I would like to share with you why from my experience these conferences are powerful and why they matter. I credit what I learned in the GR conferences for my career trajectory. I would have never been able to even attempt to take on a leadership position without what I learned there, and what I learned would not have been possible to learn anywhere else. In my first conference, I understood the power of projective identification in groups, an experience that was very intense and that almost drove me to leave the conference on my second day. To be filled through my own valence with powerful feelings and to experience immediate relief from these feelings when my group members begin to engage similar feelings that they were holding back out of fear, is quite stunning. Although as analysts, we work with projective identification in the dyad, the experience is of a whole other magnitude when the projective field is vast and projections are flying in all directions between all individuals at the conference.

As the conference unfolded, and to my surprise I saw the fear I had of taking up much authority. I had thought of myself as very comfortable doing so, until I saw the way I sat back, worried about joining any group out of an anxiety about joining a group I did not identify with and ended up missing out on finding a group I really wanted to be part of. Even more astounding to me, was that weeks after the conference ended,  I realized that I managed to go through the conference without recognizing who the director was. She was completely invisible to me. My ability to take action and to work effectively across the boundary with the staff was crippled by an old anxiety related to childhood experiences of those in charge.

​

That conference experience shook me deeply and it was all it took to get me interested in this work. I felt that I had stumbled into a world rich with possibilities for learning about phenomena and experiences I had not realized existed and that I knew were important, although not quite sure yet how and why.

​

I went back for another conference to work on taking more initiative. I wanted to use my voice to speak about what mattered to me. I decided to experiment with the exercise of leadership and was immediately hit with the actual dangers of such an exercise, such as exposure, humiliation and failure. I realized that to stand up and claim what group I wanted to form and why risked that I might stand alone with no one interested in joining me or joining the task I saw worth making a claim on.

Why am I telling you this? Because this kind of learning changed my life both personally and professionally. It made me realize that attention to the emotional experience we have in organizations is very important. Who we think we are and who we actually are in organizations are rarely the same think. And it is simply because something regressive happens to us when we join groups and organizations. The bigger the group we are a part of, the more powerful the regressive forces are. Joining requires relinquishing aspect of ourself for the sake of the collective and larger task, and it requires being in relation to a mission and the vision of leaders, activating unconscious and old feelings we have vis a vis authority figures.

​

This matters a great deal and is rooted in our beginnings. Our entry into the world immediately confronts us with navigating life and negotiating our needs with authority figures, our parents, teachers, and others in a range of contexts.  As analysts we know all too well how these early authority relationships imprint us with a framework about how the world works, in dyadic relationships and in groups. Our past becomes our predictive model that we roll forward in an attempt to make the best guess about what is likely to come at us and to prepare ourselves as best we can for the experiences ahead and the dangers that lye within them.

This is why organizational and group life is very complicated. And if it is very hard to see how that is the case, a glimpse at what happens in the world on a daily basis is a good window into the regressive forces that operate as a result of all of our membership to groups, small within our immediate circles and large ones, whether based on national identity, political identity, religious identity or some other ideology.

​

I hope that not many people get to grow up in wars. They are terrible. I grew up in one for the first 15 years of my life. As a Lebanese, I saw ordinary people, who are my neighbors or members of my religious community, carry weapons and slaughter members of different religious groups at check points in the name of God and identity. I often wondered as a child and adolescent about how ordinary people who are not criminals could commit such atrocities.

What I came to understand is that this is an aspect of the regressive forces that operate as a result of group membership. The unthinkable actions were irrational actions meant in fantasy to protect the collective identity and therefore survival of the group one belongs to, based on an urgency for survival that is akin to the urgency one feels when confronted with a life threatening situation.

I have said a lot. I hope you join me in this undertaking for you to discover what this work has to offer you based on where you come from and where you are now.