The Vienna conference on work discussion
This Symposium, and a second one which will follow it in the next issue of Infant Observation, presents papers which were originally given at the first International Conference on Work Discussion, held in Vienna from June 10th to 12th 2016, under the title Let’s talk about work! Work Discussion in Practice and Research. The Conference was hosted by the University of Vienna and the University of Klagenfurt, with an organising committee whose membersFootnote1 were drawn from those universities and from the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust in London.
The opening Plenary Session of the Conference provided introductions to the history and practice of Work Discussion by several speakers who each had a substantial role in its development. Here are excerpts from some these presentations:
Margaret Rustin (Tavistock clinic)
I am delighted to be here at the opening of this first international conference on work discussion. I realised as I wrote this that the very first Work Discussion seminar was convened in 1967, so we are anticipating the 50-year anniversary by just one year! It will be no surprise that the day of work discussion seminars many of us will have attended yesterdayFootnote2 demonstrated afresh the lively and robust method of enquiry that Mattie Harris brought into being when she invited a small diverse group of people working with children to meet regularly to discuss their work. These seminars, at the very beginning of my work in this field, were a revelation to me. I learnt about children’s feelings, about my numerous naive assumptions, and about the many different contexts of children’s’ lives, since the group included teachers, clinicians and researchers brought together by their interest in understanding everyday experiences and anxieties at work.
At that time, I was working half-time as a lecturer in philosophy to sociology students and half-time as a teacher in a primary school, with responsibility for a small group of children who were difficult to contain or to teach in their classroom. I was given a lot of freedom to invent ways to interest them in school during the mornings they spent with me. This was the 1960s, there was no national curriculum, and this was a school coping with the arrival of Caribbean families to London, most of them living in one or two rooms. We had a band, as luckily there was a piano in the room I used, we did cooking, went to the park, read stories, taped what the children told of their life stories and did sums and reading thrown in. The children were quite a handful, fascinated as I was by them. The seminars helped me to understand their behaviour and my own feelings, which ranged from exhilaration to anxiety and fury, hopefulness alternating with worry and doubt about what I was doing. I learnt that my reactions were to be taken seriously, just as the emotions the children displayed were. I grasped that the two made up the emotional force field it was my job to understand. The experience of this work and the seminar soon convinced me that child psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, with all their potential to reveal meaning in human lives, had a greater hold on my imagination than philosophy. Mattie Harris wrote of the discipline of observation and reflection which formed the core of her approach that it ‘sharpened perception and enhanced imagination’ and I found this very exciting.
The theoretical origins of Work Discussion lie in the family of practices which developed from Bick’s invention of Infant Observation. Studying with close attention the detail of complex human interactions in a steady environment can be adapted to many settings. Young Child Observation was added to Infant Observation in the Tavistock Child Psychotherapy training early on, but then came many other uses of this form of learning. Observation of institutions and in institutions was added to observation in family contexts, of old people in hospital or care homes, of premature babies in neo-natal units, of prisons, children’s’ homes and school classrooms. Work Discussion grew simultaneously with this widening realisation of how much can be learnt from disciplined observation.
The theories on which we draw are substantially psychoanalytic in origin. Transference and counter-transference, container / contained, differentiation of persecutory and depressive anxieties and defences, and a descriptive, developmental understanding of psychic life, in which states of mind belonging to infancy, childhood, adolescence and adulthood all have their place: these are the ideas we work with, usually in the background but underpinning the interpretation we give to what we observe. I am sure we shall hear these fundamental ideas referred to and explored in the next two days alongside questions of role, task, institutional anxieties and defences and different forms of group life.
Trudy Klauber (Tavistock clinic)
I discovered Work Discussion in about 1976, when I enrolled on the Tavistock Course now called ‘Emotional Factors in Teaching and Learning’. It had, in those days, a very long ‘Tavistock’ title starting with ‘Counselling Aspects in Education … .’ Each evening we had a lecture-discussion from Isca Wittenberg or one of her colleagues and a Work Discussion Group when we were asked to present an interaction from our work. The facilitator of my own first Work Discussion Group was Judith Jackson, who listened to each of us in turn reading aloud something which included detailed observation of ourselves and the children or young people with whom we worked. We would then make comments and bring our thoughts, and she made the most interesting links.
I loved that group, as did the other members, I think. We began to compete to present more detailed descriptions of interaction, and, as we did so the discussion became richer and more layered. I was really fascinated by the connections made. It felt truly enlightening to discover the transference between teacher and student and to begin to think that I might be being perceived very differently from my own sense of who I was and what I wanted to offer. Over time, I seemed to have more space in my mind when I was at work, to think about what was happening, as it happened, in the classroom or in one-to-one conversations. This became my ‘subject’ much more so than the Sociology, Humanities and Geography that I was then teaching. I wanted to understand more, and I applied for a place on the Tavistock Observation Course, directed, in those days, by Martha Harris.
After one year, I joined Martha Harris’s own work discussion group on Wednesday evenings. She would arrive, at 7 p.m. often straight from her garden, and with soil still under her finger nails. There was no doubt about the transference to her. We all waited as she Listened to what we had to say and to ask things about each presentation, and she would add brief links which seemed to bring our thoughts together and to make extraordinary sense. She understood that tiny points could link feelings, thoughts and events together and, of course, she had extraordinary insight and wonderful ‘feel’ for the work. Accordingly we all idealised her, and felt that she understood everything, which, with hindsight, might not have been entirely true. She was certainly on an idealised pedestal in my mind but she tried very hard with all the members of the group to ensure that we did not simply wait while she made all the links as she ensured that we all contributed our ideas.
My memories, 40 years later, are that Martha Harris always tried to connect group members’ comments, and often remained quiet except to add just a final point to any phase of discussion. Her modesty, her generosity and her ability to focus deeply, to remain open and not to be drawn into criticism of the presenter, even when we all felt very stirred up, was a wonderful example of a Work Discussion Group leader remaining in role, using the expertise of the group, and bringing together what seemed like disparate and disconnected thoughts in a way which made the picture fall into place. She would have been aware, no doubt, that we were working hard with her, and that very often the link she based on the unspoken communications of the young people with whom we worked.
Mrs Harris was never critical, but she could be very clear and firm when boundaries were overstepped. I recall one occasion when I presented my difficulty with a girl of about 13 who was quarrelling a lot with her mother and had decided that I might be a much better person to look after her. I was idealised and felt very stuck, while she complained endlessly that her mother was not good enough and that I should take her in. One day she noticed a pair of my gloves on a table in my room and said she needed a pair, begging me to ‘borrow them’. I foolishly agreed, feeling weak and powerless to stop her as she explained how cold her hands would get. I mentioned this in my presentation, saying that I had felt unable to stop her taking the gloves. After some discussion in the group, Mattie Harris clearly did not agree. She was not critical; she just talked, after some discussion in the group, about the meaning for the girl of possessing my gloves. She made it clear that it looked like a fantasy of possessing and controlling me and carrying ‘me’ about with her, which might not be good for the girl and certainly not for my task in working with her and her mother in relation to what she needed to feel- properly contained at home and not looking for a new and better mother at school. At the end of the presentation, I remember Mrs. Harris just saying, ‘I think it would be a good idea to get those gloves back as soon as you can.’ I felt immediately the urgency of this, as I understood more of the unconscious dynamics, and I did get them back. The girl was very angry about it but it enabled me to talk to her with greater confidence about her unrealistic ideas and to think about the reality of her situation. It certainly helped her to settle down a bit more and we were able to have more constructive discussions.
Wilfried Datler (Professor at the university of Vienna)
When, approximately 25 years ago, Gertraud Diem-Wille returned from her first extended research visit to London, she called to life the first Infant Observation Group in Vienna. I was fortunate to be invited to participate in this group and continue to be extremely grateful to Gertraud for that invitation to this very day. Because, from the activities of this group, there emerged a good many initiatives, some of which have already been mentioned here today.
The supervisions with Isca Salzberger-Wittenberg, Anne Alvarez and Ross Lazar led our group towards an ever-closer contact with the Tavistock Clinic and its offerings. And soon after that, we were to hear, also, about such things as Young Child Observation and Organisational Observation – and also about Work Discussion, including some lively feedback from two young colleagues who spent a term at the Tavistock.
I soon became convinced that also in Vienna, the principles of Work Discussion should increasingly be employed to teach psychoanalytic understandings within various types of context. And I was glad that some of these plans, along with developments in a number of training courses and seminars, were in fact able to be translated into action.
The experiences we had as events further unfolded, the many conversations with colleagues on an international level and the growing number of publications on the subject of Work Discussion, did, however, also lead to a situation, where today we find ourselves confronted with a multiplicity of questions.
In her introduction as Chair, Agnes Turner spoke about the importance of scientifically dealing with the question of which learning and developmental processes are actually kick-started, in which groups of participants attending Work Discussion seminars. There are, already, a growing number of studies in existence on this subject. Nevertheless, a good many questions remain, as yet, unanswered.
We still know little about the influence of the context within which Work Discussion seminars are being offered, and about the learning processes of the group participants. Is there a difference between, on the one hand, the learning processes taking place in seminars being offered as events in their own right, which serve to further the education of interested individuals, and, on the other hand, learning processes taking place in seminars embedded within more extensive curricula?
Which forms of synergetic interaction can be seen to result when the members of a Work Discussion seminar are obliged to participate, as a parallel activity, in Observation seminars and theoretical seminars, and, beyond that, may even be involved in a personal analysis or a training analysis? Which learning processes are enhanced by such a combination, and which may be, conversely, obstructed? And which consequences arise from such constellations for the leading of such groups?
Worthwhile also might be a series of more deeply probing studies on the types of difficulties which participants in Work Discussion seminars tend to struggle with, and which sorts of support prove to be successful in which sorts of cases. In this context, also, it seems to me relevant to discuss the question of whether all the difficulties we encounter in our seminars can be interpreted as a defence against internal anxieties, or whether there may also be other mental preconditions that, from time to time, hinder the proper working in Work Discussion seminars – or, sometimes, also, facilitate them.
Are we perhaps dealing, also, in some of our seminars, with such dense obstacles that we may view the success of our work in the seminar as, at best, modest? And can we bestir ourselves also to analyse such processes, in order to generate significant insights into the potentialities and limitations of the work done in Work Discussion seminars?
I expect that some experienced seminar leaders, will agree with me if I characterise the Work Discussion principles in the following three points:
Participants in Work Discussion seminars write up once a week, but over an extended period of time, such events as occurred during one hour of their working day when they were also engaged in dealing with other people.
They meet once a week with a group comprising four or five members plus an experienced seminar leader to share copies of their reports or protocols. One such protocol is read out and afterwards scrutinised sentence by sentence and paragraph by paragraph. In the process, particular attention is focused on the following three questions:
How might the people described have experienced the situations they found themselves in?
How, when seen against this background, could the behaviour of the people, as described, be understood?
Which were the lessons they learned and which consequences did these have for the ways and means by which the people experienced the next situation?
The essential thoughts developed within the group are jotted down, forming a set of minutes. If the presenter of the protocol introduces a new protocol some weeks later, the notes of the previous protocol discussion are first read out, to remind the group of the discussion that took place on the earlier occasion.
It may be gleaned, however, from various publications, that Work Discussion groups don’t always adhere to all of these aspects. Occasionally, the gaps between meetings are greater, and likewise the number of participants may be larger. Sometimes the professional role of the authors of Work Discussion protocols is focused, and occasionally processes of organisational dynamics are focused on too.
The proceedings of the conference
This Introductory Session established the context, in terms of the origin, development, and principles of Work Discussion, for the Conference which followed. Its participants were drawn from Austria, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom. 19 papers were presented and discussed, in plenary and parallel format, of which a selection will be published in these two Symposia. The papers described the practice of Work Discussion in a variety of settings, explored problems of establishing and evaluating this method within university contexts, and examined issues of research in Work Discussion.
A concluding session, introduced by Biddy Youell, reviewed the experience of the Conference.
Biddy Youell
My thoughts have clustered around 3 headings.
Celebration
The conference has been a celebration of how far the method has come since Mrs Harris introduced it. It has been a celebration of the way it has been passed on through the generations through complex inter-generational networks and through international links. Not just in the countries represented here, but also in many other places around the globe.
Renewal
Coming together to share ideas and learn is always a pleasure, particularly across national and generational borders. It has been reassuring to see so much common ground, away from the pressures and stresses of our institutions where we are all variously struggling with financial challenges and what can feel like an inexorable move to an anti-reflection, box-ticking way of planning and delivering services.
Margaret Rustin mentioned in her introduction yesterday that the Tavistock is no longer an institution which organises itself so fully according to the psychoanalytically informed principles to which we might subscribe. Of course, many people here are working hard at the Tavistock to preserve as much as possible of this approach, and to make sure that we can go on offering the kinds of courses and trainings (as well as clinical services) which we believe in. This may very well be a picture which is familiar to people working elsewhere and is not unique to the Tavistock or the UK.
Not for the first time, have become preoccupied with an idea of the ‘The Tavistock in the mind’- a version built up in each of our minds from our own particular experience of our contact with Tavistock courses, staff members and publications. Yesterday, it occurred to me that many of us use it – the actual place and the version of it in the mind – as a ‘secure base.’ We can revisit and draw strength from it as we venture further afield.
However, by the end of yesterday and more so today I began to feel that there is a danger of this version becoming too static, too complacent. Somebody today used the phrase ‘huddling together.’ There is a danger that a Work Discussion group can become too mutually supportive to the exclusion of permitting disagreement, pain and struggle.
That brings me to my third heading: Challenge
If the ‘Tavistock in the Mind’ becomes stuck, unchanging and unchangeable, it can become a constraint rather than a good, flexible and resilient object. I think the sense of challenge has grown over the three days. These are some questions have arisen for me from what I have heard during these days of discussion. .
Can we bear the differences which exist between us about how a Work Discussion group should be set up and conducted? And by whom? How much training and qualification is required?
How do we maximise the value of Work Discussion in a wide variety of settings?
How do we assess the learning on university validated courses without squeezing the life out of this experiential form of learning?
How do we engage with the challenge put to us to address aspects of ethnic and other differences? Are we fearful of what we might find?
How do we best make use of research?
While the common ground we have found here – our common enthusiasm for Work Discussion- has been invigorating, the element of challenge we have encountered is essential if this work is to continue to develop.
A second Work Discussion Conference is to take place at the University of Sussex on June 14–16 2019. Details of this will be given in our next issue, with the second Work Discussion symposium.
The symposium of papers
This first collection of papers from the Vienna conference are wide ranging in their use of the Work Discussion model. The papers demonstrate in their different ways the value of individuals coming together to think about and try to understand what is happening in their work. The papers illustrate how discussing work in this way can change the way an individual thinks about his or her role and their primary task in their particular setting, as well as contributing to a clearer understanding about what behaviour might mean.
In our first paper, Geraldine Crehan and Michael Rustin explore why issues of difference in identity may be difficult but important areas of thought to consider in the context of Work Discussion Seminars. This complex question is discussed from a social, cultural and psychoanalytic context. A fascinating clinical vignette from a seminar illustrates one way in which the question of difference can arise in a Work Discussion seminar. The seminar group consists of an ethnically diverse group of people, and we hear that material is presented about children from a school who are predominantly from ethnic minority groups. The presenter describes how children are being excluded from the classroom, which prompts the seminar leader to question what this means for the children and for the staff, who are from different social and ethnic backgrounds.
The vignette allows the reader to follow the way in which the seminar leader is called upon to manage the pull of feelings that are generated within the seminar group by this question, and the dilemma of how to put meaning and words to this, in order to provide some containment and give shape to the feelings evoked.
The paper argues that a Work Discussion seminar is well placed to try to give space to these questions of difference, and the anxieties that arise, but suggests attention must be paid to the external realities and distinctions of situations, as much as internal and unconscious phantasy phenomena.
The next paper is written by Margaret Moore. It is written from her experience of setting up and facilitating a Work Discussion group for teachers who work in isolation in community settings, with individual children presenting with a range of complex needs. She illustrates how the teachers begin by participating in the group by evacuating their frustrations and anxieties about the difficult work they do, and gradually move towards a more reflective position of understanding how some of their fears or anxieties may be experienced by those with whom they work.
Moore describes how her role as facilitator requires patience and a flexible approach. She highlights material about a 13 year old rolling around with a teddy bear that elicits feelings of discomfort in his teacher. Moore realises she is not yet able to pause and try to think more about this material because the group is not yet ready for this type of discussion and the vulnerabilities it may elicit.
It is striking how quickly the teachers come to value and make use of the work discussion group, suggesting how important the space is for them to feel a sense of shared experience and to feel listened to, as they speak about their isolated work.
The following paper is a welcome representation of Viennese research that explores the method of Work Discussion. In their paper, Hover-Reisner, Furstaller and Wininger develop the link between Work Discussion and the theory of mentalisation, initially using case study and observational material. The authors illustrate the changing way in which a teacher attempts to comprehend and perceive the ‘mental states that underlie’ the behaviour of a young child in her care. Significantly, the authors note that the increased sensitivity and attunement of the teacher to her young student can be recognised during the dialogue about the written account in the work discussion seminar. The paper then attempts to explore the interesting question ‘to what degree does participation in work discussion seminars facilitate the capacity to mentalize?’
In the final paper, Alba Greco writes about facilitating a Work Discussion group in Italy that is linked to a project for young people with learning disabilities. The aim of the project is to promote an increased capacity for independent living. It is a powerful account of the struggles that the young people face in separating further from their parents and grappling with daily activities such as shopping for food and relating to one another. Alberto’s journey is both hopeful and moving. Greco shares the workers responses to him that are explored in the work discussion group, alongside vignettes of Alberto that describe his movement from confused and incoherent speech and reading a newspaper upside down to an Alberto who is more in touch with reality. We hear how he communicates to his worker that he accepts he will never learn to drive but perhaps he can learn about road signs (i.e. he can learn more than he thought).
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on Contributors
Laura Pollard is a child and adolescent psychotherapist who is a past assistant editor of Infant Observation. She works clinically in East London with parents and their babies and has a professional doctorate (Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust and the University of East London) in child psychotherapy. Laura Garland (Pollard) is a Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist who trained at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust. She has a first degree in English Literature and a professional doctorate from the Tavistock Clinic and the University of East London. She currently works with mothers and babies in a Crisis Intervention Service in East London.
Michael Rustin is a Visiting Professor at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust and at the University of Essex. He is an Associate of the British Psychoanalytical Society, and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. He has been a contributor to psychoanalytic thinking about politics, society and culture over many years, has had significant responsibility for the academic accreditation of postgraduate programmes of psychoanalytic study at the Tavistock and Portman, where he has also taught on the Psychoanalytic Studies programme since its inception. He has written, edited or co-edited 17 books, and published many journal articles and book chapters. He is a founding editor of Soundings, and a member of the editorial boards of Infant Observation, and Psychoanalysis Culture and Society. His publications include After Neoliberalism: the Kilburn Manifesto (edited with Stuart Hall and Doreen Massey, 2015); Social Defences against Anxiety: Explorations in a Paradigm (edited with David Armstrong 2014); The Inner World of Doctor Who (with Iain MacRury 2014): Reason and Unreason: Psychoanalysis, Science, Politics (2001); Mirror to Nature: Drama, Psychoanalysis and Society (with Margaret Rustin 2002); Narratives of Love and Loss: Explorations in Children’s Fiction (with Margaret Rustin 1989/2001); The Good Society and the Inner World (1991); Closely Observed Infants (edited with L. Miller, J. Shuttleworth and M.E. Rustin, 1985); and Reading Klein (with Margaret Rustin 2016).
Notes
1. Wilfried Datler, Gertraud Diem-Wille, Trudy Klauber, Margaret Rustin, Michael Rustin, Agnes Turner.
2. Just prior to its formal opening session, the Conference arranged for 13 parallel Work Discussion Seminars to take place, with two presentations in each, to give participants an experience (in Vienna) of the actual practice of Work Discussion, in a small seminar group. Two of these presentations, with commentaries, will be published in the second Symposium devoted to papers from the Vienna Conference, in our next issue.