Groups use unconscious defense mechanisms to simplify complexities, reduce uncertainty, manage threat and anxieties, deal with feelings of panic, aggression inadequacy, intimacy and dependency, and create an illusion of optimism, harmony and calm.

The following authors use psychodynamic models to understand group behaviour:

  • Elmes and Gemmill (1990) – Mindlessness and dissent.
  • Kraus (1997) – Harnessing aggression.
  • Diamond and Adams (1999) – Ethical behaviour.
  • Gemmill and Wynkoop (1991) – Transformation.

Mindlessness

Mindlessness is a state in a group in which critical thinking is sluggish. Individuals repress and suppress perceptions differing from the majority. The group processes information automatically on the basis of pre-existing scripts and a rigid frame of reference, inappropriate or inadequate for coping with emerging issues.

Group emotion is intensified by individual members increasing the excitement around a common emotion without critical thought.

The rigid frame of reference:

  • Simplifies the world.
  • Protects the group from feelings of panic, chaos, ambivalence and instability.
  • Provides an illusion of control and stability.
  • Masks feelings of powerlessness, helplessness, confusion and panic.

Distorting inner and outer reality, to preserve a false sense of stability and safety, prevents the group from carrying out creative or effective work.  The group regresses to infantile narcissistic fantasies of personal perfection and omnipotence. This regression is based on the illusion of the group recreating the love and protection felt in the womb.

Splitting and projection

Unable to take ownership of the anxiety aroused by real or imagined hostility, group members project their aggressiveness and other negative and positive components with which they feel least safe (e.g. rebelliousness, courage, anger or creativity) onto out-groups and significant others associated with the group.

This creates an illusion of harmony but internal struggles continue to rage under the surface.

Within the group

In an important step, members attempt to express intellectual and emotional differences by projecting disowned components onto others within the group, rather than onto out-groups. This establishes the role of dissenter who plays a positive (charismatic hero) or negative (Whine-bag scapegoat) role.

The unconsciously recruited dissenters dramatise group conflicts, allowing other members to participate vicariously in the dramatisation, idealise the hero, vilify the scapegoat and cling to their rigid frame of reference.

The Scapegoat

The Scapegoat role expresses the undiscussible feelings of uncertainty, anger and guilt for the group. Labelled as misfits or troublemakers, they serve as container for disowned negative feelings in the group and tend to strengthen the cohesiveness and solidarity of the group around the rigid frame of reference.

The Hero

The group unconsciously collude to create a mythical, charismatic, bold leader. Members project onto the leader their disowned ability to creatively and constructively cope with emerging group issues. With childlike dependence they relegate all capacity for critical thought, inspiration and emotion to the leader. Members eschew the pain and anxiety associated with learning from their own efforts and mistakes for the simplest spoon-fed explanations.

The leader myth provides a safe place for disowned thoughts and feelings but also serves to contain intra-group envy and competition which would otherwise threaten to destroy the illusion of group harmony or leader omniscience. Members go to great lengths to preserve the illusion of harmony, adopting a rigid egalitarianism with equal vote and equal say-so in order to be loved equally by the leader. They draw away from the leader to deepen the illusion of omniscience and magic and to ward off feelings of envy, jealousy and competitiveness within the group.

Positive dissenters who persist in their views, and are consistent over time are able to influence perceptions, modify behaviours and improve the problem solving capacity of the group.

Reparation

Maintaining the split requires massive, energy-sapping, self-deception about each member’s own powerlessness and the exaggerated power of others in the group. The projections are also self-fulfilling as they reinforce unconsciously projected roles.

Second order or deep change requires members to reclaim their split off parts through reparation.

Evidence of defensive routines

When defensive projection operates in a group the members see each other as sources of hostile aggression, distorted foes to be feared. When the group is stuck in collective projection they will display:

  • Ritualised behaviours to avoid expressing feelings
    (“we will stick to this agenda even if it gets us nowhere”)
  • An atmosphere of helplessness and a fear of failure.
    (“This is impossible! How could they expect us to do this?”)
  • Fear of standing out, especially to voice feelings of frustration and anger.
  • Members denying any ownership of feelings of anger voiced by another member.
  • Splitting, projecting, denigration and idealisation to create scapegoats and heroes.
    (“Joe is such a twit!”)
  • Poker-faced mindlessness.
    (“Who me???”)

Unveiling projections allows the group to understand the underlying anxieties and free themselves to create what they want from the group. However attempts to deal with the anxieties may raise further defenses and increase the perceptions of the group as a hostile place.

A change model

Gemmill and Wynkoop (1991) describe the psychodynamics of transformation in small groups. When enough individuals in the group embrace the anxiety associated with change, making a conscious effort to take back their projections, the resulting process of change is chaotic, painful and deep.

The deconstruction model shows four areas with a chaotic vortex in the middle, where second order deep and unpredictable change happens, and an outer area where teams regress to safer less authentic or effective behaviours.

Hanging On

The group clings mindlessly to an inappropriate frame of reference. Splitting and projection have established covert hero and scapegoat roles in the group. The work of the group is to take ownership of the need for change and their resistance to the new world.

Entry into the next phase takes place when a critical mass of members collapse defensive routines to express and experience deep emotions.

As the group moves on, some of the members may not make the change and regress into a state of denial in which they are lost in defensive routines.

I suggest the role of the team coach, in this phase, is to surface the clinging behaviour and gently assist the group to understand the futility and counter-productivity of defensive routines.

Working Through

The group define the boundaries permeable enough to allow deep sharing and mutual discovery around the focal issue but rigid enough to prevent members being swept away by emotions and losing sight of their integrity (riot behaviour).

A regressive stance is experienced when group members are not able to articulate their personal experience of the focal group issue.

Entry into the next phase is made possible by a critical mass within the group exploring their past, present and anticipated future experiences together.

I suggest the role of the team coach is to hold the conversation space and assist the team to create permeable boundaries, to expand emotional boundaries and to articulate a shared description of the focal group issue.

Letting Go

Members embrace the void in which they have let go of the old but not learnt the new. The work of the team is to experience the despair, hopelessness and emptiness associated with the death of the current way of dealing with the focal issue.

Entry into the next phase happens when a critical mass take ownership of their emotions and their intellectual and imaginative abilities and decide to test new approaches.

Some of the group may not be willing to engage in the next process and become lost in emptiness. They become the living dead.

I suggest the team coach can play a support role here to enable the team to embrace the anxieties of the void as they manage the tension between relaxing in their lack of understanding and to take responsibility for transformation. The coach should also be aware of individuals requiring individual coaching.

Moving Beyond

Members begin a process of awkward experimentation, allowing themselves and others to fail as they wait for the penny to drop.

Transformation is attained when a core group integrate new meanings and new patterns of behaviour.

A regressive solution emerges when the group become permanently unstable, lost in continuous experimentation, unable to make a final decision about how to operate.

I suggest the role of team coach is to support the team in the learning process and assist them to deal with the uncertainty, awkwardness and tentativeness inherent in the phase. The coach should also know when to stand aside as the team launches into a new phase of productivity.

Conclusion

I have on occasion stopped a workshop and asked the group what was going on. This has sometimes given the group an opportunity to acknowledge and accept unconscious anxieties, allowing them to move on. I have, though, had groups respond that there is nothing going on and that it is just my “stuff”.

In researching this note I learnt something of the realities and complexities of the unconscious processes.  I am convinced of the value of developing a psychodynamic stance in dealing with individuals and groups. There is real benefit in raising psychodynamic issues when it is appropriate. But working with psychodynamics should be done with care.