There is an apocryphal tale – which happens to be true as well – that tells of a BBC reporter in Northern Ireland at the height of the troubles in the late 1980s. He was trying to explain, live on air, to the news anchor in London, the intricacies of the politics, religion, violence and tribalism, with the law, police and paramilitaries all thrown in for good measure. It was a tragic-yet-hopeful complex spaghetti of issues and events, and hard to explain in one report. So here is how he summed it all up: “Anyone who thinks they understand what is going on around here clearly hasn’t grasped the situation”. Quite. If you thought you understood what was happening, you would really need to think again.
Any clergyperson who has acted as the chair of a Parochial Church Council will know the experience of trying to find common ground amid a cacophony of opinions. On contentious matters, it is seldom possible to arrive at the point where we can say that this is the undisputed unanimous position of the whole group. In spite of Paul pleading for Christians to be of ‘one heart and one mind’, this seldom is the reality we find in practice. Many decisions, which go to a vote, have a substantial minority grumbling that what has been decided is wrong.
The academic study of group behaviour is not one that is familiar to most people. Some of the insights which can be discerned from these studies are nevertheless fascinating and useful for the Church. We sometimes want to forget the untidiness and even unpleasant dynamics that can exist even in ordinary committee work. As long-term readers of this blog will know, I have always been interested in the way groups function. What happens in a committee or a congregation is sometimes in complete contrast to what individuals say they want. When we recently looked at the writing of Le Bon and his 19th century studies of the crowd, we discovered that the normal consciousness of individuals is sometimes compromised or changed when they become part of a large group. Freud picked up this theme, noticing the way that primal unconscious processes could erupt into the conscious mind of members of a crowd. He theorised that a group like the church or the army would have a corporate super ego. This would, in a group setting, replace the one used by the individual. The army operated smoothly because a Commander in Chief was making the decisions about what were the important tasks for that army to perform. In Freud’s understanding, the person of Christ was the guiding principle, or super-ego, operating within the Christian. This created a stability of belief and practice. Freud’s observations are interesting regardless of whether we agree with them. They show him taking seriously the corporate aspect of human awareness as well as that of the individual. His speculations about the unconscious dynamics that operate within a crowd/mob, sometimes involving violence, helped his successors to an understanding of the phenomenon of fascism in the 30s.
Another pioneer of group studies, Wilfred Bion, deserves our attention. He was working with groups of officers invalided home during the Second World War. These had been incapacitated by some kind of mental trauma. Bion’s task was to rehabilitate them so that they could function once again and continue to make their contribution to the war effort. He decided on an experiment. This was to put the men into groups so that they could learn to work together and accomplish simple tasks which would involve cooperation. These Bion work groups were initially thwarted by resistance from the members of the group. Bion went on to analyse what was really going on, and how it was stopping the men working together. He called these processes of resistance, which were impeding the work tasks, basic assumptions. These basic assumptions were a kind of group mental attitude which they all shared. Put another way, the group members were acting out of a group mind, resisting doing the tasks which the group were being given. Two of these basic assumptions can be mentioned here. One is a tendency of a group always to look around to find someone to be their leader. This is, in itself, an avoidance tactic. It makes one person responsible for what goes on so the others can sit back. The second basic assumption is what Bion called fight or flight. This is a tendency for all members to use the group to look for and struggle against perceived enemies. This hostility towards another group (real or imagined) is irrational but it is a successful way of relieving primal anxieties about identity of the group. It certainly succeeded in the temporary undermining of the group tasks which were the whole point of Bion’s groups.
The study of basic assumptions and the way that these unconscious processes erupt into the work of groups, large or small, is something which was closely studied in the 70s and 80s. The Tavistock Clinic invested a great deal of energy and manpower into studying and experimenting with such groups. Sadly, from the point of my own interest, this area of study seems to have become far less fashionable over the last 20 years. It may account for the way that fewer people are on the look-out to notice the way that unconscious processes are at work in many group situations. People do not want to see how often group dynamics are rife in institutions and workplaces, including the churches. The former Dean of Westminster, Wesley Carr, was interested in this material but, since his death, I am not aware of anyone in the churches who is interested in this important class of research and study. When we, of an older generation who were aware of these interests, observe dysfunction in church groups and institutions, we are reminded of the relevance of this theoretical material to church conflicts.
One group in the news at the moment is the Governing Body of Christ Church at Oxford. Obviously, we only know what they choose to tell us about the conduct of their meetings, but it is hard not to speculate about the dynamic of these meetings. We would expect that they behave in a way similar to any other group with 60+ members. Some will be happy to sit back and listen to the activist core which is driving the agenda without expressing any opinion. They will let decisions be made on their behalf, as long as it does not touch or affect them too much outside the meetings. The second basic assumption of fight or flight will provide the group energy which is needed to pursue the vendetta against the Dean. Probably only a tiny number will personally have any deep irrational dislike of the Dean, one which has created so much malevolence. Nevertheless, some of that hatred may have spilled beyond the core. Even the most intelligent members of a large group may find something attractive in being sucked into doing what many groups enjoy most, hating a scapegoat. What I write here is, of course, speculation, but I understand that a toxic environment has indeed spread over parts of the college. Unconscious negative forces, the kind described by Le Bon, Freud and Bion are alive and well in twenty-first century Oxford.
Among the press releases put out by Christ Church for the consumption of the public is one that I am still puzzling to make sense of. However, we believe that an external, independent review will provide further reassurance about the decisions that were taken, and a way forward for all involved.” This statement contains two ideas that are mutually incompatible. The first of these is the word ‘independent’ and then it is closely followed by the words ‘will provide further reassurance about the decisions’. How can any group suggest what an independent review should provide? Although the statement is slightly qualified by the words ‘we believe’, there should be here a stronger commitment to this independence. Independence has to guarantee that any conclusion will be in accordance with the facts and the judgement of the one doing the review. Was this statement written by a fairly junior and inexperienced member of a reputation management company? It certainly does not suggest any detailed care for the reputation of the institution issuing it.
Declining academic interest in group dynamics over the past 20 to 30 years has meant that most people are now blind to the possibility for organisations like colleges and the churches to act irrationally. Bion, sixty years ago, wanted us to see how these unconscious, irrational and destructive forces can take hold in group functioning. When we talk about independence in evaluating groups and their behaviour, we mean rising above and beyond the hatreds and behaviours indulged in and fostered within much institutional life. When such irrationality becomes dominant in an institution, as it seems to be doing in Christ Church at present, calm analytical minds need to be brought in to show the difference between passionate feeling and factual material. Such judgement and stability must come from the outside.
Looking at the College from the outside, gleaning material provided by the Press and by Private Eye, we see an institution apparently bent on self-destructive behaviour. These, we believe, are driven by the unconscious processes identified by Bion and will, over a period of time, do enormous damage to the College. It may be said of Christ Church Oxford in a history written about the College many years hence. 2018 to 2022 was a period of corporate institutional insanity. No one seemed to understand what was going on and the College took some time to recover. One thing we certainly hope not to read is that the dysfunctions of the time swept away the Dean of the College.
Stephen
This is so interesting, and Bion in particular offers much insight – indeed he saw the specialized work group as exemplified by the Army and the Church. The Army provides an enemy and training against it, and the Church an idealized protective leader on whom all can depend. So, the basic assumption mentality gets channelled into a work group. He notes that when a Church group has worked efficiently to achieve a substantial result, the Church quickly steps in to give thanks to God for allowing this achievement to occur, rather than give thanks to the work group which actually accomplished it. In this way the group remains dependent on a leader who is not manifest and who therefore cannot lead in a more active way which could disrupt the status quo.
Surely relevant to what is happening in Christchurch is another of Bion’s insights which is the serious reluctance of the group to learn from experience. In his theory the basic assumption which is to preserve the group suggests that the group has a natural tendency to disintegrate. This fear of underlying disintegration gets hidden and so the group is against any form of authentic inquiry. The group is fearful and against any rational inquiry because of what might be revealed damage, murderous rage, ‘inappropriate’ sexual feelings, guilt, persecution etc. – in other words complete upheaval of the way things have been.
I wonder if Martyn Percy somehow evoked this fear by suggested changes and so the pain of all the emotional consequences resulted.
And yes, I so completely agree, there is so much insight the Church could gain from recognizing the unconscious and the strength of all these deeply hidden shadow emotions.
Thank you Fiona for adding all this fascinating stuff about Bion and the Church. I had no idea that he was ever involved in looking at the structures of the Church. Because I do not move in professional psychiatric circles, I don’t know what is being said there. As you will have gathered, I stumble across stuff by reading and if they connect with what I already know, I try to explore those connections. Your observations about Martyn and change at Ch Ch are very important. I wish that someone would insist that whoever makes the independent assessment was psychologically informed with at least some of this material. I have long complained that the NST has failed because no one cast a critical psychologically informed forensic eye over the dysfunctions within the safeguarding world at the beginning. The safeguarding world to this day is awash with basic assumptions of the most primal kind
your post has led me to look again at the books I have on Bion and I just wanted to add that he was very interested in religion, not only how the group structure worked, but also in Christian mysticism exploring St John of the Cross and Meister Eckhart. He famously coined the letter ‘O’ to describe a form of truth which one can arrive at and above which is ‘ultimate Reality’ and ‘absolute Truth’. Some of his ideas are still widely used in the analytic world – though some are actually I think quite hard to decipher!
I would like to share the following, which I recently posted on another site, so apologies to any readers who have seen it before. It is part of the text of a letter I sent to a Christ Church trustee about six months ago. By way of background: I’m an alumnus of Christ Church and former donor (albeit on a modest scale).
[…]
Like most old members, I feel both affection and gratitude towards both College and Cathedral (in which I had the privilege of getting married). It is therefore a matter of personal distress to see the Governing Body behaving in a way which is damaging, even destructive, to the House. On consideration, I believe that I can best understand the current situation as being akin to watching an old friend succumb to an addiction such as gambling or alcohol (although in this case it appears to be an addiction to litigation). So what do friends do when they see someone they care about in this position?
Firstly, they don’t give them any more money. Not only is the money wasted, it prolongs and increases the damage. Whatever the addict may say, the money will go to feed their addiction.
Secondly, they do what they can to get their friend to stop, as completely and as quickly as possible, without excuses, or promises to do so “as soon as …”. Just to stop.
Thirdly, they do what they can to help their friend avoid relapse, in particular by helping them to manage their affairs so as to minimise exposure to temptation.
Firstly, I think it is unconscionable to continue raising funds from the alumni. Frankly, it has to stop. The Governing Body has shown that it is addicted, as a body, to pursuing litigation, at very great expense, to the extent that the Charity Commission has had to intervene, and is clearly no longer fit to manage the affairs of the House. If any further proof were needed, in the middle of its extraordinary dispute with the Dean, the Governing Body has chosen to open a further dispute with one of the Canons over trademarks. May we look forward to further calls on the endowment for legal fees in this dispute too? That is perverse, it is bizarre, it is inexplicable.
Secondly, the Governing Body need to understand that they have to stop these wasteful and pernicious practices instantly. Any comments to the effect that they just need to do this, or consult that person, or finish the other, are meaningless — literally: such comments may sound like rational argument, but it’s the addiction speaking. These excuses are like the gambling addict saying, oh, I just need to back this certain winner in the 3.30 then I’ll have won it all back and I can stop, or the alcoholic saying, I’ll quit after I finish this bottle. No, they won’t.
Thirdly, the raising and spending of funds has to pass, for the time being, into the hands of independent trustees. […]
Thank you Richard. There is a limit (3000 characters)on what you can post in one comment. Others have got round this by doing two comments together. I think your description of some governors having an addiction is a very important insight. Most people can relate to this as everyone knows at least one addict in their lives.
In a 1978 interview Bion about his Tavistock method remarked that even rational people behave in a primal fashion when in groups: “I think that the race is one between the impulse to be civilized . . . and…at the same time to continue to exist and to continue to find an outlet for our primitive impulses.” A rational group of people can therefore have an impulse to ‘smash things’ through what he described as a “rhapsodic expression”.
The dynamics of the Christ Church SCR are well known. When W. H. Auden lived in college over winter in 1972-73 he became increasingly disconsolate because the SCR was divisive and so very different from his convivial memories of the place in the 1920s, when it was dominated by the likes of Masterman, Jenkins or Dundas (‘D’) (though see here, written by a maths teacher of mine: https://audensociety.org/RBMallion.pdf; note the references to Alban Krailsheimer – known as ‘the Krail’ – best remembered for his biography of Jean-Armand de Rancé).
One good way to unite and/or control a divided body is to focus the anxieties of the group on an ‘external other’. An example of this might be the British Raj. During the 1790s and 1830s there was increasing anxiety about the threat posed to Britain’s imperium in India by France or Russia. This could be used before 1833/1857 to justify the use of regular British troops to augment the military servants of the East India Company. After the ‘mutiny’ it was used to explain the existence of a permanent military establishment of 100,000 British regulars at the charge of the Indian taxpayer. Indian troops were in a ratio of 2:1 with British troops. As M. E. Yapp explained in ‘Strategies of British India’ (1980) this had less to do with the need to defend India against the Russians or Soviets, and everything to do with the need to protect British commercial and political interests against rebellion and the advance of nationalism.
In this way, the dons of Christ Church are perhaps as united as never before against their perceived common external threat. A relatively small coterie of leading antagonists of the dean can use this common external threat to control their recalcitrant colleagues. The dons are all so invested, emotionally, politically, legally and perhaps (as trustees) financially in combatting this real or imagined threat that, like Samson, they are prepared to bring roof of the temple down upon their own heads in order to attain their objective of ousting the dean: a specimen of Bion’s ‘rhapsodic expression’. Little wonder that some people I know who are familiar with the ‘House’ fear it will break up.
Also, the history of recent events is unlikely to be written any time soon, as the multi-volume history of the House has only lately been published.
The other reason the dons cannot retreat is that the loss of face would be calamitous. I wonder whether the topic of ‘face’ could be the subject of one of Stephen’s future (excellent) posts.
It’s years since I read Walter Wink’s masterly trilogy on The Powers (angels, principalities, spiritual forces in heavenly places…); but if I remember correctly he identified the ‘angel’ of a group as a sort of ethos or collective personality. This ‘angel’ is more than the sum of the group or organisation’s members, and influences how those members behave. If the office troublemaker leaves, for instance, one of the remaining staff may become the troublemaker though they’ve previously always been a good colleague – because the dynamic of that office demands a troublemaker.
He gives an example of a church which sets up all its ministers to fail, because the town’s inhabitants feel like failures and need the minister to fail too. If I recall aright, his take on the Gadarene demoniac was that the people of the region projected all their sins and failings into this man and made him an outcast. Hence their distress when he was delivered and in his right mind – with their scapegoat no longer filling that role they might have to face the darkness in themselves.
Wink argues that the Powers can be confronted and redeemed, but that we’re unable to do so until we have faced the violence in ourselves and refused to act it out.
It’s another interesting take on group dynamics and I’ve found it helpful.
If it is helpful, there is a lot of research by US political analysts into what seems to be a similar process, but there it has the label “affective polarization”. The label describes the analysis of political affiliations, and the attitudes people have towards “in groups” and “out groups”. For example https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev-polisci-051117-073034
In the world of business management and business gurus, such ideas were all the rage in the 1990s — although I imagine usually at the level of lip service — through the influence of books like Peter Senge’s ‘The Fifth Discipline’. My curiosity brought me to the works of Argyris and Schon, and thence to W R Bion. Bion’s Great War memoir ‘The Long Weekend’ is well worth reading. I remember his comment on his citation for a DSO: “DSO? I might as well have been court-martialled. It all depended on which direction one ran in when one panicked.”
I’m intrigued you regard Private Eye as being in a separate category to ‘the Press’. Surely the Eye is a very important constituent of ‘the Press’?
Private Eye is a very well informed source of information. I am told, it may be wrong, that serious journals, including Wikipedia, avoid quoting it as a footnote in their pieces in case it may be scurrilous. My own speculations on Ch Ch are indebted to PE and I was intrigued by their recent correction about who uttered the famous words when first hearing of the ‘event’. ‘Could this be the knock out blow? or similar words. Other information suggests that PE were quoting from primary sources in this instant. In my experience they are normally extremely accurate and when I am in a position to check up what they say (not very often), I find they are meticulous with the truth. I suppose I believed I was following the convention followed by others over how to treat the information in PE.
I would respectfully suggest that standards at Private Eye are as high as the best of the press and are, arguably, higher.
This is not only because a publication which endeavours to speak truth to power cannot expose itself to charges of hypocrisy, but also that its endowment is so slender and its enemies are so many (think of James Goldsmith [Jammy Fishpaste] or Robert Maxwell), that it simply cannot afford to make inaccurate statements: it bears the scars of too many libel actions which, if they had gone the other way, would have broken the paper.
If a story about the Church appears in Private Eye, I would treat it as absolutely authoritative, and certainly worthy of greater credence than anything emanating from many other organs I could mention. Thanks to Paul Foot and his successors, it has a reputation for investigative reporting second to none.
However, pace Mr Barrington, I would argue that you are right to refer to it as being outside the mainstream press which it critiques so forcefully (‘Street of Shame’), frequently using material provided by aggrieved journalists from the mainstream – and demonstrating so vividly that if any institutions best the Church in the commission of egregious abuses of power, it is the newspapers.
Private Eye is the gadfly of the media. Long may it continue!
I too treat Private Eye’s news reporting as trustworthy and enormously valuable in exposing abuses and corruption.
I do find its continuous in jokes rather tiresome though, and it generally has the air of the student rag at a boys’ school. I think that’s another reason it doesn’t get classed with the mainstream press. (continued on p 94. Ed.)
How do you treat a patient who doesn’t want to be treated?
One of the greatest challenges with toxic organisations, is how do you “ treat” them. Most groups are reluctant at best to seek outside support to get better, particularly if they enjoy very high levels of financial endowment, access to privileges, prestige and power.
We can analyse them all we like. I welcome the references to Bion’s work, which once you get your head round it is quite brilliant. Others too have mooted additional “basic assumptions” such as Hopper with his ideas about incohesion aggregation/massification. But… you can’t easily get through to people cosseted in their ivory towers.
Even in business, with clamouring stakeholders, internal appetite for external analysis is low. Many of our high street large retailers have already paid the price for this resistance to change.
One thing Bion made clear was that the avoidance of work groups and the descent into basic assumption behaviour damaged the efficiency of the Task. In business you go bust. Churches close. But with these colleges I expect they’ll go on forever!