Seminar RECORDING - Colin Campbell

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For those working in secure settings, ways of working, procedures and protocols can often feel confusing, counterintuitive, or even anti-task. Reports of failing services and corruption are not uncommon and investigations often describe a sense in which everyone ‘knew’ what had been happening all along, albeit in hindsight, as if the corrupt behaviour had taken place in plain sight. Susan Long, and others, have argued that unconscious perverse dynamics within organisations have become increasingly evident, together with the conscious accompaniments of corruption. Within the ‘perverse organisation’, collusive denial or ‘turning a blind eye’ can act as an organisational defence against an all too evident reality, with individuals within the system simultaneously both knowing and not knowing about this reality, and being engaged, consciously or unconsciously, as accomplices in the perversion. In this seminar, I will explore how unconscious perversity within secure settings and the process of turning a blind eye can help us understand anti-task or corrupt behaviour at the individual (including the ‘organisation-in-the-mind’), organisational and system levels. In doing so, I will explore how understanding these organisational dynamics from a systems psychodynamics and forensic psychotherapeutic perspective can inform efforts to detect and prevent perversity within secure settings.