Online Conference 5-11 July 2021
February 2–7, 2027
Vienna, Austria
Professional Development Workshop
Tuesday 2 February - full day workshop
Code: PDW 3
Presenters: Anna Reiche, Larry A. Hirschhorn
Moderator: TBC
Anna Reiche
Larry A. Hirschhorn
Anna Reiche is a psychologist, systems psychodynamic consultant, and accredited team coach working with groups, leadership teams, founders, and organizational partnerships. She has facilitated more than 300 group and team sessions and serves as a consultant at Group Relations Conferences. Her practice focuses on unconscious group dynamics, authority and role, leadership, conflict, anxiety, psychological safety, and the capacity of teams to remain engaged with their task under pressure. Anna combines clinical and psychoanalytic training with 12 years of senior-level business experience in marketing, organizational development, and entrepreneurship. She is a PhD candidate in organizational behaviour, researching relational conflict and innovation, a member of ISPSO, and a supervisor on the Master’s programme in Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Business Consulting at HSE University. Her work integrates systems thinking, Bionian group theory, and close attention to the emotional life of organizations.
Larry A. Hirschhorn, PhD, is Principal Emeritus at CFAR and a distinguished scholar and practitioner in systems psychodynamics and organizational consulting. A founding member and past president of ISPSO, he has spent more than four decades exploring the unconscious dynamics of authority, role, leadership, group life, and organizational change. He is the author of several influential books, including The Workplace Within: Psychodynamics of Organizational Life, Managing in the New Team Environment, and Reworking Authority. His work connects psychoanalytic thinking with sociotechnical systems and the practical challenges faced by contemporary teams and organizations. He holds a PhD in Economics from MIT and has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Wharton, Fielding Graduate University, and Thomas Jefferson University.
Drawing on Michael Apter’s Reversal Theory and Bion’s theory of group dynamics, Larry Hirschhorn has developed a deeper psychodynamic understanding of how working groups function. Anna Reiche has helped translate this framework into practice.
This full-day workshop introduces an experience-near framework for understanding how groups work, how they lose flexibility, and how they recover their capacity for work. It combines a theoretical exploration of the model with practical applications to consulting and organizational life, offering participants a clear and accessible language for understanding groups at work.
The workshop addresses a gap in systems psychodynamics. Bion offers a powerful account of how groups retreat from work through Basic Assumptions, but a less differentiated account of how working groups actually function. Reversal Theory extends this perspective by identifying four workgroup modalities and eight modes. Effective groups move between modes when anxiety, frustration, or boredom signals that the current mode has reached its limits. When this capacity for reversal is lost, working modes may become deformed. Under more primitive conditions, these deformations may intensify into destructive forms of group functioning.
By making successful work as observable and interpretable as regression, the model offers a bridge between psychoanalytic thinking and organizational practice.
A distinctive part of the workshop will focus on the art of interpreting group dynamics as they unfold. The framework identifies four types of intervention: supporting a productive mode; interpreting the frustration that signals the limits of the current mode; interpreting the gratification provided by a deformation; and supporting an emerging reversal. Participants will gain practical experience in formulating and applying these different forms of interpretation.
Participants will leave with a practical framework for observing group states, distinguishing productive work from defensive and primitive functioning, formulating evidence-based group-as-a-whole interventions, and helping organizations regain flexibility.
In relation to the conference theme, the workshop proposes that mastery does not mean eliminating anxiety or controlling a group’s state of mind. Rather, it means developing the capacity to recognize limits, tolerate incompleteness, and reverse course when the work requires it.
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