Abstract
To be disappointed is to be human, to be disappointing is also to be human. This article will invite reflection upon the under-theorised phenomenon of disappointment and its relationship to ‘failure’, to ‘hope’ and perhaps even ‘forgiveness’ (or the lack if it). The central premise is that to engage with ‘disappointment’ in our internal relatedness, and in our interpersonal and social relationships may enable us to re-connect with our own and others’ humanity – and not to do so is to remain stuck, aggrieved, resentful and locked into cycles of reciprocal self- and other-destructive violence and recrimination. The article will seek to explore disappointment as a ‘disturbance of groupishness’ (Bion, 1961, emphasis added), ‘a location of disturbance’ (Foulkes, 1948/1983 emphasis added) and a way of structuring the traumatised organisation-in-the-mind (Armstrong, 2005; Scanlon, 2012). The article will conclude with an invitation for psycho-social practitioners to leave our psycho-social retreats (consulting rooms, libraries, classrooms and the like) and, once again, to engage more deliberatively with conversations in ‘public spheres’ (Habermas, 1968).
Carpe diem: time to wake up…?
Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of others. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious… Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes. (C.G. Jung (1931) (cited in Adler and Jaffe, 1973))
In his prescient and prophetic poem ‘Choruses’ from The Rock, T.S. Eliot (1934) writes ‘they constantly try to escape from the darkness outside and within, by dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good’. The sense of the poem, at one of the many levels at which it can be read, was that the establishment, in Eliot’s case the established Church, was in a terrible collusion with its congregation to provide simplistic institutionalised solutions to the complex moral and ethical problems of the day. In this article I wish to make use of this paradigm to discuss the ways in which, through our personal and collective failure to address the darkness outside and within, we are in danger of sleep-walking into psycho-social and ecological catastrophe by repeatedly dreaming-up systems/institutions that do not enable us to think/feel about ‘the good’ – and what needs to be done to address the darkness outside and within.
A central premise of the argument is that to struggle with disappointment enables us to live and work together in these good-less social systems/institutions, and further that to engage with the good requires us, both to engage with our sleeping/waking day/night dreams/mares, and also to wake up and to seize the day. I want to propose that disappointment is an existential-given because ‘man [sic] is a group animal who is constantly at war, not only with the world, but also with himself [sic] for being a group animal’ (Bion, 1961). This essentially ambivalent and bipolar psycho-social tension is an aspect of what Bion elsewhere describes as a ‘disturbance of groupisheness’ (Bion, 1961) that arises as a narcissistic injury in relation both by the affront caused by the disappointing inevitability of our own and others’ death (Yalom, 1980; 2008), but more importantly because of the compromises that are demanded by ‘life before death’. In this sense disappointment as a location for this group-ish disturbance becomes a murmuring symptom of what cannot be articulated (Foulkes, 1948/1983).
For Craib (1994) this existential disappointment is also about needing to, and failing to, recognise the frailty and vulnerability of our- and others’-selves, and to grieve and mourn these cumulative losses in socio-political matrices where disappointment, like all other psycho-social/material resources, is not equally distributed. A world which, at its roots and branches, is characterised by the marked socio-economic differentials between those who are understandably extremely disappointed and those others who, though doubtless wrestling with their own disappointment, are also extremely disappointing (Butler, 2004; Dorling, 2010; Cooper and Whyte, 2017; Benjamin, 2018; Wilkinson and Pickett, 2009; 2017 among others).
Exploring the intersection of disappointment with experiences of being disrespected Gilligan (2000: 109) suggests, in the vernacular, that to be ‘dissed’ is also to be humiliated, and that the experience of feeling (a)shamed is at the core of much of the traumatising interpersonal and structural violence that characterises modern society. In this sense to take disappointment seriously is to revisit our individual and shared experience of feeling ‘dissed’ and to explore the ways in which this experience forms the traumatised organisation-in-the-mind (Armstrong, 2005; Scanlon, 2012) and so shapes the shaky foundations of all the social structures that we co-construct. It is also to explore disappointment, existentially, affectively, relationally and performatively as a psycho-social phenomenon that forms the substrate of relational family, neighbourhood and community matrices where lasting solutions to everyday social conflicts and inequalities are rare, and where disappointment prevails.
The psycho-social proposition I want to make is that if/when we become better able to appreciate our inner existential disappointments, this in turn will allow us more effectively to take up our respective roles as Reflective Citizens (Gould et al, 2011; Clancy et al, 2012; Mojović, 2019) – and vice versa. If we are able to take up this binocular perspective Richards (2019) suggests that conversations could be re-imagined and re-framed to ask how we, as psycho-socialists, might makes links between the darknesses within ‘the organisation-in-the-mind’ (Armstong, 2005), and the darkened-ness of the socio-political world without: between the ‘good society and the inner world’ (Rustin, 1991). In Eliot’s terms it is to find new/better/different ways to be good or at least, to paraphrase Samuel Beckett (1983) to give us an incentive to try again, to fail again and to fail better.
In this context I am inviting us to find new, more ordinary, ways of engaging with our dreams and appointments such that we might wake-up ourselves, and each other, into a different relationship with our more intimate relational and civic matrices, and the wider social and collective unconsciousness that permeates to the core (Jung, 1959; Foulkes, 1948/1983; de Mare, 1991; Lawrence, 1998; 2005; Hopper, 2002). In order to escape the entrapment of these inner/outer darknesses, the invitation is to psycho-socialists of all kinds – perhaps especially psychotherapists and teachers/academics – to consider leaving the relative comfort of well-lit consulting rooms, libraries and classrooms within, and to join with others in the darknessness without.
Practising cynical disappointment?
In earlier work, John Adlam and I (Scanlon and Adlam 2008; 2019; Adlam and Scanlon, 2011) made use of the life and times of the ancient itinerant Cynic philosopher Diogenes of Sinope, who lived in a barrel in the Agora, and his trenchant commentary about the nature of the inequality/unfairness that he perceived in the world surrounding him. We suggested that the life of Diogenes stood as a metaphor/paradigm for the psycho-social challenges facing ‘the dis-membered’, ‘the dis-respected’, ‘the dis-ordered’, ‘the dis-enfranchised’, and other ‘dissed’ persons, as well as those of us tasked with engaging them. Alongside various other stories in the life and times of Diogenes, we described how, on one occasion, emerging from his barrel, he was seen begging from a statue of a goddess in the Agora and when asked what he was doing he famously replied that he was ‘practising disappointment’ – which we suggested was a very useful skill for us all to acquire and cultivate but particularly for those of us who find ourselves living inferiority (Charlesworth et al, 2004).
Linking his formulation to the failure to grieve and to mourn Craib (1994) suggests that we consider disappointment as a necessary aspect of the human condition which demands that we be in a complex/ambivalent relationship with something that doesn’t happen. He suggests that the more we deny the extent of our individual and collective disappointment, the more we become involved in breaking the links and connections between people, and within ourselves: between relationships and relatedness (Armstrong, 2005). Craib’s contention was that disappointment contains a painful interplay between intense longing and profound unrequited sadness; a painful bipolarity of regressive/progressive forces that demands an inevitably disappointing relinquishing of some-things in order to make space for somethings else – an observation made all the more poignant when we consider that at the time of his writing Craib was unwell with a serious illness, a recurrence of which sadly and prematurely ended his life, shortly after (Roper, 2003).
In his relational work with couples Coleman (2014) suggests that disappointment, as the cause of much relationship breakdown, is both an inevitable and a necessary feature of the human condition, but he also proposes that it is, additionally, ‘the glory and the tragedy of the human imagination’ (emphasis added). Winnicott (1971; 1990) in discussing the phases/stages of ordinary human psycho-social development suggests that this involves a ‘necessary disillusionment’, linked to our emerging from the illusory comfort of a more cossetted merger into the un-comfortableness of having to more fully inhabit our bodies and so to think our own thoughts. Discussing this intersection in Winnicott’s work Glover (2015) reminds us that the word ‘illusion’ itself derives from the Latin ludere, meaning to play, and though painful this ‘necessary disillusionment’ (emphasis added) is for Winnicott also creatively/playfully connected to a capacity for concern, that in turn enables us to take up our social roles and appointments in more respectful ways. Considered in this way the intersection of ‘disappointment’, ‘disrespect’ and ‘disillusionment’ (as well as dis-enfranchisement and dis-possession) invites us to consider how engaging with the psycho-social crises of being ‘dissed’ in all its illusory guises might also provide the opportunity to learn from experience: to learn to play more nicely together – perhaps even to forgive when, as we must, we hurt and disappoint one another in the emergent rough-and-tumble of life.
The quality of mercy is not strained.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
(William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice; Act IV, Scene 1)
This reflection on the ‘twice-blessed’ nature of mercy might also serve to help us imagine disappointment as also ‘twice-blessed’ (or twice-cursed?) because there must always be both those who disappoint and those who are disappointed. Taking up this theme Honig (1996), suggests that much (all?) ‘psycho-social work’ takes place in the dilemmatic space which open up when conversations about things that do not fit together, or contain inherent contradictions, must take place and when actions are demanded that will inevitably disappoint. The dilemma being how to make best use of these psycho-social spaces to dream the dreams and have the types of conversations that help us, painfully, to recognise and lighten the disappointment; to grieve and to mourn rather than painfully to remain mired in darkened grievances – because for Honig there can be no meaningful psycho-social (ex)change without the pain of disappointment.
Yet even as this recognition begins to shine a light into the darkness we are further confounded because the discovery is not only that we are either psychologically disappointed or externally socially disappointing, but rather we must face the more complex double-edged, twice-blessed/cursed, inside-out/outside-in, both/and psycho-social moebius reality that psycho-socially we are all simultaneously both disappointed and disappointing. We are disappointed in others because we feel so disappointed in ourselves and we are disappointed in ourselves because we are so disappointing. The ‘twice-blessed/cursed’ nature of this (dis)appointment then could also be understood as an aspect of what Hoggett et al, (2013) have described in terms of ressentiment or ‘double-suffering’ (Frost and Hoggett, 2008), what John Adlam and I have termed reflexive violence (Scanlon and Adlam, 2013a) and what Jukes (1994; 1999) has discussed in references to the universal psycho-social phenomenon of sulking. Each involves a double-movement, that is, a simultaneous attack on self and other, that arises when insult is added to injury (Adlam and Scanlon, 2018) in ways which erode, eat away and damage our and others’ bodies and souls. Within this inescapably sulky reciprocal-disappointment mixed-feelings run high, but are difficult to articulate, links are not made, needful compromises are not made, and the open public exchange of social goods is impossible, and so the seeds of violence that were sowed come to be reaped (Gilligan, 2000; Jukes, 1994; 1999; Adlam et al, 2018).
Agora-phobia: a realistic fear of the marketplace
While agreeing about the potentially transformative power of conversation Arendt (1958) and Sennett (1974), in their different ways, describe the ways in which modernity has spectacularly failed to maintain effective participation in the democratic process and how our lives have become impoverished – and disappointed/disappointing – as a result. Bauman (2000; 2003), in defining the conditions of liquid modernity, similarly described by how the conceptual ‘Agora’ and other public spaces have been emptied out, such that the philosopher, the poet and the seer – along with the interested citizen – have all retreated to ‘private places’, leaving the ‘marketplace’ in the hands of powerful neoliberal, highly monetised private/public institutions who deploy secretive agencies to promote ‘fake news’ in order to propagandise and manipulate the ‘public sphere’ (Habermas, 1968; Adlam and Scanlon, 2013). Social discourse about inequality, vulnerability and lack have all but been disappeared and the currency of social exchange is dominated by the increasingly strident and manic pre-occupations about the rights of the individual, the deserving, and the ‘hard-working’, who are set against those ‘dissed’ others who are constructed as undeserving, feckless, lazy or otherwise worth-less (Scanlon and Adlam, 2010; 2013b; Charlesworth et al, 2004).
In the context of this institutionalised ‘name-calling-disappointment’ other dys-functional sub-groups have retreated from these hate-filled discourses into their own places of refuge (Mojović, 2011; Scanlon and Adlam, 2008; 2019). For some, the more privileged, this is into their gated communities, private schools and healthcare – including psychotherapy consulting rooms and higher education classrooms – where a false security is too-often generated through a cossetted and collusive turning away from the darkness within/without. Meanwhile other dissed people who feel that they have no stake in the social world express their homicidal rage towards each other in criminally (?) dis-organised gang violence, rather come together to discuss the ‘real’ social and historical roots of their understandable grievance and the terrifying grief that underpins it. Disappointed others in search of meaning become radicalised and turn their homicidal (and suicidal) rage against the unresponsive establishment through hate-filled and terrifying acts of violence.
This failure to provide spaces and places for more engaged reflective conversations leads inexorably towards ressentiment or ‘double-suffering’ (Frost and Hoggett, 2008; Hoggett et al, 2013): a reciprocal-disappointment whereby rather than learn from history we are doomed to repeat it, and rather than ‘coexist in difference’ (Arendt, 1958) we are sleep-walking into a post-truth, dis-interested future in which the relentless advance of ‘market forces’ continue to privatise profits for the few and publicise losses and failures for the many. As John Adlam and I have observed, to be agora-phobic (literally translated having a ‘fear of the marketplace’) in this quantitatively-eased modern liquidity is much less an indicator of neurotic anxiety, and much more a sign of realistic and healthy fear of the money changers who have set out their stalls in the proverbial Temple (Adlam and Scanlon, 2013).
Fanon (1961) proposed that the self-appointed colonial in-groups of his day, many of whom have become the entitled inheritors of this colonial wealth in modern times, had (and have?) no interest in civil conversations that might lead to giving up any of this appropriated wealth and their privileged appointments willingly. For Fanon one of the most important things was that newly emancipated peoples should neither imitate, nor concern themselves, with catching up with the old colonial powers but invents new forms of social organisation (Fanon 1961/2001: 254). In the terms of this article I think that Fanon is also inviting us all to concern ourselves with the reality of profound historical and damagingly racialised disappointments – the legacies of which continue to play out. For Fanon, revolution, civil disobedience and violent protest was, sadly perhaps, the only thing that would bring about the necessary organisational change that would allow newer appointments.
The invitation at the heart of this article is, therefore, that those of us ‘interested citizens’ who remain might find ways to make these new appointments, with or without disobedience, for a new/different set of conversations about this dissed and violated state of affairs and its relationship to the violent Affairs of State (Adlam et al, 2018) that perpetuate them – and it is to the examination of some possible psycho-social methodologies for enabling these conversation that I now turn.
Talking about disappointment and failure
Zeldin (1998) charted the changing nature of conversation from the Agora and the Fora of ancient times, through to the Salons and Cafés Scientifique of French High Society, and on to examine ‘public conversations’ that gave rise to social (r)evolutions, workers’ rights, women’s suffrage, civil and human rights. To which I might add my own current concern to engage with contemporary anti-racist conversations (Akala, 2018; Bhopal, 2018; Di Angelo, 2018; Eddo-Lodge, 2018; Kendi, 2019 among others), or where to position myself in conversations about the impact of global warming, which threatens to ruin the world and its inhabitants for generations to come (Kolbert, 2006; Weintrobe, 2012; Ghosh, 2016 among others).
In mapping the changing nature of conversation Zeldin (1998) argues that the right type of conversation in the right place at the right time has the potential not only to change minds, but also to transform the social world – indeed, as Margaret Mead (1901–1978) suggests, ‘it is the only thing that ever has’.1 For Benjamin (2018) the aim of creating spaces and places in which these conversations can happen requires what she describes as a ‘moral third space’ in which members, as citizens, can listen to each other’s stories, see ourselves reflected in others’ pain and, in coming to recognise our own frail and interdependent vulnerability, to bear witness to self-and-others’ disappointment, and so group-ishly to re-member ourselves and each other.
Discussing disappointment from an organisational perspective Clancy et al (2012) similarly discuss how organisations frequently become arenas of disappointment where emotions, such as shame, guilt and anxiety prevail, and a sense of failure is followed by defensive blame and recrimination. However, they also argue that a judicious appreciation of the affective and dynamic implications of disappointment can offer a way of moving beyond these dynamics turning it into a foundation for organised and organisational learning. Elsewhere I have written about how Reflective Practice, broadly-defined, may have an important place in enabling this learning (Scanlon, 2012; 2017). Similarly, Glover (2015) argues the trust necessary for effective learning is centred around the limits, and the connections, between self and other at the threshold between the comforting and disillusioning aspects of the social environment. Arguing from the perspective of Complexity Theories perspective, Stacey et al (2002; 2003) Mowles (2015) and others argue that creating optimal conditions for complex reciprocal conversation is necessary and perhaps even sufficient to enable organisational and social change – ‘one conversation at a time’.
One curious example of this type of conversation at a socio-political level is in Finland, where since 2010, there has been an annual National Day of Failure. This celebration (?) was first instituted by a group of Finnish students whose reasoning was that while the need to succeed has enabled many people to achieve a great deal, conversely the fear of failure has made others feel inadequate and afraid of trying new things. The argument was that making mistakes, and the disappointment associated with it, are a normal, ordinary and healthy part of life and that our failures as well as our successes needed to be acknowledged and appreciated in order to manage our individual and collective sense of failure and inevitable disappointment.
In this context the only real affective difference between the fear of failure and the experience of disappointment is a temporal one. In Craib’s terms both are complex and ambivalent relationship with something that doesn’t happen; fear of failure it is an anticipatory anxiety about something that will-not happen in the future and disappointment is about something that isn’t happening in the present or didn’t happen in the past. Learning from experience then involves interactions and exchanges between selves and others that are about multiple affective pasts and wished-for futures, and countless other contradictory spatio-temporal ambivalences. In this sense disappointment, failure and hope could be imagined to-share the same dilemmatic space (Honig, 1996) in the traumatised organisation-in-the-mind (Armstrong, 2005; Scanlon, 2012), however, learning to talk together about our grievances, ressentiment (Hoggett et al, 2013) and sulking (Jukes, 1994; 1999) might allow the grief and the mourning to be processed?
Of course, a key factor, often observed, is that we mostly regret what we didn’t do, rather than what we did and it has been observed that a growing number of us may come to regret (un)consciously choosing inaction and loneliness over risking failure or the experience the disappointment that underpins it. Indeed it may well be that our collective failure to share our disappointments is contributing significantly a very serious psycho-social dis-ease that is beginning to be described in terms of the ‘loneliness epidemic’ (Schultze, 2018; Health Resource and Service Administration, 2019; Jo Cox Commission, 2018; Loneliness Task Force (Ireland), 2018, among others) – a theme to which I hope to return in future articles.
Dreaming in imperfect systems: organising new appointments in a widening gyre
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
(From ‘Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’ W.B. Yeats (1865–1939))
On the wider socio-political stage we have seen different kinds of ‘reflective conversations’ being deployed in conflict zones to bring people together to talk about their ressentiments and disappointment outside and within. For instance, restorative justice, conflict resolution and mediation methodologies have been brought to bear as a means of enabling the types of reflective conversations that evidentially allow different parties to share their profound sense of disappointment through truth telling, reconciliation, understanding – perhaps even forgiveness (Zehr, 1990; Elworthy and Rifkind, 2006; Hoggett, 2009; Erlich et al, 2013; Ofer, 2017; Sands, 2016; Weinstein, 2018).
Conversations have brought peace (or at least a cessation/reduction of organised violence) to South Africa and (Northern) Ireland and have allowed truths to be told about historical Church/State institutional abuse in Ireland and elsewhere. Conversations have also begun, in part, to address the genocidal destruction of indigenous people by colonial powers and to acknowledge the inestimable human cost of the historical trade, trafficking and enslavement of millions of people – while in other parts of the world wars persist, conflict continues and the truth about other types of institutionalised abuse, territorial occupation and the continuing enslavement and exploitation of children and vulnerable adults in other places is yet to be told – and how in the meantime the planet continues to heat up!
Utilising systems, psychodynamic approaches in their experiential working conferences exploring German-Jewish group-relations in post-holocaust context, Erlich et al (2013) suggests a metaphorical, development in such conversations ‘from blood, through tears, to words’ (emphasis added). Similarly, de Maré et al (1991) propose a movement ‘from hate, through dialogue to culture’ that is necessary to allow neighbourhoods and communities to develop. Borrowing from the praxes of ancient Greece, de Maré et al (1991) make use of the concept of Koinonia (κοινωνία), meaning the gift of active participation that is linked to a desire to take up membership of the community group: to belong. To offer an integrative statement of this movement, paraphrasing de Maré et al (1991) and Erlich et al (2013), I propose a conversational development to address the disappointments outlined earlier from ‘hate-and-blood, by way of tears, to words-and-dialogue; and by way of action, to community’ (emphasis added).
In a seminal series of documentaries Adam Curtis (2002; 2004), utilising a critique of the work of Edward Bernays (Sigmund Freud’s nephew), pointed to the power of propaganda (and advertising) in mobilising the social group to hatred (and desire) though the manipulation of unconscious fears/desires as if to save/protect us from these fears by mobilising us to hate and murder our fellow man (or at least to buy things that we don’t want/need). Lawrence (2000) in discussing the development of organised communities of practice contrasted the politics of revelation, with the politics of salvation and suggested that one way of allowing something to be revealed is through ‘Social Dreaming’: a set of related methodologies which, rather than trying to save us from disappointment, and the associated losses and hatreds, might instead allow for our disappointment to be revealed. The social and organisational power of the politics of revelation, and the impact of the shared dream in enabling a meaningful ‘mission’ and relevant ‘social action’ was perhaps never more clearly illustrated than by Dr Martin Luther King Jnr who dreamed a resonant social dream ‘I dream…that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character’ (King, 1963) – a dream which sadly is not realised because we have failed to get beyond the blood or the hatred – yet!
From a psycho-social point of view a number of theorists, from different, overlapping traditions, have taken up the challenge of how we might better enable people to take up their membership of neighbourhoods and communities in order to address their shared disappointment with reference to the notion of the ‘Reflective Citizen’ (Mojović, 2019; Gould et al, 2011; Kraemer and Roberts, 1996). Dubouloy (2011) suggests that to become a more reflective citizen requires that individuals, families and neighbourhoods, as sub-systems of wider communities, must ask the questions that will allow them to find their place and to take up their membership of that place, while allowing and enabling others to do the same. Krantz (2011) in the same volume, suggests that while it is necessary to be reflective, it is not in itself sufficient to bring about change and so proposed a further movement from reflective citizen to ‘deliberative citizen’ within which we must first think and feel, after which we must find our voice(s) and then act accordingly.
Whether this deliberative action utilises the psycho-social technologies of Group Relations (Sher, 2018), the Large Group (Kreeger, 1975), Median Groups (de Maré et al, 1991), Social Dreaming matrices (Lawrence, 1998; 2000; 2005), visual matrices (Froggett et al, 2015;Manley, 2018; Mersky and Sievers, 2018; Langridge et al, 2019), Reflective Citizens methodologies (Mojović, 2019), extra-mural public programmes in the ‘public sphere’ (Maile and Griffiths, 2014; Diamond, 2014; Morgan, 2019), or other formalised psycho-social methodologies, what all these approaches have in common is that they are all, in Bauman’s terms, about inviting the ‘interested citizens’ to re-occupy the agora. The key question being posed, therefore, is how to enable us to come out from our psycho-socially retreated hiding place and places of refuge to make use of these psychosocial technologies to join with others to create new appointments for more ordinary conversations in the public sphere (Habermas, 1968).
In one such group that I co-convened during the COVID-19 lockdown there was a parapractic mis-hearing of ‘Social Dreaming Matrix’ – which associatively became a ‘Social Grieving Matrix’. The theme of ‘social grieving’ as a synonymous with mourning was enthusiastically taken up by the group and I offer it here as a question about how we might engage with the idea that a Social Grieving matrix is exactly what is needed. The question to which I hope to return is how best to offer this.
Concluding remarks: paying forward?
‘Pass the parcel. That’s sometimes all you can do. Take it, feel it, and pass it on. Not for me, not for you, but for someone, somewhere, one day. Pass it on, boys. That’s the game I want you to learn. Pass it on.’
At the heart of Hector’s invitation, like the (very serious) children’s party game it invokes, is an (un)conscious invitation to engage more hopefully with our disappointment. Like the children who, when the music stops, excitedly tear open the newspaper wrapping in the hope of a reward – only to be faced with the disappointment of the empty wrapper – are invited to engage with the eternal-springing, breast-filling hope that their turn might yet come – or perhaps even that they may come to take pleasure in others’ success? In the same ways he also invites us all to relinquish all hopes/desires for instant personal/psychological/social gratification and instead, through practising disappointment and social grieving we might plant some seeds of hope that may one day develop into conversations that might make a difference, and so in returning to the beginning again, we might join with Eliot in engaging with ‘the darkness outside and within’ in order to find better ways ‘to be good’.
Notes
Mead quote used with permission of the Institute of Intercultural Studies http://www.interculturalstudies.org/Mead/biography
Acknowledgements
This article draws upon a series of on-line conversations: ‘Ordinary conversations in ordinary times’ (Association for Psychosocial Studies (APS) and the Institute of Group Analysis (London), ‘Corridor Conversations’ established by Eve-Marie Kimmerling (Irish Group Analytic Society (Dublin) and a Social Dreaming Matrix co-hosted with Dr Rachel Gibbons, Mr Michael Scott and Mr David Armstrong at the Institute of Group Analysis (London) during the COVID-19 lockdown of 2020 – and I am grateful to all who participated. I would also like to acknowledge my sincere appreciation of disappointing conversations with my friends and colleagues Dr Jo-anne Carlyle, Mr Adam Jukes, Dr Ian Miller and Dr Annette Clancy (University College Dublin), and my long-time friend and fellow psycho-socialist John Adlam.
Conflict of interest
The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.
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