Book launch: Group relations and other meditations by Carlos Sapochnik

You are warmly invited to an online launch of ‘Group Relations and other Meditations’ by Dr Carlos Sapochnik, presented in conversation with Julian Lousada. Participants will have the opportunity to listen to short introductions to the book, as well have the chance to participate in an audience discussion.

This work will allow psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, group therapists, organizational consultants and trainers to put the lessons learned from group relations conferences into everyday practice.

About the book

This book examines the Tavistock tradition of using group relations conferences as temporary training organisations for groups and institutions, and how those can inform and enrich the theory and practice of experiential learning.

It analyses the structures, rituals, and beliefs of the practice, drawing on the author’s learned experience in the field, followed by meditations on the social nature of corruption, martial arts, Western culture’s longing for creativity, and the use of drawing in social science research. It addresses the tension between psychoanalysis and systemic theory in group relations thinking, refining and re-defining key concepts, challenging notions of dependence and dependency, performative poetics, learning, the politics of power, nostalgia, and the unspoken reasons for the wish to join conference staff teams.

The many strands address dimensions of group life that crucially affect our everyday living and surviving, both as individuals and as members of society.

Group Relations and other Meditations is available NOW to pre-order on the Routledge website.

About the author

Carlos has worked as an organisational consultant within a systems psychodynamic framework since 2004, across diverse environments but particularly in mental health, higher education and the voluntary sector.

He trained at the Royal College of Art, the Tavistock Clinic, and the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths College where he completed a doctoral project on observing, forgetting and drawing groups.

His current work is centred on experiential learning in groups and in research, with a particular focus on the vicissitudes of translation in the process of observing groups, making drawings and writing ethnographies.

Media reviews

"Carlos Sapochnik's book is a real gift and was very much needed. I have rarely found such a thorough and innovative text on Group Relations Conferences, as 'a learning device' about 'inside' and 'outside' groups and organisations, and on group life in general. The psychoanalytical and the systems theory are brilliantly integrated with the practitioner's real and emotional experience. This work provides an excellent example of the hermeneutic tradition of questioning and interpreting meanings in search of truth, not as a 'principle', but as an 'inter-subjective collaborative enterprise. "

Louisa Diana Brunner, Leadership Consultant and Executive Coach, Independent Researcher, Group Relations Conferences Staff and Director

"This is an exhilarating and complex book that vividly reminds me of the pleasure and stimulation of working with Carlos Sapochnik in many conferences. It combines scholarship with the invitation to think and play, proposing that creativity is not a quality of the gifted but intrinsic to human nature. The book contains intriguing ideas for the reader to engage in the spirit of open minded enquiry. Above all, we are invited to explore the immense contribution that the application of psychoanalytic thinking can make to contemporary discourses."

Julian Lousada, Psychoanalyst and Organizational Consultant

"Carlos Sapochnik has made an important and perceptive addition to the literature on group relations. This book is a distinctive interrogation of the author's lived experience of group relations as an approach to personal and systemic learning. The author questions and critiques this method as a way of enhancing our understanding and enjoyment of it. He provides the reader with insightful conclusions about group relations as a learning process; and offers important 'meditations' on power, corruption, aggression and creativity within systems of learning and organizing."

Russ Vince, Professor of Leadership and Change, School of Management, University of Bath, UK