Jonathan Dunn's critical review of intersubjectivity in psychoanalysis provides a framework for understanding the relational aspects of organizational life. By acknowledging the co-constructed nature of experiences and the significance of interpersonal dynamics, organizations can foster environments that promote psychological well-being and collective success.
"Tom Main, one of the British “Independents,” said of psychoanalysis that sitting behind a couch five times a week was only one of its applications."
How do you use psychoanalysis?
Last month we began reading a special section of Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society (2012) entitled: Locating the Psychosocial – Using Klein, Bion, Winnicott, Lacan, and Relational Theory to Treat Transgenerational Trauma. This special section explicitly strives to “bridge the gap” between the clinical and academic “modes of thinking” while straddling analytic approaches to conceptualizing and treating psychic trauma. More specifically, treating the transmission of transgenerational trauma manifested as psychosis. So, with this new series of readings we extend our discussions of the psychosocial and how to think psychosocially about organizations and organizing.
Our first reading was Psychic Murder and the Asylum of Psychosis, which is Esther Rashkin’s re-reading of Mario’s case (see Faimberg, 2005) with a “psychosocial and intrafamilial” lens. She focuses on “unspoken languages”, highlighting the interplay between aliveness and deadness, and viewing enactments as a mode of communication. Rashkin is concerned with what is said and unsaid, concealed and revealed, visible and invisible.
Rashkin introduces a number of ideas that are ripe for use in the organizational context. For example:
Would you like to join us as we play with these ideas?
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During times of severe crisis and turmoil, as experienced globally in the last few years, leadership is a critical resource in staying connected with social and organizational reality. This presentation will first describe how the 33 Chilean miners, trapped almost two-thousand feet below ground for 69 days, shared forms of leadership that activated group resilience. Qualitative data reveals how the miners as a group engaged in shared agency. A sophisticated work capacity and a constructive relational dynamic evolved, helping them absorb severe strain and anxiety. Their distribution of leadership was essential for promoting collective sense-making and emotional containment. There will also be an opportunity to think together about how some of what has been learned from this paradigmatic case might be applied to contemporary organizations within their complex and shifting reality.
The recent article by Seth Allcorn and Carrie M Duncan published in Psychohistory, “A Journey into the Heart of Darkness: Psychosocial Insights into Predatory Behavior”, explores the heart of darkness in leaders and organizations using Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella, which was later remade in the movie Apocalypse Now. It does so by examining how ideologies, cultural norms, and social values can shape the personalities of emerging leaders, sometimes in dark ways, and amplify their effects on societies and organizations. In particular, leaders’ predatory personality features can result in destructive organizational dynamics, and increase costs related to workers’ emotional distress and organizational dysfunction. A psychosocial perspective contributes to understanding how harmful styles of leading emerge. The psychosocial view presented in this article “bears witness to sociopolitical and economic traumas generated by national and organizational cultures that allow, and may even value, the predatory behavior that disrupts work and traumatizes…organization members” (p. 255). The authors identify assessments of leader-follower relational dynamics as important for “understanding the unconscious emotional and psychological dynamics that become barriers to organizational effectiveness and change” (p. 254). In short, “by making the experience of ‘what it’s like to work (live) here’ available for reflection it becomes possible for organizational members to transcend the harm being done and rebuild a sense of community both inside and outside of the organization” (p. 255).