Systems-Centered Training

Book Preface

This book tells an engaging story about how models of complex phenomena are built, a story that nicely illuminates the reciprocal, iterative and ongoing process between careful observation and theory construction. It also reveals what those who undertake such an arduous task require in terms of courage in approaching what is not yet known, in remaining open to new experience, in a willingness to critique one’s ideas and in persevering in efforts to understand and explain complicated relations among variables and constructs that form human living systems. Trying to fathom what happens in human groups, why it happens and what can be done to change what happens are tasks not for the faint of heart.
I’ve been a fan of Yvonne Agazarian and her lifelong team of colleagues ever since picking up her first book in 1981 precisely because of its intrigu-ing title, The Visible and Invisible Group. This title, and, as it turned out, the novel ideas presented in this pioneering volume, spoke to my own intellectual struggles to make sense of group life and, more particularly, to bring together a depth view of the individual with a depth view of group psychology, an interest of mine that was borne of my graduate school experiences at Yale in the late 1960s. In that era, Yale Psychology and Psychiatry were at the fore-front of studying and articulating the complex relations between the individual and the group, guided primarily by ego psychological (Edelson, 1970) and Kleinian object relations theoretical frameworks (Gibbard, Hartman, & Mann, 1974; Newton & Levinson, 1973). These classic writings, as well as the experi-ences generated from participating in the numerous Tavistock and Lewinian group relations conferences conducted at Yale in those days, have served as an important impetus in the awakening of my own curiosity about individual-in-the-group theory (Greene, 1982, 1983), a curiosity that has imbued my entire professional career and that has made reading this present volume so rewarding.

One can see the influences of these early theoretical efforts in the present volume: ideas about roles and role locks, about driving and restraining forces that, respectively, promote and inhibit goal attainment, about explicit and implicit goals and about the universal and ubiquitous dilemmas in group life in relating to authority and in developing peer relations. But this current work, the most recent in a long chain of theoretical and empirical contributions from the Agazarian team, has gone way beyond these foundational works, entering new territory by conceptualizing group life from a systems perspective. Their unique contributions, well summarized in Chapter 1 and elaborated in detail in the subsequent chapters, reveal the ever deepening and articulating of their thinking. I found their conceptual focus on the individual-becoming-a-group member, represented by their person-as-a-system model, particularly compel-ling precisely because it captures the ever-present dilemma of maintaining a sense of safety, familiarity and viability by attending exclusively to one’s familiar self from the past versus the risking of this security to explore and discover, as Turquet (1975) so aptly put it, the skin of one’s neighbor.

As substantive a contribution to building theoretical models as this volume is, this book is not just about theory. What helps to make theory robust are its links to empirical investigation and (in the case of psychological theories) to clinical practice. And this book well demonstrates vital connections to both of these enterprises. With regard to research, the singular accomplishment here is the construction of a classification system, dubbed SAVI, for analyzing com-munications in the group, not the content of the messages, but importantly what the messages serve in the way of furthering or obscuring information flow. Now I have no illusion that empirical research will answer all of the big questions about any complex phenomena of interest. One has only to look at the amassed empirical findings about the relationship of cohesion to outcome in group psychotherapy to understand the limitations of research. Despite decades of research on this relationship, most of what we can say is that generally a more cohesive group yields better outcomes. But the operative word in this rather tepid conclusion is “generally.” We know little about the circumstances and conditions under which this relationship is maximized and when it can actually lead to negative results. And further, sadly, we still don’t have a universal or shared definition of the cohesion construct.

Despite this not-so-optimistic view, empirical research such as the develop-ment and application of sophisticated process measures like SAVI does have heuristic value. Those studies (Agazarian & Simon, 1989; Simon & Agazarian, 2000) where its application serves to identify important patterns and relational dynamics can help both theorist and therapist in generating new hypotheses and new understandings of group life.

With regard to practice, I agree with the authors’ assertion that the creation of the concept of functional subgrouping and its implementation in therapy and work groups is a vital procedure for helping these systems progress. In con-trast to the natural regressive tendency in group life to form dysfunctional sub-groups, either-or splits that serve to keep uncomfortable feelings and thoughts at arm’s length, the conscious, intentional and proactive structuring of func-tional subgroups – where like-minded members can join together to explore (to apply one of the authors’ engaging mantras) differences in the apparently simi-lar and then also to discover similarities in the apparently different – potentiates the social organization towards greater differentiation and integration, hall-marks of progressive development.
Moreover, their ingenious techniques of linking and bridging by ask-ing members, first, to register their understanding of the previous member’s remarks (and correcting misunderstandings if necessary via reality-checking) and then to conclude by asking whether “anybody else” joins with them so aptly counter the regressive tendencies in groups towards fragmentation or fusion.

Taken together, the career-long dedication of these authors to advancing our understanding of how groups work is truly impressive and inspiring. And their training of many others over the years – scholars, clinicians, researchers – holds promise that this systems view of group life will neither stagnate nor fade away but rather continue to develop and transform. In the spirit of SCT and functional subgrouping, I end by asking Agazarian, Gantt and Carter, did I get you right?