With Richard Morgan-Jones, organisational and group relations consultant and psychoanalytic psychotherapist

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The challenge facing consultants in working with organisations and groups, as well as in the community, increasingly involves the impact of the fast-changing environmental context. This context impinges on individual’s bodies, minds, and their capacity for relating thoughtfully. It is a context much at risk from totalitarian forces and violating splitting. Such experiences mobilise the work group potential of professional reflective practice at the level of group and organisational dynamics.

Beyond these experiences from which we are committed to learn with others, rather than suffering in silence, Richard has developed an experiential guided group event. The ‘Trilogy Matrix Event’ has been used in consulting, not least to the moment in group relations conferences between experiential and reflective engagement.

This event is designed to explore how contextual dynamics impinge across the skin of group and the experience of individuals at the level of body, emotion and capacity for thoughtfulness. It involves three circles meeting one at a time while the other two circles observe. Each circle has a specialised focus on behalf of others: person, dynamics, context.

Lewin’s Field Theory that shaped many developments in Tavistock approaches to consulting and research also has an equally, but lesser-known influence through various migrations in clinical psychoanalysis. Bion’s use of Lewin’s ‘life-space’, mapping force fields through his reflections on group experience has spread into exploration of the phantasies of the paired work group in psychoanalysis. This positions the analyst as part of an expanding field whose containing capacity is being stretched by what is waiting to be contained as a matter of urgency.

Richard Morgan-Jones is an organisational and group relations consultant and a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and senior member of the British Psychotherapy Foundation. He is a member of OPUS and a distinguished member of the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations. He has consulted to group relations conferences internationally. He is a member and mentor of AKRI and over the past 5 years has been consulting to and directing group relations conferences in Russia. He is the author of The Body of the Organisation and its Health and co-editor of Developments in Field Theory for Psychotherapists, Psychoanalysts and Counsellors, both published by Routledge.