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HOWELL S. BAUM. Organizational Membership: Personal Development in the Workplace (State University of New York Press, 1990).
ISRAEL MENZIES LYTH. Containing Anxiety in Institutions: Selected Essays, Vol. 1 (Free Association Books, London 1988).
LESTER L. TOBIAS. Psychological Consulting to Management. A Clinician's Perspective (Brunner/Mazel, 1990).
EDWARD R. SHAPIRO and WESLEY CARR. Lost in Familiar Places. Creating New Connections Between the Individual and Society (Yale University Press, 1991).
Psychoanalysis, potentially, is a theory that can expand the connections among seemingly diverse areas of human experience. Starting out as a discipline that discovers hitherto hidden connections within the individual and elucidates powerful subterranean forces producing profound effects on the surface, it holds out the promise of analogously (or causally) demonstrating intricate and unseen connections in the larger units in which all individuals live--family, tribe, organization. Overall, in today's end-of-the-20th-century world, we see the possibilities of using thinking developed in one discipline and domain to help understand another.
However, both the specifics and a usable theoretical framework of such cross-fertilization often are elusive. One arena where such specification is badly needed is that of the relationship between psychoanalytic study of the individual and the study of organizations. This field--and indeed the books under review establish that there is a field--exemplifies the tension between the promise of psychoanalytic theory as the discipline that will unlock the deep meanings and secrets of another discipline, and the practical and theoretical difficulties of implementing such a program.
The four books reviewed here map out the terrain of psychoanalytic thinking in regard to management, leadership, and organizational thinking. Such thinking, a fundamental reexamination of these areas, potentially can add a deep, very important dimension to the organizational domain. This dimension is one of process--no matter what aim we want to achieve--commercial, social, or otherwise; whatever managerial task we want to accomplish--the way we approach and carry out the task is crucial. How we get where we want to go is linked not only to operative measures that are target oriented, but also to deep, complex processes, most of which are not conscious and are not expressed in people's overt behavior. These hidden components have a decisive effect on the achievement of aims.
It was from psychoanalytic theory that I began my observation, understanding,...