Social Dreaming - History

History

Social Dreaming was discovered at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, London, in 1982 by Gordon Lawrence, when he was a member of the scientific staff and joint-director of the Institute's Group Relations Education Programme (with Eric Miller). The thinking of Social Dreaming arose out of these experiences. At the time little mention was made of dreaming in that work and when a dream was voiced in any group situation there existed no method of working with it. The Tavistock method had Wilfred Bion's Experiences in Groups as its intellectual lynch-pin and focused on the dynamics of groups as they affected authority relations. The personality factors of participants were deemed to be a private matter, not for public examination. This depended on Bion's formulation that a group could be examined using two perspectives, what he called Oedipus and Sphinx. The first could see the group as a product of the pairing issues of the participants but the second related to problems of knowledge and scientific method which the group were using to advance the learning and understanding, of the group as a whole. The Tavistock method uses the Sphinx perspective exclusively.

Dreams, if ever used in a group, always illuminated the existential life of the group but the only method available was that of Oedipus. Lawrence felt that a method of dream-examination needed to be available to be congruent with the Programme's Sphinx posture. Having examined the anthropological and dreaming literature Lawrence discovered Charlotte Beradt's The Third Reich of Dreams . Beradt had collected dreams before the war in Germany, using general practitioners as her source. She discovered that the dreams of the Jewish patients did not arise from their inner, personal conflicts but arose from the social milieu of Hitler's Third Reich which persecuted the Jewish population by means of propaganda, half-truths and lies.

Once this was digested the method of Social Dreaming could take shape because dreams could be used to illumine social situations, provided the knowledge perspective was used, and not the classic Oedipal one.

In devising the first experiment in Social Dreaming at the Tavistock Institute, it was recognized that the exploration of the dreams was to be the focus. For that reason the collection of people taking part was described as a Matrix, to differentiate it from a group. A Matrix is a place from which something grows, and Matrix acknowledged the unconscious, both personal and social in that it was the feelings and emotions of the participants that were critical. It was felt, intuitively, that if it was described as a 'group', the invitation would be to explore the dynamics of the group to the detriment of the dreaming process. A group is bounded by a universe of meaning but a Matrix makes possible, and can tolerate, a multi-verse of meaning. Divergent thinking is possible in the Matrix.