Harold Bridger

Harold Bridger, Psychoanalyst and Organisational Consultant 1909 - 2005
An appreciation of the life and contribution of this exceptional person, based on his own writing, that of others, and personal recollections as a colleague and friend from the mid-1970s onwards.
By Judith Brearley

Harold Bridger was born on 15 May 1909 in London, the son of a Russian Jewish émigré, and eldest of five children. He graduated in Mathematics and taught the subject in Coventry until 1939. As an officer in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment he commanded a searchlight battery in Fife, using early applications of radar. He was seconded to the War Office Selection Boards where he developed innovative group methods alongside Jock Sutherland. He then succeeded Wilfred Bion in command of psychiatric rehabilitation of service personnel at Northfield Hospital, Birmingham. There he designed the first Therapeutic Community, which later became a model for Tom Main’s work at the Cassel Hospital. Towards the end of the war he was appointed Chief Vocational Officer and Lt. Colonel RA responsible for Civil Resettlement Units for repatriated prisoners of war.
In 1946, Harold became a Founder Member of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, and embarked on psychoanalytic training with Paula Heimann as his analyst and Melanie Klein as a supervisor. Again he worked with Jock Sutherland, who became Medical Director of the Tavistock Clinic around this time. With others, including Eric Trist, Isabel Menzies, Eric Miller, Michael Balint and John Bowlby, and using psychoanalytic, socio-technical, and open systems thinking, they helped to integrate the Clinic’s mental health focus and the Institute’s study of wider social problems.
From this point Harold's career as Senior Consultant at TIHR involved several distinct yet inter-related roles. All had international, multidisciplinary, cross-cultural and strongly collaborative dimensions, all were hugely significant for those he worked with, and many continued for the rest of his life. Among these were career counselling, organisational consultancy (e.g. with Shell, Unilever, Philips, Royal College of Nurses, Therapeutic Communities in Italy), fostering understanding of group dynamics and organisational behaviour through design of workshops and learning conferences, and helping to build such bodies as the Institute of Human Relations, Zurich, the Foundation for Adaptation to Changing Environments, the Bayswater Institute and the Scottish Institute of Human Relations (of which Harold served on Council in the early years). In 1974 the British Institute of Management awarded him the Bowie Medal for his ‘substantial contribution to the advancement of knowledge about management, and for his innovative work and its influence on both institutions and companies alike in bridging the gap between the academic researcher and the practising manager’. More recently the University of East London/Tavistock Clinic awarded him an Honorary Doctorate.
SIHR trainings and developments have benefited in their design from Harold Bridger’s ideas, including use of entry/exit groups, search groups, consulting quartets, institutional processes thinking and periodic review. Likewise, anyone who has participated in intensive experiential group relations training is indebted to Harold’s pioneering work. In 1957, with Eric Trist, he set up the first Tavistock Leicester conferences, which mainly focus on the group’s own behaviour in the here-and-now, the so-called single task. Harold then developed Transitional Working Conferences with a double task in which groups work on concerns from their own organisations, periodically suspending business to review and reflect on emotional and conflictual undercurrents impeding progress, i.e. on process as well as task. Conferences in this form, with titles such as ‘Rethinking and Managing the Human Complexity of Organisational and Community Change’, take place every year in different parts of the world.
D.W.Winnicott’s concept of transitional phenomena inspired Harold to think about the organisational and societal implications of transitional objects in the adult world. Just as there is no such thing as a baby without a mother, so Harold asserts there is no such thing as a group without a task; it is in the context of the task that we can make sense of the conscious and unconscious processes operating within and between working groups. Such thinking led to the development of ‘the transitional approach to the management of change’. This recognises that in any change process, people have to give up hitherto valued but now redundant ways of working, find new ways of perceiving and adapting to the situation, and cope with internal insecurity and external instability. As staff struggle with all this, managers can learn how to avoid persecutory directives, and instead to value and enable them by providing the conditions for effective adaptation.

About thirty of Harold’s papers have been published, but despite this he was a reluctant writer and not very confident of his ability. I think he greatly preferred the tuning-in to the ideas and feelings of people (‘Listen to the music behind the words!’), the cut and thrust of debate and the immediate responsiveness of face-to face contact, in all of which he was supremely at ease. His way of speaking was full of memorable ideas and vivid images of which the following are examples. On the need to understand the turbulent environment we inhabit, or ‘permanent white water’: ‘The fish doesn¹t realise that it lives in water until it is already on the bank!’ (An old French saying) On the importance of working collaboratively with the client on the problem rather than taking it away and handing it back sorted out: ‘Organisational consultancy is much more like attending a car-maintenance class than taking one¹s car to the garage’. On the crucial importance of process and the need to take time for reflective space and review: ‘Too many people want to arrive at their destination before they have made the journey!’
I was most fortunate to work with Harold, both when he helped with SIHR developments, and as a staff member in many Working Conferences and related events. He had an insatiable interest in the whys and wherefores of people’s interactions in different environments. I gained much of my understanding of ways of working in organisational consultancy from him. He had a great zest for life, a quixotic sense of humour, and was always warmly responsive. I valued his friendship enormously.

Bibliography
Amado, G & Ambrose, A.(Eds) (2001) The Transitional Approach to the Management of Change. Karnac
Bridger, H. (1990) The discovery of the therapeutic community: the Northfield Experiment, and Courses and working conferences as transitional learning institutions both in E.Trist & H. Murray (Eds) The Social Engagement of Social Science Vol. 1, The Socio-Psychological Perspective. Free Association Books
Gold, S. & Klein, L. (2004) Harold Bridger: Conversations and Recollections Organisational and Social Dynamics Vol.4 Nos.2 & 3
Klein, L. (Ed.) (1989) Working with Organisations: Papers to celebrate the 80th Birthday of Harold Bridger Lockwood. Kestrel Print