association. He
is an Associate of the Gordon Lawrence Foundation for the Promotion of Social
Dreaming, and has been actively involved in social dreaming since 2001, hosting
sessions in a variety of settings, in the UK and internationally. He helped devise the
first programme for professional development of social dreaming hosts in 2007. He
is co-founder of the Queer Social Dreaming Matrix, running since 2016, a
monthly open access meeting in London for sexual minorities. His published
papers on social dreaming include Social Dreaming for a Queer Culture (Self &
Society, 2005), and Image to Gesture – Social Dreaming with Student Theatre
Directors (in The Creativity of Social Dreaming, Karnac, 2010).

Artist note about the cover:

In this project, Borough’s Cut Up method is applied. This procedure exactly cor-
responds with Sigmund Freud’s interpretation of the human dream.
PREFACE
Jonathan Gosling

In Candy Neubert’s novel Big Low Tide (2012 p. 92) Brenda prepares for a difficult
conversation with her self-absorbed lover. She wakes before him so that “when he
is fully awake but with the pockets of his mind still empty from the night, she will
sense her moment and slip into it.”
Those moments between sleep and wake, when “the pockets of the mind” are
not yet filled, carry the faintest vibrations of a different kind of knowing. This
book is concerned with this knowing, apprehended in dreams but which so often
slips out of the pockets of the mind as we wake. The central chapters chart many
attempts to re-capture dreams and to understand the kind of knowing they repre-
sent. Part 1 offers a comprehensive theory of this kind of knowing, and how it is
realised in the particular context of a social dreaming matrix.
As the editors point out, it is important to realise that the kind of knowing available
to us at night, in our dreaming states, is not the same kind of knowing as we habitually
exercise in relation to waking sense-data or conceptual thinking. The objects of
knowledge – what we perceive, how we perceive it, and how we represent those
perceptions to ourselves – are something apart from reason and conceptualisation.
Naturally people have always theorised about dreams (in Chapter 1 of this
volume, Susan Long offers a comprehensive review), and most modern theories
recognise the significance of the context in which dreams are recovered, told,
heard and thought about. Indeed, modern theorising can be defined by this
acknowledgement that the purposes, methods and context in which we examine
phenomena (including dreams) are choices that determine the meaning and sig-
nificance we find in them; and even the ontological status we ascribe to them. As
McLuhan said, “the medium is the message” (1964 p. 9).
Most contexts for examining dreams involve two or more people contemplating
the narrated images of a dream, and wondering what they might mean. In social
contexts, this tips towards “what the dream might mean for us, collectively” (rather
 Preface xvii

than what it suggests about the dreamer’s psychological state). So while dreams have
forever been shared and interpreted in social situations, the Social Dreaming Matrix is
thoroughly modern in choosing to construe dreams and dreamers in this way.
The underlying assertion of this book is that there is much value to be gained by
accessing this different knowledge, and that social dreaming is a technique suited to
elaborating some possible meanings in ways that will be useful for other purposes.
The book therefore locates social dreaming within the instrumentalism of social
science – it is valuable because it helps us do other things such as (inter alia)
articulate shared anxieties and prejudices, predict likely responses, enhance cultural
surveys, inform managerial policies and embody community affiliation. (This
instrumentalism might be contrasted with social dreaming as participatory art, such
as the weekend of “motel dreaming” in a Tasmanian motel, organised by David
Patman in 2014: www.moteldreaming.com).
However, if social dreaming is to become a social science method, it requires a
coherent epistemology, related to but distinguished from theories of knowledge
that apply to other forms of knowing. This is the first significant contribution of
the book. Two substantive philosophical essays by the editors explore how a
theory of dream-knowledge might be derived from the work of Pierce (Long) and
Deleuze (Manley). These two essays are crucial in establishing the distinctive but
de-centred and elusive field we are drawing on here. As Long has shown in earlier
work, Pierce’s concept of abductive logic recognises the emergence of distinct ideas
from the unconscious, rendering the idea or way-of-seeing into a handy object that
can be adopted as a working hypothesis. Social dreaming is thus located as a
method for working with emergent ideas.
Secondly, Manley invokes Deleuze’s metaphor of the rhizome to describe the
way that dream-material spreads and crops up all over the place, connecting
apparently separate ideas, and generating fragments that sometimes grow and
extend unexpectedly.
By describing dreams as emergent and rhizomatic, social dreaming becomes
allied to contemporary theory in other fields. For example, in Strategy Without
Design Chia and Holt (2011) define strategy as a process of learning characterised
by an attitude of alertness and readiness for associative thinking because individual
agency is limited, conditional and dependent. They argue that conscious intention
is an inadequate explanation of strategy, which is better understood as collective
responsiveness to emergent awareness.
Social dreaming is thus in tune with other non-rational aspects of future imaginings
and responsive actions.
Another key element is doubt in the ability of individual or even collective con-
scious intent to explore the potential for a future that remains relatively obscure – an
obscurity that becomes more intense as we consider climate change (bio-diversity
loss, air pollution, etc) may induce a “tipping point” into unpredictable instability.
Ecological collapse is not the only conceivable catastrophe – colonial invasions have
always wreaked this havoc, and many cultures have been utterly obliterated as a
result. In the more colloquial world of business, firms collapse or are absorbed