Winnicott and Labor’s Eclipse of Life

September 7, 2023September 17, 2023Leave a comment

Locating Winnicott within a broad landscape of critical scholarship that dissects work’s perils, Nathan Gerard's new book positions Winnicott as both a radical critic and creative advocate for building a different kind of work life—one that might make room for the presence of self.

By shuffling the discourse on neoliberal subjectivity to reclaim what Winnicott calls “unit status” of the separate self, Gerard differentiates Winnicott from the relational tradition by advocating for Winnicott’s non-relational aspects. Through such analysis, the book reveals how work and home have become two sides of the same impoverished coin, each contributing to a legitimately “bad environment” that perpetuates self-absence and annihilates one’s unique sense of “feeling real” and alive.

Psychoanalysis, teaching, and learning

June 17, 2022July 26, 2022Leave a comment

CPOS is proud to present their third biennial workshop, "New Engagement with the Future: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Anxieties and Defenses in Teaching and Learning (about Management and Organizations)". The workshop will be presented online as part of the annual symposium of the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations on June 29, 2022 at 6:30am CST.

For more information and to sign up visit: https://am2022.ispso.org/AM22-Workshops

CPOS associates will share their experiences at the intersection between psychoanalysis, educational institutions, and classroom teaching practices – focusing on how we see psychoanalysis as potentially disruptive to dominant theories, practices, and discourses of teaching and learning. Psychoanalysis usefully provides important concepts that can help us unpack unconscious meanings and motivations – transference and countertransference, splitting and projection, denial and defense, illusion and disillusionment. And, it offers something more – a way of being and working in the space of education that has the potential to encourage reflection in action and support our efforts to work together to move past the trauma of the pandemic and build a better world.

Accreditation as a social defense

March 29, 2022March 29, 2022Leave a comment

Healthcare management struggles to be both a scholarly discipline and a legitimate practice. Legitimacy is often equated with being “business like”. As such, healthcare management scholars and practitioners have made “professionalization” a priority in an effort to legitimize the field (Gerard, 2019; 2021). Accreditation is at the center of this effort.

Accreditation of healthcare management programs (along with clinics, behavioral health programs, and hospitals) makes sense on the surface, but it is also a way that faculty and students (and clinicians, managers, and executives), unconsciously, protect themselves from having to confront the field’s complicity with questionable managerial techniques that at best reinforce existing health (and healthcare) inequities and, at worst, exacerbate social injustices.

Working in healthcare settings, as managers and as clinicians, requires awareness of self and other experiences in the face of acute fear, anxiety, loss of hope, and even death – while holding hope for recovery, health, and life. Yet, in today’s healthcare environments, managers and clinical staff avoid these emotional complexities with technical models, data-driven interventions, and pretentions to rigorous science. The psychoanalytic question here: what do these efforts represent unconsciously, and what do they attempt to cover over or deny?

Unpacking Squid Games

November 2, 2021Leave a comment

On the surface, the Squid Game is a sustained critique of class and ultimately the egregious excesses of contemporary capitalism. Akin to the highly successful Hunger Games franchise, poor contestants are pitted against each other by the wealthy, and the audience invariably identifies with the few proletarian protagonists who display some moral compass amid a primitive “dog-eat-dog world” at once contrived and sensational and yet a direct mirror of contemporary society. Below the surface, however, and in addition to what some critics may see as mere “pretense at social commentary,” the Squid Game succeeds at offering incisive organizational commentary, and particularly at illuminating the terrifying efficiencies of state-sponsored and organizational violence. Indeed, for the psychosocially-informed viewer, the series has many easily observed organizational linkages, most notably elements of the Nazi era, but also much of the history of mercantilism, colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, and ill-conceived but common organizational change dynamics such as downsizing resident in the plot.

Center for Psychosocial Organization Studies

Generating knowledge and imaginative possibilities to improve organizations

Category: Contributed by Nathan Gerard

Psychoanalysis, teaching, and learning

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Unpacking Squid Games

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