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:- Crypt - “permits the radical denial of traumatic loss by allowing its carrier or “cryptophore” to live a double life…” (p. 72)
- Endocryptic identification – “A crypt or intrapsychic vault may form in the ego .. and house within it-buried but psychically alive-the deceased associated with the unspeakable drama… (p. 72)
- Cryptophores – “may identify with the living dead in the crypt by way of endocryptic identification and live out…aspects of the trauma…” (p. 72)
- Cryptonym – “word that hides…[that] resist understanding through their various linguistic transformations... but contain traces of specific traumas that can…be deciphered and read” (p. 73)
Would you like to join us as we play with these ideas?
If so, please email: admin@surfacingtheorg.com
For more information about our group visit: surfacingtheorganization.com