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Abstract
Contemporary western organizations appear to be caught in neophily, i.e., a cult of newness and novelty. As traditional means of organizational transformation—and profit maximization in particular—have broadly proven insufficient or to have completely failed, contemporary capitalism has turned the Old into an antiquated object of hatred. As the Old, and thus the past, is split off, the New—because it is new—is guaranteed to be better. Organizational structures and processes that previously served as more or less reliable containers for both labour and capital are now regarded as old wineskins that have served their purpose and belong on the ‘scrapheap of history’.
This paper emanates from the working hypothesis that betrayal and cynicism, in the context of organizational transformation, cannot sufficiently be understood from a perspective limited to individual psychopathology but has to take the organization as a whole into account.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Gilles Arnaud, Adrian Carr, Stan Gold, Claus Hohmann, Peter Jüngst, James Krantz, John Newton, Peter Pelzer, and Jonathan Shay for their help in the process of writing this paper. I am especially grateful to Rose Mersky for her work in editing this paper to best express my ideas in English.
Notes
1. Extended version of a paper presented at the 2005 Baltimore Symposium of the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations: The New: New Psychoanalytic Responses in our Work with Organizations and Society.
2. Social Dreaming ‘is a discipline for discovering the social meaning and significance of dreams through sharing them with each other's. This is done by the deliberate and sustained method of free association and amplification through the Social Dreaming Matrix.… From the inception of Social Dreaming the systemic nature of dreaming was recognized and affirmed. Not only do dreamers dream from their ecological niche but also they dream themes that are systemically related. Social dreaming is also a uniquely experiential discipline, which frees participants from their personal defenses that constrain free‐thinking and interaction in ordinary social situations. Social dreaming can be used in organizational systems, professional communities, and consumer, focus and special interest groups' (quoted from the text of the Social Dreaming Institute). Social Dreaming was founded by W. Gordon Lawrence in 1982.
3. Socio‐analysis is defined ‘as the activity of exploration, consultancy, and action research which combines and synthesises methodologies and theories derived from psycho‐analysis, group relations, social systems thinking and organisational behaviour’ and ‘social dreaming’ (Bain, Citation1999: 14).
4. Unthought known is a term which has been offered by the British psychoanalyst Bollas (Citation1987, Citation1989). It refers to what ‘is known at some level but has never been thought or put into words, and so is not available for further thinking’ (Lawrence, Citation2000: 11–12). This knowledge cannot be grasped because it cannot be phrased in language or metaphor. As it cannot be thought, named, or put into an idea, it is acted out primarily in situations of high anxiety and chaos, which foster the exportation of the threat of internal terror.
5. The Committee of seven rings is ‘the “Secret Committee” of seven men, including himself, that Freud organized in 1912 “to maintain the faith and to search out deviance” from his principles. Freud charged Ernest Jones, Karl Abraham, Otto Rank, Sandor Ferenczi, Hanns Sachs and Max Eitingon with preserving his discovery and propagating it around the world. To seal their compact he gave each an ancient ring, thus closing the circle’ (Schneiderman, Citation1991).
6. Transference: the process by which an individual or social system displaces on to others feelings, ideas, etc., by which it relates to others as though it were some former object (cf. Rycroft, Citation1995/[1968]: 185ff).
7. Basic assumption me‐ness (baM): ‘Our working hypothesis is that baM occurs when people—located in a space and time with a primary task, i.e., meet to do something in a group—work on the tacit, unconscious assumption that the group is to be a non‐group. Only the people present are there to be related to because their shared construct in the mind of “group” is of an undifferentiated mass. They, therefore, act as if the group had no existence because if it did exist it would be the source of persecuting experiences. The idea of “group” is contaminating, taboo, impure, and, in sum, all that is negative. The people behave as if the group has no reality, and cannot ever have reality, because the only reality to be considered and taken account of is that of the individual. It is a culture of selfishness in which individuals appear to be only conscious of their own personal boundaries, which they believe have to be protected from any incursion by others. The nature of the transactions is instrumental, for there is no room for affect which could be dangerous because one would not know to where feelings might lead’ (Lawrence, Bain and Gould, Citation1996: 100).
8. Projection: ‘Lit. throwing in front of oneself. Hence its use in…psychoanalysis to mean “viewing a mental image as objective reality”. In psychoanalysis two sub‐meanings can be distinguished: (a) the general misinterpretation of mental activity as events occurring to one, as in dreams and hallucinations; and (b) the process by which specific impulses, wishes, aspects of the self, or internal objects are imagined to be located in some object external to oneself. Projection of aspects of oneself is preceded by denial, i.e. one denies that one feels such and such a wish, but asserts someone else does.… Projection of internal objects consists in attributing to someone in one's environment feelings towards oneself which derive historically from some past external object whom one has introjected’ (Rycroft, Citation1995/[1968]: 139).
9. Contrary to the traditional use of the term both in psychiatry and psychoanalysis, psychosis is understood here as a way of thinking. It is mainly through the work of Melanie Klein (Citation1952, Citation1959) that the experience of anxieties of a psychotic nature is regarded as a constituent dimension of the normal development of infants, and equally constitutes a part of our adult world, rooted as it is in this early experience. To acknowledge psychotic anxieties and thinking as constituent parts of the development of infants and of human development—and thus of life in general—contributes towards a depathologization of psychosis and its respective anxieties (Young, Citation1994: 73ff). It is the notion of psychotic anxiety as the in‐between state of the paranoid‐schizoid and the depressive position which challenges me to use the notion with organizations. Social organizations and profit‐oriented organizations, in particular, often seem to cover their internal anxiety level with a somehow curious, but nevertheless normal appearance.
10. Introjection: ‘The process by which the functions of an external object…are taken over by its mental representation, by which the relationship with an object “out there” is replaced by one with an imagined object “inside”. The resulting mental structure is variously called an introject, an introjected object, or internal object’ (Rycroft, Citation1995/[1968]: 87, original emphasis).
11. Paranoid‐schizoid position: ‘Psychic configuration postulated by Melanie Klein in which the individual deals with his innate destructive impulses by (a) splitting both his ego and his object‐representation into good and bad parts, and (b) projecting… his destructive impulses on to the bad object by whom he feels persecuted. According to Klein, the paranoid‐schizoid position constitutes the infant's first attempt to master its death instinct and precedes the depressive position. Failure to leave the paranoid‐schizoid position (i.e. to reach the depressive position) is responsible, in Klein's view, not only for many schizoid and paranoid disorders, but also for obsessional difficulties…in which the ‘persecuting bad object’ is introjected…, forming the core of the super‐ego’ (Rycroft, Citation1995/[1968]: 125).
12. Depressive position: ‘A Kleinian concept. It describes the position reached (in her scheme of things) by the infant (or by he patient in analysis) when he realizes that both his love and hate are directed towards the same object—the mother—becomes aware of his ambivalence and concerns to protect her from his hate and to make reparation for what damage he imagines his hate has done’ (Rycroft, Citation1995/[1968]: 36).