The systems psychodynamics of
Decolonising Minds, Workplaces & Curricula
for a better future
đź”– PRESENTATION
Paper (parallel)
📆 DATE
Wednesday 20 Nov 2024
⏰ MELBOURNE TIME
5.00 - 7.00 pm
⏰ LOCAL START TIME
time start
Dr Leslie Brissett
Consultant
Leslie B Brissett has worked for local, national and international governments and organisations. A consultant and organisational analyst, he worked for 12 years for the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, the last 7 years Directing the Leicester Conference, 5th generation successor to AK Rice as the Group Relations Programme Director, he has suggested that the 2020’s represent an Archaic revival – Awakening Organisations and Socio-Ecological- Psycho-Spiritual Gnostic Reticularity.
⏰ DURATION
120 minutes
At War against Nature – The Iceman Legacy
The legacy of colonialism is written in Stone on the monuments and buildings that house its institutions. This paper seeks to explore the nature of the colonial project as a manifestation of a mind ill-at-ease in the world. This mind can be categorised as “The Iceman Legacy” and is situated in the hypothesis that northern Europeans suffered extreme hardship at the hands of nature’s winters and lack of sun which altered their DNA to such extent that they regressed to a brutal, warlike being with diminished capacity for love, sharing and growth.
Considering the foundational work Authority conducted at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations and its global partners, this paper suggests that Weberian, Kantian and Hegelian thought was used to further the ends of the ill-at-ease mind as it sought a paradigm shift to complete domination on one hand and annihilation of the “other” on the other. Freud had opened the doors to a new layer of perception when he identified the unconscious and its capacity to identify and explain the discontents in that project of colonialism, “civilisation”.
The paper lays out the epistemicide that is inherent in the colonial project – meaning that the true goal of colonialism was not simply the harvesting of resources, human and otherwise, it was infact a systematic, parasitic attempt to secure a dominating position with regard to all of life on earth in order to wipe out knowledge systems that gave the “other” power. The tools of colonialism are shaped by the systematic framework of concepts in the form of Politics Philosophy and Economics. Armed with these conceptual frameworks, the agents of the colonial project created disciplines of education, health, housing, employment, cultural pursuits and its crowning glory, the systems of laws and rules to enshrine the ownership of commodities.
It is not by chance that even in 2024 the British Royal Family followed by the Catholic Church and Gina Rinehart, Australian mining magnate are the largest land owners on earth. The paper makes no claim that any one individual or organisation is culpable for the domination and epistemicide necessary for the colonial project to survive, but in order to understand the scale of thought that decolonisation requires one has to understand the depth of the infection that we all carry due to contamination from the ill-at-ease mind.
Psychoanalysis and the systems psychodynamic perspective is an antidote to the species-wide infection, and offers a glimmer of reality via its Bionian intense beam of darkness.
It leaves the reader with some questions about the nature and form that the dominator mind has and how to access the assumptions that hold up that world view.
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Session schedule
5 MINS
Introduction
30 MINS
Paper presentation
20 MINS
Small group discussion; impressions of the paper and developing questions for the presenter
20 MINS
Discussion forum with the presenter; moderated for the speaker to elaborate their ideas
10 MINS
Discussion forum with the presenter; themes from the discussions
5 MINS
Break
30 MINS
Whole symposium open reflection discussion