Robert M. Young Online Writings
THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF INSTITUTIONS
Suggested Reading:
Armstrong, David (1995) ‘Making Absences Present: The Contribution of W. R. Bion to the Understanding of Unconscious Social Phenomena’; on-line at http://human-nature.com/hraj/armstrong.html
Jaques, Elliott (1955) 'Social Systems as a Defence against Persecutory and Depressive Anxiety', in Klein, Melanie et al., eds. New Directions in Psycho-Analysis: The Significance of Infant Conflicts in the Patterns of Adult Behaviour. Tavistock; reprinted Karnac: Maresfield Reprints, 1977, etc., pp. 478-98.
Menzies Lyth, Isabel (1959) 'The Functions of Social Systems as a Defence Against Anxiety: A Report on a Study of the Nursing Service of a General Hospital', Human Relations 13: 95-121; reprinted in Containing Anxiety in Institutions: Selected Essays, vol. 1. Free Association Books, 1988, pp. 43-88
People who work in the field of institutional psychodynamics tend to do two sorts of things. The first is to act as staff on conferences of the kind which grew out of Wilfred Bion’s work. I have discussed these in the unit on Group Relations. The second is to act as consultants to institutions, e.g., commercial organizations, professional groupings, hospitals, schools, and other educational institutions, public sector organizations, charities. In Unit Five of the course on Contemporary Problems in Psychoanalysis I wrote about the pioneering and classical work of Isabel Menzies Lyth who sought to understand why nurses resigned from their profession in such high numbers, a problem which, over forty years later, continues to lead to serious staff shortages in the National Health Service and to consequent draining of nurses from other countries. I urge you to read what I wrote about her work in that unit and will now add more about her findings. They are paradigmatic of the psychoanalytic approach to institutions in that they point to the fundamental role of unconscious forces in determining what goes on in them.
In the case of nurses, the unconscious defences against the anxieties which were erected against the fear of death and destruction which are rampant in the hospital context and which became the routines of the nursing service, had the effect of leading people who went into the field out of compassion for human suffering with a strong desire to alleviate it, to behave in thoughtless and routinised ways and to treat the patients as if they were not fully human - to treat the relations between people as if they were relations between things, recalling Marx on fetishism (1867, pp. 163-77) and Georg Lukács on reification (1923, pp. 83-222). Put simply, when people cannot bear what situations make them feel they switch off, i.e., they withdraw their sensitive and tender feelings and protect themselves from being overwhelmed by threatening feelings. It is notorious that people who work in institutions caring for disadvantaged people -- delinquents, prisoners, the learning disabled, the elderly and so on -- are prone to suffer burn-out and to become insensitive, off-hand and, in extreme cases, uncaring and even brutal. I shall give you a list of the things Menzies Lyth found nurses doing in the hospital. As you ponder it and compare it with your own experience, you will see that we are dealing here with quite general phenomena, ones which we can discern clearly in a London teaching hospital but which are also at work in other institutions - in a school, in a university or government department, in the military and clergy, in a corporation, etc. -- throughout the world.
Here are the defensive techniques she discovered: splitting up the nurse-patient relationship; depersonalization, categorisation, and denial of the significance of the individual; detachment and denial of feelings; the attempt to eliminate decisions by ritual task-performance; reducing the weight of responsibility in decision-making by checks and counter-checks; collusive social redistribution of responsibility and irresponsibility; purposeful obscurity in the formal distribution of responsibility; the reduction of the impact of responsibility by delegation to superiors; idealisation and underestimation of personal development possibilities; avoidance of change (Menzies Lyth, 1959, pp. 51-63). During a visit to Bulgaria someone told me that a person who wants to keep his or her job there never does anything he or she was not told to do. It’s the same all around the world.
Two examples she cites rang painfully true to my own experience. The first falls under the category of 'depersonalization, categorisation, and denial of the significance of the individual’. Menzies Lyth writes,
The protection afforded by the task-list system is reinforced by a number of other devices that inhibit the development of a full person-to-person relationship between nurse and patient, with its consequent anxiety. The implicit aim of such devices, which operate both structurally and culturally, may be described as a kind of depersonalitsation or elimination of individual distinctiveness in both nurse and patient. For, example, nurses often talk about patients not by name, but by bed numbers or by their disease or a diseased organ: "the liver in bed 10" or "the pneumonia in bed 15". Nurses themselves deprecate this practice, but it persists. Nor should one underestimate the difficulties of remembering the names of, say, thirty patients on a ward, especially the high-turnover wards' (p. 52).
The patient is not seen as whole person needing care but a number, an illness, or a damaged part of the body, that is, 'a part-object only, the retreat into part-objects being another feature Bion attributes to basic assumption group phenomena’ (Menzies Lyth, 1969, p. 16) ‘Basic assumption’ functioning is a concept Bion uses to describe groups in the grip of an escapist unconscious phantasy.
A similar depersonalization occurs for the hospital staff through the use of identical uniforms with a rigid hierarchy of roles and tasks appropriate to various levels of seniority. The nurses become their roles and skills, and are thereby experienced and experience themselves less as individuals: charge nurse, staff, student, aide. Like a soldier or policeman or priest, they are cloaked in their uniforms and positions in society and are thereby more respectable (one of Florence Nightingale's intentions when she created the nursing profession), while both less vulnerable and less accessible. The starch is a powerful barrier; so are the colours of the uniforms and their quasi-military markings. The bizarre hats are part of a code whereby those in the know can locate a nurse's training hospital in the complex culture of the hierarchy of trainings, like a college or club or regimental tie or the insignia of a nun's order.
The problem of depersonalization has been made even more acute in recent times in Britain by the fact that staff shortages - due to the factors here described - lead to increased use of external commercial agency nurses who are quite often present on a given ward for a single shift and in an entirely different hospital the next working day. Callousness can also be born of boredom and doing routine tasks with only prostrate bodies for company. If one is sitting alone in a recovery room waiting for a patient to come round from an anaesthetic, conversation from a passing colleague is very welcome and unlikely to take account of the fact that the patient may be taking in what is said as he or she regains consciousness. When I was thirteen, I was wheeled in my bed from my hospital room for a test. On the way back, when the nurses pushing the bed thought I was asleep or unconscious, they were discussing my alarmingly low pulse and respiration rates and speculating that I would not survive another night. Once I realised what was being said, I kept quiet for fear of being caught eavesdropping.
My second example is of underemployment of nurses and getting them to do stupid things. This is the example always cited from Menzies Lyth’s classic paper, because it is so familiar to people who have spent time in hospitals. Hospital routines are 'routinely' followed slavishly to the point that common sense utterly disappears:
Underemployment of this kind stimulates anxiety and guilt, which are particularly acute when underemployment implies failing to use one's own capacities fully in the service of other people in need. Nurses find the limitations of their performance very frustrating. They often experience a painful sense of failure when they have faithfully performed their prescribed tasks, and express guilt and concern about incidents in which they have carried out instructions to the letter but, in so doing, have practised what they consider to be bad nursing. For example, a nurse had been told to give a patient who had been sleeping badly a sleeping draught at a certain time. In the interval he had fallen into a deep natural sleep, Obeying her orders, she woke him up to give him the medicine. Her common sense and judgement told her to leave him asleep and she felt very guilty that she had disturbed him (Menzies Lyth, 1959. p. 69).
In industry this is called 'working to rule' and is considered to border on industrial sabotage. Doing exactly what one is told is a characteristic of the roles of prisoners, people in the military and children under the yoke of particularly authoritarian parents. Of course, to follow orders to the letter, without using one's discretion and common sense, very frequently leads to disaster, which is why so much slapstick comedy illustrates this form of revenge against silly, authoritarian rules and rulers. The outstretched upturned hands, accompanied with a shrug and a look of pseudo-innocence, completes the moment of Oedipal triumph, just before the chase by the would-be punisher begins. Having been addressed like an idiot and told to do 'exactly as I say', one then behaves like a fool, thereby protecting the vulnerable, sensible self from further humiliation. Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Stan Laurel and Lou Costello got some of their most reliable laughs this way.
Menzies Lyth draws a cautionary conclusion:
In general, it may be postulated that resistance to social change is likely to be greatest in institutions whose social defence systems are dominated by primitive psychic defence mechanisms, those which have been collectively described by Melanie Klein as the paranoid-schizoid defences (Menzies Lyth, 1959, p. 79).
In later reflections on her work and that of her colleagues, she has reiterated just how refractory to change institutions are (Menzies Lyth, 1988, pp. 1-42, and personal communications).
The defences described here and in the essays by Bion and Elliott Jaques (1955) do not, to say the least, bring out or reflect the best in people.
These defences are oriented to the terrifying situations of infancy, and rely heavily on violent splitting which dissipates the anxiety. They avoid the experience of anxiety and effectively prevent the individual from confronting it. Thus the individual cannot bring the content of the phantasy anxiety situations into effective contact with reality. Unrealistic or pathological anxiety cannot be differentiated from realistic anxiety arising from real dangers. Therefore, anxiety tends to remain permanently at a level determined more by the phantasies than by the reality. The forced introjection of the hospital defence system therefore perpetuates in the individual a considerable degree of pathological anxiety (Menzies Lyth, 1959, pp. 74-5).
I believe that this sort of thing is characteristic of bureaucracies, of street gangs, of racial disharmony, of nations in dealing with each another. The primitive mechanisms at work here generate unconscious phantasies of others and of one’s place in the group which Bion and his successors have been a pains to spell out. Most importantly, they involve the projection of split off, unwanted or taboo parts of the self into others, with such evocative force that they elicit in the other the projected behaviour and put the two in a symbiosis which confirms and sustains the unfortunate features of behaviour. As importantly, they get built into the fabric of the institution and - as we saw in the example of the nurses - lead to the institutionalisation of anti-human behaviour. Everyone knows this; it is the source of endless jokes and of passionate indictments of apparatchiki, whether in Washington, Moscow, London or Mexico City. We need institutions in order not to be overwhelmed by dread, but since fundamental features of those institutions are created to contain and to defend us against those anxieties, they are inherently conservative, often reactionary.
Elliott Jaques suggests that as a result of these reflections on human nature
it may become more clear why social change is so difficult to achieve, and why many social problems are so intractable. From the point of view here elaborated, changes in social relationships and procedures call for a restructuring of relationships at the phantasy level, with a consequent demand upon individuals to accept and tolerate changes in their existing patterns of defences against psychotic anxiety. Effective social change is likely to require analysis of the common anxieties and unconscious collusions underlying the social defences determining phantasy social relationships (Jaques, 1955, p. 498).
To a degree all institutions have these features as fundamental aspects of their structure and dynamics. Psychotic anxiety is as much a feature of relatively democratic groups and institutions as is it of more rigid ones. In fact, one of the most striking discoveries in the student movement of the 1960s and of the ensuing feminist movement was that throwing off the shackles of the existing ways of doing things very quickly led to what was called ‘the tyranny of structurelessness’ in which egos competed for power and the creation of new and sometimes worse institutional structures. I published a lovely book by Claire Baron entitled Asylum to Anarchy (Baron, 1987) reporting a study of what happened to a therapeutic community when total freedom was declared. It was closed down in fairly short order, not because the outside authorities were alarmed but because of the internal chaos. I dare say that some of you have some idea of the sorts of process to which I am referring.
Speaking for a moment more about my own experiences, I have lived and worked in a number of institutional settings, beginning with family, neighbourhood, schools, military organisations and camps, to medicine, university teaching, cultural politics, television, publishing and professional psychotherapy. In each and every one of these settings there have been periods (more often than I care to remember) when dreadful things were happening between individuals, in factions and sometimes throughout the group which were quite literally mad, but no matter what was said, they persisted, sometimes to the point of the demise of the project, more often, as I mentioned in another unit, to the point of a split or expulsion. I always secretly felt it was my doing, and others sometimes agreed. Now I know that individuals play causal roles, but the structural causation is the most important factor. People act within those group dynamic constraints, constraints which are powerfully coercive. There is even a force at work called ‘role suction’; the individual gets pulled into the position which the group dynamic requires, and the requisite behaviour is sucked out of that person, as if by a vacuum cleaner (Horowtz, 1983, pp. 29-30).
The history of political sects is notoriously about this sort of thing, and splits, betrayals, purges and scapegoating are routine. What is striking is that such dynamics occur in nominally consensual groups. Indeed, someone once wrote a book about the dynamics of one of the most consensual groups in history - the Puritans who emigrated from England to America to practice their strict beliefs. In spite of basing their community on religious ideals, crime, deviance and serious group problems appeared almost immediately - see Erikson, 1966). So, it seems, we are here looking at human nature on the hoof. I want to say that in spite of all my experience of working in groups, collectives and institutions I never felt I had the least understanding of these processes or any hope of getting beyond them until I got involved with the group relations movement. It is not a panacea, but it is certainly more than a beginning.
I am attempting to show the interrelations and congruences between the most primitive levels of the individual unconscious and the features of institutions which puzzle and dismay us. I am sure you all have a strong intuitive sense of what the phrase ‘pathological organisation’ means in your own institutional roles. Closely allied with this idea, my colleague, David Armstrong, offers us the idea of ‘the institution in the mind’ (Armstrong, 1991), while Gordon Lawrence’s concept of ‘social dreaming’ brings us the intriguing prospect of the individual dreaming on behalf of the group and institutional dynamic (Lawrence, 1998, 2003). I mention these as further promising aspects of the illumination group relations can bring to better social dynamics in institutions and societies.
I shall offer one more example of the interrelations between Kleinian psychoanalysis and institutions. One of Klein and Bion’s most assiduous followers with respect to the importance of primitive functioning is Donald Meltzer. In his book, The Claustrum (1992), he investigates a personality type - people who have to win and will do anything to reach the top. They become authoritarian leaders in institutions, companies, countries: ruthless apparatchiki, tycoons, dictators They have a survivalist mentality and are unmerciful to competitors. They absolutely must prevail. What Meltzer has to say about them is that in their inner worlds they are dwelling at the very extreme of the psychic digestive tract, just inside the anus. Their ruthless behaviour is a desperate defence, parallel to what we saw in the nurses and also parallel in being a bulwark against psychotic distress, in this case, the prospect of schizophrenic breakdown. Meltzer explores the inner worlds of such people with great care and subtlety.
The more we get to see about the dynamics of groups and institutions, the more surprising and bizarre they seem. I am thinking about the sorts of things we learn about business, the military, politics, the entertainment industry. Sometimes we get good look into the intimacies of power, for example, in the Watergate hearings in 1973, the Clinton impeachment hearings, David McClintick’s (1983) account of power dynamics in Hollywood, Steven Bach’s (1985) account of the Making of the film of ‘Heaven’s Gate’, directed by Michael Cimino, which went so a over budget that it broke the studio, United Artists. As I write, Britain is in the midst of searching hearings conducted by Lord Hutton, on the circumstances surrounding the apparent suicide of a Ministry of Defence weapons specialist, Dr David Kelly.
We also have biographies of men in power. I am thinking of Pulitzer Prize-winning ones by Robert Caro of Robert Moses (1974), the czar of public projects in New York from the 1920s until the 1950s and of Lyndon Johnson (1983, 1990, 2002). Others come to mind - of Douglas MacArthur (Manchester, 1978), of Richard Nixon (Rangell, 1980). Similarly illuminating accounts have been written about the dynamics of particular businesses, IBM (Rodgers, 1969), ITT (Sampson, 1973), Lemann Brothers (Lewis, 1989). It is a source of constant amazement to me how institutions manage to survive. Some don’t, of course -- Enron and WorldCom, and the stories of the shenanigans that went on and led to their demise beggar the imagination. Some institutions shouldn’t survive -- Devils’ Island, the Gulag Archipelago. I am irresistibly drawn to such accounts and find in them much of psychoanalytic interest about people and power and group and institutional dynamics. They show just how much we are, in spite of all the benefits of the evolution of rationality, in the grip of primitive, unconscious, psychotic forces.
Needless to say, the sorts of groups and institutions mentioned above rarely turn to psychodynamic consultants to sort out their difficulties, but some do. In order to get a sense of the sort of work people who do consult to institutions do, I suggest that you have a lingering look at the papers presented to the main professional body of such consultants, The International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations (ISPSO), which has annual conferences and places the papers given at those conferences on-line in an archive at the organization’s web site: http://www.ispso.org/ You will also find a statement about the scope off the discipline, links, journals and a colossal bibliography of the field (in the making) called Recommended Reading. You may also want to join the email discussion forum concerning the work of the members of ISPSO. To join, go to http://lists.oakland.edu/mailman/listinfo/ispsosend Reading the ongoing flow of messages on an email forum is an excellent way of becoming familiar with what is going on in a field. You get a good sense of the issues under discussion, the positions held and new developments in the literature. You don’t have to take part in the discussions unless you choose to. Another group concerned with group and organizational dynamics is orgodyne, which you can join by going to the Yahoo Groups site: http://www.groups.yahoo.com/ (You’ll need to register with Yahoo Groups, where you will discover other interesting egroups concerned with psychoanalysis, e.g. one called grouprelations.)
I have to say that I have some strong ambivalence about much of the consultancy to organizations, especially commercial ones. Most people in the field get their living by being paid substantial consultancy fees (£1000 per day is not unusual) by corporations. Their institutional location tends to pre-structure what the consultant can say. They are often employed by top management, and this, to say the least, raises sensitive diplomatic issues about how candid the consultant can be. Don’ get me wrong. I think this is important work, but it is easier to consult and give candid counsel to some oganizations than to others. Consultants are usually called in when there is trouble -- you might say when the institution has a fever. Feverish people are often volatile and find it hard to take their medicine, especially if they find it unpalatable and if it threatens their own position and power. Of course, practitioners in the field of consulting to institutions think hard about minimising the forces compromising their integrity.
I greatly admire some people in this field. I particularly recommend the writings of David Armstrong, Gordon Lawrence, Lawrence Gould, Kenneth Eisold, Larry Hirschorn and Howard Stein (I am not implying anything about the work of people not on this list.) Some of the others I find slick, hand in glove with management, not always particularly concerned with the views and interests of ordinary workers lower down the hierarchy. Once again, consultants’ interests are in danger of being structurally allied to management, and management is not always in sympathy with the requirements and interests of their workforce. Some are; many are not. If you look at the combined list of papers given at ISPSO conferences, I think you will detect a pronounced management bias -- quite a lot on ‘leadership’ and ‘authority’, for example. To be sure, there are people in this field who are left-wing and identified with workers near the bottom of the hierarchy, but my impression is that they are a relatively small minority in the profession of organizational consultancy.
It should be acknowledged that, just as individuals working in this field are not free from dubious and self-serving motives, the dynamics of their professional organizations are not exempt from the very same problems they seek to alleviate in the organizations of their consultants. There are splits, intrigues, scapegoatings expulsions, even a flying Dutchman or two, The more one gets to know about the institutions where group relations and organizational consultancy were developed, the more one learns about conflicts, cliques, ostracism, personal and doctrinal splits, emigration. The same is true of psychotherapy training organizations, where there have been a number of splits and wherein the organizational dynamics are particularly distressing, given the fact that all member are supposed to have undergone a searching training therapy or analysis. For example, among psychoanalytic psychotherapy training organizations in London, the British Association of Psychotherapists (BAP), the London Centre for Psychotherapy (LCP) and the Association of Individual and Group Psychotherapy (AGIP) were all the product of splits, while the Forum for Independent Psychotherapists was partly formed by dissidents from the Arbours Association and AGIP, while the Site for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy was formed by people splitting off from the Philadelphia Association. Another, less obvious, way to express strong disagreement with the way organizations are run is individual withdrawal or voting with one’s feet. For example, some meetings of the Lincoln Centre have been so poorly attended that they were inquorate, even though the training it offers is highly-regarded (see Young, 1996).
In spite of very acrimonious controversies and huge conflict of personal loyalties between Ana Freud and her followers, on the one hand, and Melanie Klein and hers, on the other, with a rump of people not committed to either in the middle, the British Psychoanalytic Society did not split but created a structure where the training and rotation of major offices reflected its three main theoretical and personal loyalties (King and Steiner, 1991). This historic compromise has endured for over half a century. In some ways it has proved sclerotic, but the high quality of its training and of the writings of the society’s members is undeniable. Even so, the problems occurring among the three groups in the British Psychoanalytic Society -- Contemporary Freudians, Independents, Kleinians -- became so acute that Isabel Menzies Lyth was asked to look into them. Her report has not been made public. I have noted that if one goes to a party given by a member of the Independent Group, it is unlikely that you will see any Freudians or Kleinians there. I am told that he same is true of social events given by members of the other two groups.
Lest you think this is mere tittle-tattle, I refer you to a microscopic study of the institutional dynamics of psychoanalytic organizations. Douglas Kirsner has taken a very close look at four psychoanalytic societies, the four most eminent ones in the United States: in New York, Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles. He has conducted exhaustive archival research and conducted scores of interviews and has come up with a close analysis of their institutional dynamics. He has also thought long and hard about what procedures and institutional boundaries might mitigate the abuses of power and patronage and the hegemony of cliques that he found. His book, which I most heartily commend to you, is a model of analytic reflection on institutional psychodynamics: Unfree Associations: Inside Psychoanalytic Institutes (Kirsner, 2000, see also Kirsner, 1999).
Of course, you may say, such things are true of many professions, academics, for example. I agree, but when it is true of people who are supposed to be trained in thoughtfulness, insight and forbearance, it’s more than a little worrying. When it turns out that priests, nuns and therapists behave in ways that are inconsistent with fundamental articles of faith of their highly moral callings, it is particularly dismaying. I can think of several people who have had leading roles in psychotherapeutic, psychoanalytic, group relations and organizational consultancy organizations whose behaviour has sometimes (and in some cases frequently) been inconsistent with some of the fundamental tenets of their professions, e.g., imperious, undemocratic, devious, manipulative, nepotistic. I wish that a good experience of therapy or analysis and long experience of working in group relations and related activities were proof against these things, but I am sadly convinced hat they are not. I comfort myself with the maxim that ‘One should not judge the priesthood by the priest’ and the knowledge I have that, on the other hand, much good has come of psychotherapy psychoanalysis, group relations events and psychoanalytic approaches to organizations. On balance -- and in the depressive position ‘on balance’ is as good as it gets -- the good outweighs the bad
In conclusion, I have sketched ideas drawn from Klein, Bion, Jaques, Menzies Lyth, Armstrong, Lawrence, and Meltzer. If you have lost count, here are the ideas I have mentioned: psychotic anxieties, projective identification, paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, the institution in the mind, social dreaming and the claustrum. All are concerned with primitive functioning, and all are relevant to understanding the dynamics of groups, factions, institutions, regions, racism, nationalism, international relations. I believe they hold out hope for humankind, hope of a kind which is not available to the same degree from any other framework of ideas. The reason they do so is that they take very seriously the need to understand and work through the large role of the unconscious aspects of aggressive and destructive aspects of human nature. They help us to see what restricts and persecutes the whole tone and mood of mental space, and group relations practitioners provide temporary institutions and consultations which promise to make mental space more capacious, contained, benign and creative. Psychoanalytic consultants to institution do likewise but in the field, where they can rarely create artificial settings. They have to have their insights on the battlefield, as it were. They will not solve everything, but I say of that what Churchill said of democracy: it’s the worst form of government - except for all the others. Kleinian psychoanalysis, group relations the psychoanalytic study of organizations are the least successful ways of improving the quality of mental space - except for all the others. I do not think they will make us perfect, but they can certainly make us more insightful, perhaps wise, and they do - in their increasing use throughout the world - help people not to act as badly and as desperately as they did before and often to co-operate more than they did, as well. In this period of dashed hopes and fearful prospects, that’s a lot.
This is a unit for the Distance Learning MA in Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Sheffield (2003).
REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING
(Place of publication is London unless otherwise specified.)
Armstrong, David (1997) ‘The “Institution in the Mind”: Reflection on the Relation of Psychoanalysis to Work with Institutions’, Free Associations (no. 41) 7: 1-14; on-line at http://human-nature.com/hraj/mind.html
______ (1995) ‘Making Absences Present: The Contribution of W. R. Bion to Understanding Unconscious Social Phenomena’, on-line at http://human-nature.com/hraj/armstrong.html
Baron, Claire (1987) Asylum to Anarchy. Free Association Books
Bach, Steven (1985) Final Cut: Dreams and Disaster in the Making of Heaven’s Gate. Cape.
Caro, Robert A. (1974) The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. N. Y.: Knopf.
______ (1983) The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Vol. 1: The Path to Power. N.Y.: Knopf
______ (1990) The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Vol. 2: Means of Ascent. N. Y.: Knopf.
______ (2002) The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Vol. 3: Master of the Senate. N. Y.: Knopf.
Colman, A, D. and Bexton, W. H. (1975) Group Relations Reader 1. Washington, D. C.: A. K. Rice Institute.
______ and Geller, M. H.(1985) Group Relations Reader 2. Washington, D. C.: A. K. Rice Institute.
DeBoard, Robert (1978) The Psychoanalysis of Organizations: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Behaviour in Groups and Organizations. Tavistock.
Erikson, Kai T. (1966) Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance. N. Y.: Wiley.
Gabriel, Yainnis et al. (1999) Organizationsin Depth: The Psychoanalysis of Organizations. Sage
______ (2000) Organizing and Organizations: An Introduction, 2nd ed. Sage.
Gould, Laurence J. et al., eds. (2003) Applied Experiential Learning: The Group Relations Training Approach. Madison, CT: Psychosocial Press.
Hinshelwood, R. D. (1987) What Happens in Groups. Free Association Books.
______ (2001) Thinking about Institutions: Milieu and Madness. Jessica Kingsley.
Hirschorn, Larry (1984) Beyond Mechanization. MIT
______ (1990) The Workplace Within: Psychodynamics of Organizational Life. MIT
______ (1997) Reworking Authority: Leading and Following in the Post-modern Organization. MIT.
Horowitz, L. (1983) 'Projective Identification in Dyads and Groups', Internat. J. Group. Psychother. 33: 259-79. reprinted in Colman and Geller, eds. (1985), pp. 21-35.
Jaques, Elliott (1955) 'Social Systems as a Defence against Persecutory and Depressive Anxiety', in Klein et al., eds. (1955), pp. 478-98.
King, Pearl. & Steiner, Ricardo, eds. (1991) The Freud-Klein Controversies 1941-45. Tavistock/Routledge.
Kirsner, Douglas (1999) ‘The Internal Politics of Psychoanalysis: Life among the Analysts’, Free Associations (no. 43) 7: 416-436; on-line at http://human-nature.com/free-associations/kirsner.html
______ (2000) Unfree Associations: Inside Psychoanalytic Institutes. Process Press; penultimate draft on-line at http://human-nature.com/kirsner/index.html
Klein, Melanie et al., eds. (1955) New Directions in Psycho-Analysis: The Significance of Infant Conflicts in the Patterns of Adult Behaviour. Tavistock; reprinted Karnac: Maresfield Library, 1977, etc.
Lawrence, W. Gordon, ed. (1998) Social Dreaming @ Work. Karnac.
______, ed. (2003) Experiences in Social Dreaming. Karnac.
Lewis, Michael (1989) Liar’s Poker: Rising through the Wreckage of Wall Street. N. Y.: Norton; reprinted Coronet, 1990.
Lipgar, Robert M. and Pines, Malcolm, eds. (2003) Building on Bion: Roots. Origins and Context of Bion’s Contributions to Theory and Practice. Jessica Kingsley.
_______ (2003) Building on Bion: Branches. Contemporary Developments and Applications of Bion’s Contributions to Theory and Practice. Jessica Kingsley.
Lukács, Georg (1971) History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Merlin.
Manchester, William (1978) American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964. Little, Brown; reprinted Laurel, 1983.
Marx Karl (1867) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1; reprinted Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976..
McClintick, David (1983) Indecent Exposure: The True Story of Hollywood and Wall Street. Columbus Books.
Meltzer, Donald (1992) The Claustrum: An Investigation of Claustrophobic Phenomena. Strath Tay: Clunie.
Menzies Lyth, Isabel (1959) 'The Functions of Social Systems as a Defence Against Anxiety: A Report on a Study of the Nursing Service of a General Hospital', Human Relations 13: 95-121; reprinted in Lyth (1988), pp. 43-88
______ (1969) ‘A Personal Review of Group Experiences’, in Lyth (1989), pp. 1-18.
______ (1987) ‘Action Research in a Long-Stay Hospital’, in Lyth (1988), pp. 130-207.
_____ (1988) Containing Anxiety in Institutions: Selected Essays, vol. 1. Free Association Books.
______ (1989) The Dynamics of the Social: Selected Essays, vol. 2. Free Association Books.
Miller, Eric (1993) From Dependency to Autonomy: Studies in Organization and Change. Free Association Books
Morgan, Gareth (1986) Images of Organization. Sage.
Obholzer, Anton, Roberts, Vega Z. and Krantz, James, eds. (1998) The Unconscious at Work: Individual and Organizational Stress in the Human Services. Routledge.
Rangell, Leo (1980) The Mind of Watergate; An Exploration of the Compromise of Integrity. Norton.
Rodgers, William (1969) Think: A Biography of the Watsons and IBM. N. Y.: Stein and Day; reprinted N. Y.: New American Library, 1970.
Sampson, Anthony (1973) The Sovereign State of ITT. N. Y.: Stein and Day; reprinted Coronet, 1983.
Shapiro, Edward R. and Carr, A. Wesley (1991) Lost in Familiar Places: Creating New Connections Between the Individual and Society. Yale.
Stein, Howard F. (2001) Nothing Personal, Just Business: A Guided Journey into Organizational Darkness. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Woodhouse, Douglas and Pengelly, Paul (1991) Anxiety and the Dynamics of Collaboration. Aberdeen University Press/Elsivier.
Young, Robert M. (1994) Mental Space. Process Press; on-line at http://human-nature.com/rmyoung/papers/paper55.html
______ (1996) The Culture of British Psychoanalysis and Related Essays on Character and Morality and on The Psychodynamics of Psychoanalytic Organizations; on-line at http://human-nature.com/rmyoung/papers/paper53.html
Archives:
Web site of the international Society for the Psychoanalytic
Study of Organizations: http://www.ispso.org/
Web site of Human Relations, Authority and Justice
http://human-nature.com/hraj/home.html
Bibliography:
Sievers, Burkhard, complier ‘The Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations: A Bibliography in the Making’ http://www.ispso.org/The%20Field/the%20field.htm
Journals:
Administration & Society
Culture and Organization
Ephemera - an e-journal
Free Associations
Freie Assoziation (German)
Human Relations
JPCS: Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and
Society
Journal of Psycho-Social Studies - an e-journal
Organization
Organizational and Social Dynamics
Socio-Analysis
Copyright: The Author
Address for correspondence:
26 Freegrove Road, London N7 9RQ
robert@rmy1.demon.co.uk
Web site and writings: http://www.human-nature.com