W. Gordon Lawrence – författare

One way of conceptualizing the relationship of individuals, through their roles, to their various groupings (such as families, communities, and business and industrial enterprises) is to consider their political relatedness. This includes an exploration of organizational structures, management, and issues of responsibility, leadership, and authority. Beyond this, the Tavistock open systems approach has always held that unconscious social processes are of central importance in such explorations. The methodology of the approach, therefore, is one that encourages people to consider the unconscious in relation to the political dimensions of institutions, This involves people in examine a range of boundaries, such as those between the inner and outer worlds of the individual, between person and role, and between enterprise and environment. Also involved are less obvious boundaries - or limits, or distinctions - such as those between certainty and uncertainty, order and chaos, innovation and destructiveness, reality and fantasy, and relationship and relatedness.

This broad range of papers covers different aspects of social dreaming.The book begins with a summary of the Social Dreaming Matrix conceptualised as a temporary system with its intakes, transformation processes and outputs. The remaining chapters cover social dreaming in different contexts including, amongst others, from the perspectives of art, architecture, theatre, working with immigrants, with pilots and lawyers and family mediators and hospitals.All the papers cover areas outside of the goal orientated activities of the institution, and examine what they may be saying about the organization of the participants.

Social Dreaming is the name given to a method of working with dreams that are shared and associated within a gathering of people, coming together for this purpose. In the first chapter, he outlines some ideas on this phenomenon. Here follows a wide-ranging collection of essays on the experiences of various practitioners, either personal or what the

Social Dreaming was discovered in the early 1980s at the Tavistock Institute in London. Its focus is on the dream and not the dreamer. It is done with a set of people who come together to share their dreams. This goes against the accepted belief, even dogma, that the study of dreaming can only be pursued in a one-to-one relationship, where one of t

This book explains social dreaming by situating it in the context of thinking, culture, and knowledge and distinguishes how it differs from conventional, therapeutic dreaming, making the case for how it can be used in systems, like business organizations, educational institutions, and hospitals.

"Social Dreaming" is the name given to a method of working with dreams that are shared and associated to within a gathering of people, coming together for this purpose. Its immediate origins date back to the early 1980s. At that time, the author was on the scientific staff of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations. He was a core membe

'"Social Dreaming" is the name given to a method of working with dreams that are shared and associated to within a gathering of people, coming together for this purpose. Its immediate origins date back to the early 1980s. At that time, Gordon Lawrence was on the scientific staff of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations. He was a core member of the Institute's Group Relations Program, within which he had developed a distinctive approach centering around the concept of "relatedness" - that is, the ways in which individual experience and behavior reflects and is structured by conscious and unconscious constructs of the group or organization in the mind...'What Lawrence has discovered or rediscovered in the social dreaming matrix is another context of contexts for dreaming, in which the emotional experience on which our capacity for dreaming, for entertaining dream thoughts, works is not that of the pair but that of the many: group, society, tribe, collective, race, species. Within this or these contracts, the meanings of the dream and dreaming spread out to capture and formulate echoes-of-the-thoughts-that-are-there, in the space between the "many-in-mind".'- David Armstrong, from his Introduction

A volume of collected papers by one of the most prominent thinkers on psychoanalytic processes in organisations. The papers in this collection span two-and-a-half decades and address some of the most difficult, complex, and paradoxical aspects of the human condition.

One way of conceptualizing the relationship of individuals, through their roles, to their various groupings (such as families, communities, and business and industrial enterprises) is to consider their political relatedness. This includes an exploration of organizational structures, management, and issues of responsibility, leadership, and authority. Beyond this, the Tavistock open systems approach has always held that unconscious social processes are of central importance in such explorations. The methodology of the approach, therefore, is one that encourages people to consider the unconscious in relation to the political dimensions of institutions, This involves people in examine a range of boundaries, such as those between the inner and outer worlds of the individual, between person and role, and between enterprise and environment. Also involved are less obvious boundaries - or limits, or distinctions - such as those between certainty and uncertainty, order and chaos, innovation and destructiveness, reality and fantasy, and relationship and relatedness.This volume, with a new foreword by Mannie Sher, describes the educational approach of the Tavistock open systems mode of group relations training for exploring and interpreting such boundary issues and problems. Examples of its application include family systems, rural developments, and organizational development. This volume should be of value to students and teachers of organizational analysis, training, and development, as well as to students and teachers of organizational psychology and sociology.This volume is one of a series being reissued by Karnac Books representing the theory and practice of organizational development used over many years at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations.

This preliminary text explores the phenomenon of social dreaming, a concept first introduced at the Tavistock Institute in 1982. The focus is on the dream and the social context of the dreamers rather than the individual dreamers. The dreams often reflect the social environment of the dreamer and prove to be a useful tool when examining the group dynamics. W. Gordon Lawrence offers many examples of dreams narrated and their applications in the social setting. His extensive experience and knowledge on the subject are combined with an easy to understand language in this important text on social dreaming.

Social Dreaming was discovered in the early 1980s at the Tavistock Institute in London. Its focus is on the dream and not the dreamer. It is done with a set of people who come together to share their dreams. This goes against the accepted belief, even dogma, that the study of dreaming can only be pursued in a one-to-one relationship, where one of the participants is a trained psychoanalyst. The chapters in this book on Social Dreaming indicate the endless possibilities of free association and amplification in social dreaming. Although each writer has conveyed this, there still exist in their texts more detailed connotations and possible meanings of particular dreams. In a sense, their chapters are only beginnings for the reader to expand, as none, is in any sense a complete, final version of the potential meanings of dreams in a particular Social Dreaming Matrix.Examining recalled dreams with many others in a Social Dreaming Matrix leads to the transformation of the thinking embedded in the dreams. There are infinite meanings to a dream by regarding the dream as an unconscious product of cultural knowledge, not as an expression of the psyche exclusively, opening new possibilities of thinking. When the individual unconscious resonates, or reverberates, with others in the Matrix the infinite becomes accessible. Being in the infinite is the mental space where new thinking happens. It is the space in which the dream is regarded as an object by taking a global perspective, and giving one's total attention to it, as if it had never existed before. All the finite knowledge of civilisation begins from having the experience of being in infinity, through the awareness of the unconscious with its time-less and place-less qualities, its symbolism, and its paradoxes.

This broad range of papers covers different aspects of social dreaming.The book begins with a summary of the Social Dreaming Matrix conceptualised as a temporary system with its intakes, transformation processes and outputs. The remaining chapters cover social dreaming in different contexts including, amongst others, from the perspectives of art, architecture, theatre, working with immigrants, with pilots and lawyers and family mediators and hospitals.All the papers cover areas outside of the goal orientated activities of the institution, and examine what they may be saying about the organization of the participants.