The symbiotic lure permeates the practice of organizational management and change facilitation. It can also be observed by researchers when they cross the boundary of an organization and as they 'open up' the organization in the research process. Diamond (1988) uses the symbiotic lure as a metaphor for understanding psychological regression in organizations. It is a reaction to anxiety in which members of a group or organization “[deny] their individual differences and psychologically [merge] with each other”, often against an "other". Leaders, when enacting effective containment, play a key role in managing the symbiotic lure to prevent its potentially devastating consequences in organizations and society.
Category: Articles of interest
Subjectivity and desire in research
"Is an interpretation always, to some extent, an imposition of our own discursive or psychical attachments?" The answer to this question, in part, lies in exploring the subjectivity of researchers/analysts and participants/analysands in the research encounter. In part, it lies in tracing what happens to psychoanalytic concepts in the research process. This is the project taken up by Claudia Lapping in her 2013 paper entitled "Which subject, whose desire? The constitution of subjectivity and the articulation of desire in the practice of research". The article reminds us that our inner emotional experiences are always both a potential source of insight and a path towards imposing our own needs and desires on organizational members. Interpretation is sometimes the expression of our own, not others', desires. And, sometimes it is an attempt to hide the lack that we cannot bear to acknowledge. The research encounter inevitably evokes something about us. We may attribute these aspects of our experience to the other (through interpretation) when, in fact, they reveal something about our selves.
Paradoxes of the self
"Moving back and forth between celebration of the private self and articulation of the impossibility of a one-person psychoanalysis, Modell’s quest to define the nature of the self has taken him from classical analytic theory, through Winnicott and object relations, to the philosophy of intersubjectivity and, in later years, to the work of infant researchers and neuroscientists."
Psychoanalytic theory as social practice
"Shifts in psychoanalytic theory and practice have occurred, in part, because of the inability of the classical (Freudian) model to provide a language that adequately captures deeply felt human values and beliefs."
Thomas Ogden on three forms of thinking
Thomas Ogden (2010) outlines three forms of thinking: magical, dream, and transformative. These three forms of thinking offer a different way of approaching clinical material. They also offer different ways of considering how we do research and generate insight in the research process.