Information of another order

“To keep pursuing an expression of life in these uncomfortable language acrobatics is hard work; it sits at odds with everything society substantiates. Even the attempt at living description defies the culture of “efficiency.” But—I would rather continue in that awkwardness than rest in the familiar tones and language that carries a history of violent reductionism, illusions of control, and hidden stow-aways of linear strategy. Try as one might, to make change within “industrialized” perception, it will always re-produce the dreams of the culture in which it was forged. I was looking for information beyond the tropes of qualitative or quantitative; I was looking for information of another order.” Nora Bateman, Unpsychology*.

Over the last few weeks I’ve started working with three women academics on a hard-sell reflective piece about the bullying of women in Higher Education. Although what we talk about at work has been radicalised in the last year, it still requires an act of some effort to push back against the established epistemic violence that denies the language of embodied intelligence.  And despite sustained industrial action giving us the space to join the dots of our common experiences of being bullied there remains an extraordinary resistance to articulating a living description of how things happen to women in organisational life.

This is going to sound bad.

One of the reasons why we don’t talk about bullying in the academy is because right from the get go women are groomed to expect routine intellectual theft, the slow creep of institutional failure projected as personal failure, combined with low level bureaucratic violence of punitive performance management systems. We expect to be measured by the performance metrics as deficient. So instead of insisting on a sector wide recalibration of how we are ranked by the metrics over the last three traumatic years, we accept that most women didn’t spend lockdown writing their next book. 

The press-repeat nature of post-pandemic inequalities is particularly painful for clever girls who learned to hide their shiny selves for fear of the mythical witch hunts that maintain the gendered bottom line. Painful for the clever girls who thought there would be some sanctuary in the academy where their intelligence was not supposed to be a continued cause of shame. 

Although bullying is an occupational risk, for women it slips effortlessly towards the personal as the audit culture in which we work individualises the attack, whether through student feedback or peer review processes gone wrong. And part of that attack is to enlist an embedded misogyny that delights in the humiliation of exceptional women just for the cosmic shits and giggles. 

Before the onslaught of whaddabouts and whaddayameans that inevitably follow a gendered statement like that I believe that in a performative work system every single one of us can be bullied, and if it were a simple case of bullies v victims we’d have crushed it by now. I believe that we’re all somehow involved in the systemic culture of fear that has come to exist in universities and that this causes enormous pain to both men and women representing a form of self-harm for all of us interested in legitimate and sustainable systems of knowledge production.  

But since we haven’t had the stomach to map the attack on women in work we continue to tip toe around the issue of bullying in a gaslit fog.

A few years ago I ran a series of discussions about Surviving Work in Healthcare courtesy of the Tavistock. Psychoanalytic people, academics, practitioners and trade unionists talking about their experiences of work using a psychoanalytic lens. One conversation with the beatific Elsie Gayle and Angela Eden was about bullying in the NHS. In this conversation Elsie describes her experience of being bullied when she was working as a midwife by a younger white colleague. If you have any sense of the nature of institutional misogyny it will not surprise you to know that midwives are some of the most bullied professionals in the health service. Women protecting other women in the process of giving birth in the way they want independently of institutional hierarchies, how very dare you. Elsie describes the effect it had on her, and in her beautiful way wondered how someone could be a whole human being if they couldn’t look at their own experiences and try to understand them.

Angela "I’m absolutely sure that working in a gang in a hospital or wherever has got something to do with being acceptable to the dominant culture. So if there is a clique in there who have the power you have to choose - am I going to be part of that gang that has the power or not? I know people who have watched bullying and have felt too ashamed and scared about their own job to whistleblow. The wish to be part of something - a tribe, a group or a profession - we know is a huge pull. The shame of watching something and not doing something - either you’re letting down the gang, or yourself, or your colleague, either way you’re lost." 

Elsie "I think you have to be able to recognise that something is seriously wrong and its actually going to damage me if I don't do something about it. I also think you need somebody on your side - somebody to support you and just guard your space, to be an ear and to point you in the direction. I had to find people and things to help me help myself. To be honest, although I didn't want to hear it I was told twice to leave the organisation - twice! - leave before they push you out. Sometimes you have to leave. You also need to contain the situation so it doesn’t affect the rest of your life - because it can actually destroy your family life, professional life, everything that is you. It can destroy you. So you have to find some way of dealing with the situation, putting it down and getting on with the rest of your life." 

Angela "Catch it early before its gone too far. So if you had an awareness of what counts as ethical behaviour and reasonable requests from management and sets of behaviour - if you can catch it early enough before it becomes damaging. You need a touchstone - a reflective group, a thoughtful individual - before you go mad. Once you’ve got to the point of bullying where you’re in pieces you cant hear it so being able to take it to an ally to say whats going on and to hear someone say “this is not on”. So that the moment it happens you’re not isolated."  

Elsie "Just talking about gang culture, in my case I couldn't understand why people were looking on and not doing anything because it was very visible what was happening. Nobody did anything, except for this one person who actually saved me. Really, nobody said anything - it was as if they were complicit in what was going on."  

Angela "And immobilised by the whole system. We shouldn't be - we see it around us and what resilience we need to whistle blow as you did. I’m not excusing this - it made me think that I was in the wrong - they’re in the right, look most of the people aren't saying anything so why am I making such a big fuss?"  

Elsie "But would you then be a whole person? You see for me you need to resolve these things. I feel like I wouldn't be a whole person just standing by. I feel a bit uncomfortable now because now I meet my bully at work - and its a hello and a hug and we’ve resolved it and put it down. Well I have."  

Angela "You’ve done the work. After years of thinking about this and understanding and reading and PhDs you’re understanding bullying. And it’s hard, it’s hard to be always conscious and thoughtful and ethical. Not everybody can do it."  

As an experienced midwife Elsie deeply and unselfconsciously understands how to bring life into the world and the profound responsibilities of guiding mothers and children through a good birth. And in a perverse way the attempt to rid her of her calibre is defeated because in response to this attack she did the emotional work for herself and the people around her.

So, this is also going to sound bad. 

In my experience, the targets of the worst levels of bullying at work are not just women but exceptional women. The kind of women you would never believe would be targeted because it’s just too audacious to imagine anyone would have the reason or guts. 

For the lucky kids in the back row with no lived experience, bullying can push us into such spectacular disorientation and trauma that many are ejected from their careers and minds.  The more performative the organisation, the more likely there are to be real casualties as the recent case of the headteacher Ruth Perry shows us. And then it quickly becomes too hard to explore the darkness of Ruth’s story because it raises a question about how an Ofsted report pushed a remarkable woman over-working in a context of sectoral crisis into such despair.

It was an envious attack. 

I have a tendency to go to psychoanalytic theory when the issue at hand is complex, affective and too dark for a staff meeting. In Kleinian thinking envy is a primitive emotion present in early development where the infant starts to develop relationships with the people taking care of them. As a defence against the powerful anxieties of the baby about loss - and losing their caretakers who keep them alive - narcissism and omnipotence get enlisted where dependency is denied by denigrating and undermining the goodness of the parental object. In simple terms, envy of the power of mummy leads to a hostility and a spoiling of her as a way of trying to control her. And it’s in this primitive way that bullying often involves a love of the victim, a deep envy which attempts to spoil and denigrate the loved thing in order to control it. 

Under Glasser’s formulation the process of infant development involves what he calls the ‘core complex’,  a complex of feelings, ideas and attitudes where the infant is torn between an intense longing for closeness and blissful union with the other and a desire for separation and individuation.

These anxieties have related defences including narcissistic withdrawal, where aggression is directed at the self (masochism), and sexualisation of the aggression that forms the basis for sadism. Glasser distinguishes aggression from sadism on the basis of their different attitudes towards the object. Aggression is the negation of the object and involves anxiety (shit I killed mummy) whereas sadism aims for the suffering and control of the object and involves no anxiety (I hurt mummy to keep her here and very busy hurrah for me). The aim and relationship with the object turns from destruction to one of control/hurting that in essence keeps the object alive.

Ugly as this psychoanalytic perspective is envy is my only explanation for why the exceptional women we work with are often the victims of the worst bullying and often by the most mediocre people. It explains why the outstanding qualities of some women are by necessity denied and denigrated by a system that perversely recognises their value. And distasteful as it may be to think about this, it explains why some bullies really do get a kick out of hurting people. 

I realise this version of bullying is not easily translated into the language of self-help Apps and workplace toolkits but I have started to understand when people say it’s not our job to educate the people standing in our way. Exhausted by the demand to deliver our knowledge with sufficient convention so that it can be heard, it’s something I am increasingly unable and unwilling to do. One of the principal demands coming from the women left standing on the frontline is for our institutions to read the room and to do this by using the information from another order that our lived experience offers. 

With courage as our protection, the only way out is through. 

To hear the full conversation with Elsie Gayle and Angela Eden go HERE. 

Surviving Work in Healthcare is a free online resource designed for people working on the frontline. The website is a joint project by Surviving Work and the Tavistock & Portman NHS Foundation Trust. We hope that you can use them in your activities, meetings and trainings -  all we ask is that you respect the copyright and attribute the resources to the authors when you use them. 

*To read Nora Bateman’s article on warm data you can read an exceptional edition of Unpsychology Magazine, edited by Julia MacIntosh and Steve Thorp here.