Lacan with the organization

Study group – Articles

Reading 1: A place to start

Arnaud, G., & Vidaillet, B. (2018). Clinical and critical: The Lacanian contribution to management and organization studies. Organization, 25(1), 69-97. Link

Optional readings:

  1. Contu, A., Driver, M., & Jones, C. (2010). Jacques Lacan with organization studies. Organization, 17(3), 307-315. Link
  2. Arnaud, G., & Vanheule, S. (2013). Lacanian psychoanalysis and management research: On the possibilities and limits of convergence. Management decision, 51(8), 1664-1677. Link
  3. Nobus, D. M. (2016). Esprit de corps, Work Transference and Dissolution: Lacan as an Organisational Theorist. Link

Reading 2: Identity and Subjectivity

Driver, M. (2023). Caring for the divided self: A psychoanalytic exploration of care and identity in organizations. Organization, 30(2), 361-379. Link

Optional:

  1. Arnaud, G., & Vanheule, S. (2007). The division of the subject and the organization: A Lacanian approach to subjectivity at work. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 20(3), 359-369.
  2. Driver, M. (2009). Struggling with lack: A Lacanian perspective on organizational identity. Organization Studies, 30(1), 55-72.

Reading 3: Leadership

Picard, H., & Islam, G. (2020). ‘Free to do what I want’? Exploring the ambivalent effects of liberating leadership. Organization Studies, 41(3), 393-414. Link

Optional:

  1. Harding, N., & Lee, H. (2014). The Doctor/Manager relationship as a psychosocial encounter: A scene of fantasy and domination?. In The Psychosocial and Organization Studies: Affect at Work(pp. 215-240). London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.

Reading 4: Entrepreneurship

Santisteban, S. C., & Jones, C. (2024). Ordinary entrepreneurial psychosis. Organization, 31(1), 66-86. Link

Optional:

  1. Driver, M. (2017). Never social and entrepreneurial enough? Exploring the identity work of social entrepreneurs from a psychoanalytic perspective. Organization, 24(6), 715-736.
  2. Jones, C., & Spicer, A. (2005). The sublime object of entrepreneurship. Organization, 12(2), 223-246.

Reading 5: Performance and envy

Vidaillet, B. (2017). Understanding the strange growing of individual performance appraisal. Link

Optional readings:

  1. Bloom, P. (2013). Fight for your alienation: The fantasy of employability and the ironic struggle for self-exploitation. Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organizations, 13(4), 785-807. Link
  2. Catlaw, T. J., & Marshall, G. S. (2018). Enjoy your work! The fantasy of the neoliberal workplace and its consequences for the entrepreneurial subject. Administrative Theory & Praxis, 40(2), 99-118.
  3. Cremin, C. (2010). Never employable enough: The (im) possibility of satisfying the boss’s desire. Organization, 17(2), 131-149.

Further readings:

  1. Azfar Nisar, M. (2020). Practitioner as the imaginary father of public administration: A psychoanalytic critique. Administrative Theory & Praxis, 42(1), 44-61.
  2. Driver, M. (2009). From loss to lack: Stories of organizational change as encounters with failed fantasies of self, work and organization. Organization, 16(3), 353-369.
  3. Fotaki, M., & Harding, N. (2013). Lacan and sexual difference in organization and management theory: Towards a hysterical academy?. Organization, 20(2), 153-172. Link
  4. Glynos, J. (2011). On the ideological and political significance of fantasy in the organization of work. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 16, 373-393.
  5. Harding, H 2014, Jacques-Marie-Èmile Lacan. in J Helin, T Hernes, H D & H R (eds), Oxford Handbook of process philosophy and organisation studies. Oxford University Press, Oxford https://purehost.bath.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/196233995/Lacan_Chapter_Final.pdf
  6. Kenny, K. (2009). Heeding the stains: Lacan and organizational change. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 22(2), 214-228. Link
  7. Nobus, D. M., & Moncayo, R. (2018). The Lacanian School as an Organizational Structure. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

LInks of interest – Basic concepts

  1. Modules on Lacan: https://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/english/theory/psychoanalysis/lacandevelop.html
  2. Stanford encyclopedia: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lacan/
  3. Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Lacan

LInks of interest – If you want to explore Lacan himself

  1. Lacan Works Exchange: https://lacanianworksexchange.net/lacan 
  2. A gentle introduction to Lacan: https://www.lacanonline.com/2012/07/reading-lacan-where-to-start/
  3. Reddit:

Dictionaries – In case you want to see different definitions

AN INTRODUCTORY DICTIONARY OF LACANIAN PSYCHOANALYSIS

“Detailed definitions are provided for over two hundred Lacanian terms. Attention is given both to Lacan’s use of common psychoanalytic terms and how his own terminology developed through the various stages of his teaching. Taking full account of the clinical basis of Lacan’s work, the dictionary details the historical and institutional background to Lacanian ideas. Each major concept is traced back to its origins in the work of Freud, Saussure, Hegel and others.”

Videos – Sometimes helpful to see/listen to a presentation

    1. Lacan in 10 minutes (10:00): https://youtu.be/MxRS0DL3RPw?si=GesMYhpYv2dMEJCl
    2. The Imaginary, the symbolic, and the real (15:52): https://youtu.be/BD9rMahFFHc?si=RvcIZEkmBhhr4PFD
    3. Jacques Lacan (8:12): https://youtu.be/5OnhOXq7m4w?si=q0-Mt_TnzcctGFHB
    4. Interview with Bruce Fink: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UeAihtvZhQ

Podcasts – The perfect length for a walk or workout

Ordinary Unhappiness 39: It’s Not You, It’s Lacan: The Mirror Stage, Part IAbby, Patrick, and Dan kick off their 2024 Lacan era by tackling his single most famous essay and concept: the mirror stage. Because Lacan is notoriously difficult, this is going to take multiple episodes, of which the first is devoted to stage-setting, demystifying, and unpacking exactly why Lacan is both so notoriously difficult, and also notorious in general. What shakes out of their ensuing conversation includes Lacan’s biography (in brief); Lacan as a reader of Freud and the description of his project as a “return to Freud”; the experience of reading Lacan; frustration, anxiety, the pressure of time, and the logic of the “short session”; and more. Then they turn to the essay itself, getting granular about Lacan’s relationship to phenomenology (and what that is), his opposition to Descartes’ cogito (and what that entails), and more, building to the famous scene of the baby jubilant before the image of itself in the mirror. What a charming scene of self-recognition and unproblematic joy! Or is it? Stay tuned for the next installment.

Ordinary UNHAPPINESS, Episode 41: Identification and Misrecognition: The Mirror Stage, Part IIOur journey through Lacan’s “mirror stage” continues as the scene before the mirror unfolds into a tragic drama. Abby, Patrick, and Dan unpack the many meanings of “identification” and how, for Lacan, the self-identification the baby “assumes” from the slick image in the mirror offers a template for all subsequent identifications. They also talk about mirrors both literal and metaphorical; biological models, developmental teleologies, and roles we assume; the desire for knowledge; and knowledge as a destination versus knowledge as a process.

Ordinary Unhappiness 43: The Mirror Crack’d: The Mirror Stage, Part IIIAbby, Patrick, and Dan conclude their adventure through Lacan’s mirror stage! They reprise Lacan’s parable of the mirror-besotted baby and tie together the many threads – theoretical, clinical, and philosophical – woven through it. They walk through how Lacan musters evidence for his argument using both cases of pathology (i.e. psychosis) and “normal” dreams and fantasies, and how his situating of alienation within the ego puts him at odds with other schools of psychoanalysis, specifically those associated with Anna Freud and Melanie Klein. They outline how Lacan’s polemic against “ego psychology” expands from a critique of contemporary Anglophone psychoanalysis into a broader objection to schemes of social control and ideologies of “a freedom that is never so authentically affirmed as when it is within the walls of a prison.” Does Lacan’s parable suggest any radical potential, and does it open up new ways for thinking about the inevitability, limits, and flexibility of identity claims in our own lives and our historical moment? They confront this question by unpacking the different senses of an “exit” to the mirror stage, and how Lacan’s essay on the origins of subjectivity relates to the open question of where work of therapy ends and new possibilities of remaking ourselves and the world begin.

Books – Just in case you need more to do

    1. How to read Lacan: https://ia804604.us.archive.org/28/items/how-to-read-lacan_202307/How%20to%20read%20Lacan_text.pdf
    2. Lacan and organization: https://mayflybooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/9781906948108LacanAndOrganization.pdf