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Social Defences Against Anxiety: Explorations in a Paradigm

Editor : David Armstrong, Editor : Michael Rustin

Reviews and Endorsements

‘The editors are to be congratulated on having turned out a most impressive piece of work. Their introduction is a masterpiece of clarity, of concepts, and of subsequent developments following Isabel Menzies Lyth’s original work. In addition to this most erudite summary, there is a wealth of contributions from a worldwide spectrum of application in which any reader will find inspiration.’
— Anton Obholzer, Chair, Tavistock Institute of Medical Psychology

‘Isabel Menzies Lyth was a pivotal and highly original thinker in the area of group and organizational dynamics, specifically concerning the theme of social defences against anxiety. In this volume, David Armstrong and Michael Rustin do justice to her work by bringing together an impressive range of therapists, consultants, and academics, who further her thinking and take this approach into a number of new areas. This is a superb volume that makes an excellent contribution to both theory and practice. I can thoroughly recommend it.’
— Professor Mark Stein, Chair in Leadership and Management, University of Leicester, UK

‘A rare gift to any field, this volume critically engages one of its foundational concepts: collective unconscious defences against shared anxiety. At once scholarly and imaginative, the scope of this volume’s contributions is breathtaking: from careful examination of the nature of anxiety to astute observations on the interaction between organizational and societal dynamics. This book is a sweeping achievement, discerningly rooted in its tradition and yet extraordinarily rejuvenating to contemporary thinking and practice.’
— M. Gerard Fromm, PhD, ABPP, President of the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations; Senior Consultant, Erikson Institute for Education and Research, Austen Riggs Center

‘This book is a landmark defining the current status of the rich tradition arising from the application of psychoanalysis to social systems. That move from individual work to applying its results to the field of social science was obviously appropriate for psychoanalytic object relations theory with its emphasis on engagement between minds. Its conceptualization provided penetrating understanding of the psychodynamics of health provision, a framework for consulting to organizations in general, and new insights on the conceptual study of the human mind in society. The vigour of this approach, and a variety of innovative projects from a wide landscape of interests is surveyed in these explorations. They set a marker of where the tradition now lies, and point to where its contributions can most clearly be made in the future.’
— R. D. Hinshelwood, Professor of Psychoanalysis at the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex