What Is Real – and What Is Not?

I prepared carefully for a two-day working conference grounded in a systems-psychodynamic tradition (The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations), in which participants were invited to study group processes. The task was clear: to experience, analyse and explore group dynamics within clearly defined boundaries of time, task and territory.

I was fully aware that the setting was deliberately constructed and therefore not real life. Roles, tasks and interventions were framed as temporary and provisional. And yet, what unfolded was undeniably real: anxiety, struggles around auhority, longing, resistance and competition. Accuracy in preparing and framing did not prevent illusion, projection and emotional investment from happening. Although several of the exercises were explicitely simulations, the emotional and relational responses they evoked were not simulated.

On the journey home, I heard on the radio the remarkable story of a painting attributed to Modigliani that had been exhibited for decades as authentic at the Museum of Fine Arts of Nancy. La Femme Brune was long believed to be genuine, celebrated alongside La Femme Blonde. La Femme Brune later appeared to be a fake. The painting itself was not real. The emotions people felt in relation to it were neither mistaken nor unreal. They reflected the relationship people believed they were in with the object, not its material truth. The authenticity of a painting belongs to external reality. Its emotional and symbolic meaning belongs to psychic and social reality.

A working conference operates in a similar way. It is a constructed container, “not real life,” yet it becomes charged with unconscious meaning. What participants project into the setting—and what the setting evokes in return—is psychically real and consequential.

Like the working conference and the believed-to-be-real painting, my practice attends to what is taken as real in the system and not to what is factually true. My work is about creating the conditions and not about predicting content. The psychic reality that emerge can not be scripted.

Thank you Sofie Cornelissen for the inspiration.