BOOKS EDITED
R.D. Hinshelwood and Wilhelm Skogstad (Eds) (2000) Observing Organisations. London: Routledge.
I worked between 1976 and 1993 as a Consultant Psychotherapist in St Bernard’s hospital in West London. When I started there were Som 2000 patients with a mental illness diagnosis. I was the only psychoanalyst and it seemed a drop in the ocean of a the psychiatric practice based on pharmaceutical if I were to practice clinical with any of the two thousand. Instead, I decided to use my specific training to offer support to any staff interested in the unconscious aspects of the patients they cared for. One project I started was an observational experience, rather in line with Esther Bick’s baby observation method. I offered this to young doctors in their psychiatrist training. It became surprisingly popular. Later, I offered a similar opportunity to trainee psychiatrists at the cassel hospital. The book comprises two Chapters about the observation method plus a series of observational studies provided by those who joined this course.
JOURNAL ARTICLES
R.D. Hinshelwood (2016) Reflections on a psychoanalytic contribution to understanding (psychiatric) institutions. In Funczione Gamma https://www.funzionegamma.it/en/category/research-and-clinical-application-of-group-therapy-within-mental-health-services/
I worked in large mental hospital for 17 year (1976-1993). In this paper I give an account of the way I tried to contribute psychoanalytic thinking to the work of doctors (including trainee psychiatrists), nurses, music and art therapists, and at times management. It also describes an out-patient service for individual and group therapy to the local district in West London.
What are Organisations
BOOKS EDITED
R.D. Hinshelwood and Marco Chiesa (Eds; 2002) Organisations, Anxiety and Defence. London: Whurr Publications; Wiley.
With a research colleague from the Cassel Hospital, Marco Chiesa, we edited an international collection of chapters on the anxiety defence structures of organisational cultures. That is to say, the anxiety of the individuals in an organisation arising from the task or from survival (of the organisation or the individual) impacts on the way they do the task together. The concepts of Elliott Jaques and Isabel Menzies is mirrored in other countries with similar or difference conceptions.
JOURNAL ARTICLES
R.D. Hinshelwood (2008) Systems, culture and experience: Understanding the divide between the individual and the organisation. Organisational and Social Dynamics 8: 63-77.
There is often confusion over social dynamics as if a social group or organisation can gave an unconscious like an individual, one that is structured similarly to the individual unconscious in terms of anxiety and defence. In fact if a social group is organised with defensive attitudes, it is a defence against a collective anxiety suffered by the individuals. It is the individuals who unconsciously collect around a set of attitudes that supports their own defences. Unconscious cultural attitudes are supports for the individual unconscious and cannot be said to be a social unconscious. Group dynamics are the cultural expression of individual unconscious dynamics
R.D. Hinshelwood (2022) Oedipus and his group. Funzione Gamma https://www.funzionegamma.it/en/groupal-oedipus-and-the-primary-scene-in-the-network-era/
This Italian website devoted to group dynamics published a paper concerning what importance the Oedipus complex has for understanding the behaviour of groups. It started with the observation that Oedipus plus his parents, a shepherd and his adopting parents form a group with powerful emotional interactions. Those interactions are kept unknown in the group. However, there is one mind, Tiresius who does have an insght into the forbidden knowledge which if known causes a sequence of tragedies.
CHAPTERS IN EDITED BOOKS
R.D. Hinshelwood (1995) Changing prisons: the unconscious dimension. In Murray Cox and Chris Cordess (eds) Forensic Psychotherapy: Crime, Psychodynamics and the Offender Patient. (London: Jessica Kingsley) pp. 465-474.
This is a summary of my experience of working in a prison as a psychotherapist, two-sessions a week. There was a sense of enlightenment that the prison considered therapy as apossible ingredient of rehabilitation. The problem for the institution was the different sets of views on the prescribed guilt of the prisoners. On one hand guilt deserves punishment, and on the other it an impetus to eform and d better. The prisoners and guards were together committed to punishment to be served. This attitude on the part of the dominant groups needs to change if rehab can be successful. This paper discusses the commitment to the punishment view of imprisonment.
R.D. Hinshelwood (2001) The psychosocial process. In R D Hinshelwood and Marco Chiesa (eds) Organisations, Anxieties, Defence: Towards a Psychoanalytic Psychology (London: Whurr).
Though the disciplines of social science and psychoanalysis have contrasting views of the origins of anxiety, conflicts and behaviour, the individual is under pressures from both at the same time. He is the resultant of the combined psychosocial influences.
R.D. Hinshelwood (2002) Applying the observational method: observing organisations. In Briggs, Andrew (ed.) Surviving Space: Papers on Infant Observation London: Karnac.
This book celebrated the work of Esther Bick and I was invited to contribute because the observation method which I and Wilhelm Skogstad developed and edited our book on derived from Bick’s baby observation method.
R.D. Hinshelwood (2013) Observing Anxiety: A psychoanalytic training method for understanding organisations. In Susan Long (ed) Socioanalytic Methods: Discovering the Hidden in Organization and Social Systems. London: Routledge.
Susan Long’s book incorporates psychoanalytic thinking in her social science research. I was invited to contribute to this collection of research studies because the observational method developed for psychiatric trainees at St Bernards Hospital fitted as an example of the approach she calls socioanalytic.
Groups and Institutions
BOOKS
R.D. Hinshelwood (1987) What Happens in Groups (London: Free Association Books).
During my work at the Marlborough Day Hospital I conducted a three-times-a-week therapy group, as well as taking part in the community meetings and the life of the therapeutic community. From this I was able during my learning psychoanalysis to reflect on group dynamics and to write this book, with copious clinical illustrations. The ‘transference’ in groups is radically different from that in a psychoanalytic session.
R.D. Hinshelwood (2001) Thinking about Institutions: Milieux and Madness, London: Jessica Kingsley.
In the course of my career up to this point, I had worked in a variety of mental health institutions from large mental hospitals and a prison, to various therapeutic communities, to out-patient service and private practice.As a result I had been able to give a number of presentations and write a number of papers on groups and institutions. This book is not a collection of them but a distillation of what survived as important from them.
JOURNAL ARTICLES
R.D. Hinshelwood (1972) Patients who lapse from groups (letter). British Journal of Psychiatry 120: 587-588.
I worked in therapy groups from when I was a trainee psychiatrist, starting in 1966. Very early on I became aware of people who did not take to therapy in a group and wh needed an exclusive and safer setting. This ws only a brief letter describing my views on those distinguishing features of people who dropped out.
R.D. Hinshelwood (1979) Demoralisation in the hospital community (Paper given to Napsbury Hospital Staff). Published in Group-Analysis 11: 84-93. Re-published in Hinshelwood, R.D. (2000) Thinking about Institutions. London: Jessica Kingsley].
In the late 1970s, I became interested in the dynamics of the whole organisation, St Bernards being a very large group of thousands — staff plus inmates. This paper was about the distinctly quirky kinds of phenomena that occurred in these highly institutionalised old places.
R.D. Hinshelwood (1985) Anti-therapeutic forms of cohesiveness in groups. International Journal of Therapeutic Communities 6: 133-152.
My interest here was to worry about the problems for group therapy and therapeutic communities that social psychology throws up when we know how individuals can be dominated by group pressures. One naive view of group dynamics is that a cohesive group is a therapeutic one; but the lesson of social psychology is that a cohesive group can be one in which individuals are expected to, and coerced into, conforming. The conforming is regarded as a ‘cure’. It was the beginning of an interest, and concern, that led to my book in 1997 attempting to discriminate coercion from therapy.
R.D. Hinshelwood (1987) The psychotherapist’s role in a large mental institution.
Psycho-Analytic Psychotherapy 2: 207-215.
Psychotherapy has an ambiguous position within the psychiatric services, both needed and somewhat devalued. This paper addresses psychodynamic issues embedded in the unfortunate professional contest between psychological and biological approaches.
R.D. Hinshelwood (2004) Two early experimenters with groups. Group Analysis 37: 323-333.
In my study of groups and the literature on group therapy I became intrigued by the early venturers in this area. This paper is about the work of two people from the 1920s, One was Trigant Burrow who first used the term ‘group dynamics’ and attempted to use groups to dismantle the apparent authoritarianism of individual psychoanalysis; and Jacob Moreno who developed psychodrama as a setting for playing out spontaneous expressions of stressful issues and conflicts.
R.D. Hinshelwood (2007) Bion and Foulkes: The group as a whole. Group Analysis 40: 344-356.
Both Wilfred Bion and Michael Foulkes started their interest in groups and their potential for therapy in wartime. Work with disturbed soldiers who had broken down on the battlefield required a treatment to enable them to rejoin their units and platoons. This required developing models for understanding how individuals relate to their social context. Bion tended to focus on the whole group as the creation of the individuals and to demand they attend to it, while Foulkes took a view of the individual’s experience in relation to the whole group and its manifestation as a matrix.
R.D. Hinshelwood (2010) Organisational schism: Looking after a psychiatric service. Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy 24: 202-212.
One of the disturbing things about a psychiatric service is how the different disciplines tend to work in isolation and without much reference to each other. Indeed, they operate without much reference to the experiences and views of their patients. This paper discusses this problem and the views that very separate disciplines hae of each other which keeps them apart and allows little understanding o the work of each other
R.D. Hinshelwood (2012) Group psychotherapy and mental health: Whose dynamics? European Journal of Psychotherapy and Counselling 14: 201-212.
This special issue edited by Claudi Neri sought to examine problems of psychotherapy in institutions. The paper I wrote discusses how in an institutional setting the relations between therapist and client becomes hierarchical with the professional dominating. That therapeutic relationship is always in danger of taking on the pattern of the managed institution in which the therapy takes place. Mental health institutions are especially prone to control because of the inherent anxiety that madness causes everyone in society’
R.D. Hinshelwood (2020) Unresolvable controversies: Investigating the unconscious in groups. International Journal of Controversial Discussions 2: 102-118; Retrieved from https://ijcd.internationalpsychoanalysis.net/ ijcd.internationalpsychoanalysis.net+1
Prior to Freud’s death in 1948 he kept a rigid control of what counts as psychoanalysis. Since then there has been an increasing number of divergences from his classical model. Though debate in any discipline can be useful, the capacity of debate between schools of psychoanalysts is very limited for various reasons. In this paper, I tried to cover the factors causing those limitations. But in particular, as in any individual, grou or intergroup relations unconscious factors are the most difficult to track down. Surprisingly psychoanalysts are particularly resistant to th view they are subject to unconscious interference in their thinking.
CHAPTERS IN EDITED BOOKS
R.D. Hinshelwood (1996) I have an idea…. In David Kennard and Neil Small (eds) Living Together (London: Quartet) pp. 126-144.
This was a popular paperback intended to inform the general public about the nature of groups of people together. It was itself contributions from a group of people wih various views on the way people are, passionate, cognitive, visionary, indifferent.
R.D. Hinshelwood (2012) Personal trauma and collective disorder: The example of organisational psychodynamics in psychiatry. In Hopper, Earl (ed.) Trauma in/and Organisations. London: Karnac.
This collection of chapters views the impact of distressed people on the nature of organisations from a variety of points of view. My own contribution rviewed my reflections on organisations that took in and housed people with mntal disorders so sever they could not be tolerated any longer by family friends and society. It is a serious demand on an organisations to tolerate and care for people collected together because they had become intolerable to others. Such organisation as the large mental hospitals of old could understandably become disturbed organisations.
R.D. Hinshelwood (2018) The institutions of psychoanalysis and psychiatry. In Claudio Eizirik and Giovanni Foresti (eds) Psychoanalysis and psychiatry: Partners and Competitors. London: Routledge.
I was pleased to be asked to contribute to a publication for the book series of the International Psychoanalytical Association. Once again it was an opportunity to consider if, and how, the distress of those that psychoanalysts and psychiatrists work and care for are deat with by the specific carers, and whether they find their own ways to keep a distance from being invded or impacted by the distress brought to them.
Thinking about Group Experience
EDITED BOOKS
Tiago de Sousa Mendes and R.D. Hinshelwood eds (2024) Containment and Organisations: Unconscious Anxiety and the Working Task. (London: Routledge).
This book which I helped Tiago to edit, was an attempt to collect views on the now-fashionable conception of the process of containment. The conception grew out of the clinical observation of projective identification first indicated by Melanie Klein and Herbert Rosenfeld, and described in most detail by Wifred Bion. This book specifically focused on organisations and institutions which are particularly in demand to be projected into in the way for the development of individuals within the organisation. Organisations are very varied in the way they handle these unconscious demands, the demand being largely unconscious for both those in need of containing and those expected to fulfil the need. It is not of course a part of the prescribed role of such organisations; nevertheless the demand is incessant.
JOURNAL ARTICLES
R.D. Hinshelwood (1987) Social dynamics and individual symptoms. International Journal of Therapeutic Communities 8: 265-272.
The relation between the rigid need for personal defensive attitudes and behaviour to avoid intolerable anxiety in an individual affects his relations and thus in a collective way the combination of everyone’s defences makes for a community that is always unique.
R.D. Hinshelwood (1988) Models of demoralisation. British Journal of Psychotherapy 5: 218-227.
Demoralisation is not a common description of the state of in an institution in the contemporary world though it applies particular to units of soldiers in wartime. However, the behaviour in a working institution can become simple mechanical acts that loose a creative meaning. This may be more common in those institutions working with people. Examples of a reverberation between these rigid cultural attitudes and the individuals; dejected mood at work such that individual and culture can interact to dispose th hole organisation into an ossification.
R.D. Hinshelwood (1989) Communication flow in the matrix. Group-Analysis 22: 261-269.
The experience of each other in a grou[ entails a degree of identification, not only with what they think, but also with what they feel as a person at tht moment. In a group situation such feelings can move fom one peron to another in a chain of unconscious identifications. However the exact experience can change from one link to the next
R.D. Hinshelwood (1993) Locked in role. Journal of Forensic Psychiatry 4: 427-440.
In the 1970s, I worked as a psychotherapist in Wormwood Scrubbs prison when there was a considerable psychological input to prisoners’ treatment and rehabilitation. I left after a couple of years with the sense that psychotherapy was not going to make much headway against the culture of the prison, which was based on evasion of the emotions of guilt and helplessness – by both staff as well as prisoners. A schism between toughness and weakness seemed to play out an emotional defensiveness in rigid roles at the social level.
R.D. Hinshelwood (2008) Group therapy as psychic containing. International Journal of Group Psychotherapy 58: 283-302.
The need for people to ‘contain’ each other’s experiences is now widespread in the contemporary model of psychoanalytic practice, when one person needs another as a kind of auxiliary ego to manage intolerable experiences. Such a process brings insight into play for the suffering individual. Such a process can also play out in the context of group therapy where the other members will collective function as this auxiliary ego, guided by the group conductor.
CHAPTERS IN EDITED BOOKS
R.D. Hinshelwood (1982) The individual and the social network. In Malcolm Pines and Lisa Raphaelson (eds) The Individual and the Group, Volume 1 (London: Plenum) pp. 469-477.
The sociologists’ understanding of the network of group, tightly bounded or not, can be used for understanding the unconscious projective-introjective links and identifications that are the focus on a psychodynamic group therapy. How these grow up to form a group matrix is the task of the therapy as well as the factors in the individual’s acceptance of the pressures that push him into a role that is a node in the matrix.
R.D. Hinshelwood (2003) Group mentality and ‘having a mind’. In Malcolm Pines and Bob Lipgar (eds.) Building on Bion: Volume 1, Roots: 181-197. London: Jessica Kingsley.
This chapter introduces many issues that have developed in my thinking in recent years. What does it mean to have a mind? It is something that is easily put out of action as Bion described in his late paper on ‘Making the best of a bad job’. A mind is what makes the best it can of the in-flooding of experiences it has to try to represent. It is based on Bion’s intersubjective notions of alpha-function and projective identification.
R.D. Hinshelwood (2013) Being disturbed: The impact of severe personality disorder on professional carers?. In Steven Walker (ed.) 2013 Modern Mental Health: Critical Perspectives on Psychiatric Practice. St Albans: Critical Publishing Ltd.
Psychiatry is a discipline that invites mental disturbance from society into its special care. Despite a degree of omnipotence in that posture, the accumulation of intolerable distress has an impact on the everyday shifts of the work nurses and other staff do. It is for the staff, unlike patients, relentless continuous. It is a torrent of madness they are committed to day in and day out. The chapter is one of the many expositions of this theme. Here it is adapted to the understanding of those who are not mental health professionals.
Psychoanalysis and Education
JOURNAL ARTICLE
R.D. Hinshelwood (2009) Do unconscious processes affect educational institutions? Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry 14: 509-522.
Having been persistently interestd in the stress of psychiatry the invitation to a conference on psychoanalysis and education gave me the impetus to speculate on whether there was a comparable innate stress in schools. I was aware of Homer Lane and the progressive education movement that recommended engaging children in a distracting curiosity rather than threatening punishment. The nature of curiosity and the stress of learning seemed to capture some similar anxieties and might prompt the recourse to guilt and punishment.
Families
JOURNAL ARTICLES
R.D. Hinshelwood (1971) Family constellation and drop-outs from groups. British Journal of Psychiatry 117 (letter).
Before becoming a psychoanalyst I had noted that the position within the family, central or peripheral seemed a determining factor in whether therapeutic community members stuck with the treatment offer or dropped out. This was a brief letter.
R.D. Hinshelwood (1972) Schizophrenia and family function. British Journal of Social Psychiatry 6: 26-37.
This built on a previous discovery that position in the sibling order affected the risk of schizophrenic episodes. It had the implication that relational factors in the family were at least a partial factor in the risk, despite the widespread conviction that the condition was neurological.
CHAPTERS IN EDITED BOOKS
Gary Winship and R.D. Hinshelwood (2006) Orestes and democracy. In Prophecy Coles (ed) Sibling Relationships. London: Karnac.
At this time there was suddenly an interest in whether psychoanalysis (supposedly focusing so exclusively on the influence of the Oedipal parents) had left out the influence of siblings in the early development of a child, or reduced it overmuch to mere sibling rivalry. Being now an ‘experienced’ grandparent, I was intrigued, Gary contributed an alternative myth from Ancient Greece, which developed a very different side to sibling relations concerning solidarity and colleaguely destruction of the parents.
R.D. Hinshelwood (2015) Couples and primitive processes. In Aleksandra Novakovic (ed) Couple Dynamics. London: Routledge.
Freud saw the Oedipus complex as the major unconscious determinant of relations, conflicts and disorders within families and personalities. However, Klein’s research into more fundamental issue such as the formation of the ego rather than merely its function imply that couples come together in ways that result in more fluid interactions of parts of the personality and of internal objects.
R.D. Hinshelwood (2022) Otherness in groups: The nursing couple and Oedipal relations. In Smadar Ashauch and Avi Berman (es) Sibling Relations and the Horizontal Axis in Theory and Practice: London: Routledge.
This chapter considers the impact family impact on individuals from a very early age. Examples are given to illustrate the two basic forms of experience in a family, strikingly described by Ron Britton. Firstly a baby is a part of an exclusive feeding couple; and secondly a witness of an excluding couple in some form of feeding or sexual intercourse with each other inclusive versus exclusive experience show as culture of groups that influence a groups therapeutic potential.