Online Conference 5-11 July 2021
February 2–7, 2027
Vienna, Austria
Professional Development Workshop
Tuesday 2 February
Morning, half-day workshop
Code: PDW 5
Presenters: Regan Berry & Nicola Wreford-Howard
Regan Berry
Nicola Wreford-Howard
Regan Berry is a psychoanalytically informed executive coach, workshop facilitator, researcher and Social Worker in Private Practice. In addition to her academic research Regan works as a change architect, systems thinker, strategist, transformation and culture practitioner. Regan has a deep love of learning and is passionate about creating containing spaces to facilitate learning. Drawing on three decades of experience in both the profit and non-profit sectors she co-creates tailored creative, experiential workshops with her clients to cultivate intra and interpersonal awareness and insight into the unconscious dynamics at play in teams, organisations and broader society. Regan is an executive coach with Wits Business School and a doctoral supervisor with da Vinci Institute. Regan cares deeply about social justice and works with various groups in schools to address the systemic injustices entrenched in the South African education system not only by exploring rational challenges but by assisting organisations and schools to explore what might be taking place below the surface.
Nicola Wreford-Howard is an organisational psychologist, executive coach and consultant with a systems-psychodynamic approach. She worked for 30 years advising companies and governments on organisational dynamics and change management in digital transformation, organisational transition and merger integration initiatives. Nicola creates and facilitates spaces for collaboration and innovation. She offers supervision and mentoring to organisational development (OD) professionals and consultancy teams. Nicola is an active member and previous board member of the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations (ISPSO) and a current board member of the Centre for Social Dreaming (CSD). She has hosted Social Dreaming Matrices and SD Workshops at conferences and in business schools in Europe, USA and Asia and has a keen interest in exploring the evolving application of Social Dreaming in organisational settings.
What becomes thinkable when dreams, dream fragments and associations are returned to visual symbols and juxtaposed into a collage? Can harmony emerge from seemingly jarring elements? Seiden (2001) suggests that through collage-making diverse elements are brought together and the ordinary is elevated. Further dialogue may then open new associations, connections and possibilities.
This experiential PDW proposes Social Dream Collage making as an experimental extension of the Social Dreaming Matrix (SDM), using dreams, associations and emotions emerging from the morning matrix as material for further thinking. The workshop explores how the creative process of collage making may give symbolic form to what was not yet available in words in the SDM and synthesise what emerged.
No artistic ability is required. The aim is not to create an aesthetically successful picture or accurately illustrate a dream or the matrix. Participants will be invited to relinquish demands for coherence, completeness and mastery, remaining receptive to fragments, images, colours, words, textures and juxtapositions whose significance may initially be unknown.
The workshop is grounded in Lawrence’s (2003) formulation of social dreaming as sustained thinking. Within the SDM, dreams, free associations, links and connections create a multiverse of meaning and a creative pool from which new knowledge may emerge. The matrix brings participants into the tension between the known and unknown, inviting them to remain with doubts, mysteries and uncertainties, open to emerging patterns, “thoughts in search of a thinker”, and new knowledge, rather than searching for an omnipotent completeness.
The PDW carries this process of sustained thinking into a visual register. Remaining in a state of reverie, participants attend to the sensory and emotional fragments that remain from the SDM and create collages using the images, words, dreams and associations that attracted, disturbed or resonated with them. The collage, like the SDM is not a finished interpretation, but a provisional incomplete form through which the emotional experience may become available for further thought. The collages will record and capture some of the meaning making from the SDM and can be shared with other AM participants.
Nitsun’s (2023) experimental work of sharing his paintings with groups reveals how paintings became catalysts for memories, projections, associations and dialogue. Meaning develops through the social context of encounter. Similarly, the collages form a temporary visual associative matrix encountered collectively through sharing, free association and dialogue. The collages may capture dimensions of emotional reality not fully accessible through literal language, sensed in the matrix but not yet fully known or expressed. The collages with their fragments and juxtapositioned images beautifully mirror the SDM which Manley (2018, p. 22) describes as a “complex collage of inter-connected and multi-faceted dream images”.
We conclude by exploring if and how the collages enabled thinking and how new, provisional knowledge may emerge through the creative process of collage making and dialogue without participants becoming the “master of the house”. Incompleteness is embraced as a generative condition for thinking, creativity and learning, with participants discussing applications of the methodology in their own professional contexts.
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