This paper discusses the congruence of emotional reflexivity and successful educational leadership and aims to interrogate how Bion’s concept of “Containment” has an impact for in-depth reflection on emotion and for an epistemological process of understanding psychodynamics within educational systems.

In educational systems (schools and their environment) professional cooperation, leadership and change management are strongly influenced by unconscious and thus hidden processes. The less that players of the system paid attention to unconscious dynamics, the more they will superimpose purposeful and rational actions (Giernaczyk/Lohmer 2012). Referring on group relation theories (Klauber 1999), the more accurate the educational leaders know about emotional and unconscious psychodynamic processes, the more successful they will be able to deal with their leadership tasks, and can offer Containment within their working environment. Therefore, this research paper will focus on capacity of understanding emotional aspect within educational systems and aims to question the role of emotional reflexivity within this context.

Background

Current studies (Abels 2011, Roters 2012, Wyss 2013) from educational research have featured questions regarding educational competencies, high-quality instruction and standards for teachers and educational leadership training, with the concept of reflection assuming central importance. The capability to reflect as one component of “professional habitus“ (Nairz-Wirth et. al., 2011) was defined as one of five core professional competencies within the educational field in Austria. Nevertheless reflective practice is often handled in a marginal way, which can be linked to the capacity of reflexivity of the educational practitioners, such as a surface practice of reflection and excluding emotional aspects.

Reflexivity is based primarily on meta-cognition concerning actions, where affects and emotions are often perceived as disruptive aspects. However, emotions are clearly ubiquitous and influence actions and ways of thinking. Therefore, conscious perception and in-depth analysis of emotions is relevant for reflective practitioners and for educational leaders (Crawford 2009). The conscious examination of emotions is essential (Burkitt 2012). Increased consideration of emotions can be found in the field of depth psychology in the education. These researchers propound a psychoanalytic epistemological view of reflective processes, with emotions arising during reflection, or constituting either the cause or catalyst for reflection. Within the epistemological process, the practitioner can observe, question and reflect upon the internal, latent and preconscious counterparts of external, manifest and conscious contents and dynamics.

Theoretical concepts

This paper shall illustrate research results in the form of case studies of head teachers from primary and secondary schools in Austria.  These case studies will be discussed against the background of Bion’s concept “Containment”. Giernalczyk and Albrecht (2011, 124) describe Bion’s concept as a principle for emotional learning, where “a place, a person, an advisor, a mother (container) takes something in to be contained and returns it is an altered form, by which process both the sender and the recipient are altered.”

Here, Bion is referring to Klein’s concept of projective identification when he assumes that a part of normal development is for the person to remove unbearable impulses/emotions from itself and project them into another person, so that the other person experiences what this condition feels like (Diem-Wille 2009, 70). Through successful containment a mentally three-dimensional space will be created, where thoughts can be thought, digested and given back to their thinker in a transformed form and help to analyse psychodynamics within the system.

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