Organizational transformation is not always for the best. It can entail progress, but it can also entail corruption and decay. To observe changes in society, therefore, is not necessarily to discern trends that hold promise for the future. They may be, instead, harbingers of collapse.

Collapse has happened before. Following upon the great period of order and prosperity called the Pax Romana, Western civilization went into a decline that culminated in domination by Germanic tribes beginning in the fifth century. The ensuing period of about 500 years is called the Dark Ages.

Civilization, for all practical purposes, means organization. That the Dark Ages represented a loss of organization cannot be doubted. In the absence of Roman law and order, complex forms of organization became impossible. Cities, the idea of which is the key to our idea of civilization, lost their populations. Along with them went the complex division of labor that they made possible and hence the specialization that made it possible for people to become very good at something, since each person not have to do everything. With the exception of religion, everything that required specialized knowledge was lost: the arts and sciences, engineering and technology, and the capacity to maintain a system of widespread education and literacy. Human life in Europe came to be organized through primitive segmented communities, based on kinship and proximity, and largely self-sufficient through basic agriculture and, frequently enough, pillage. No better account of this situation has been written than that of Thomas Hobbes:

In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society. And the life of man: poor, nasty, solitary, brutish, and short.

Of interest to us, though, is that in addition to the loss of external public order, the Dark Ages represented the loss of internal mental order. Writing of the difference between classical civilization and the Dark Ages, historian Thomas Cahill observed:

The intellectual disciplines of distinction, definition, and dialectic that had once been the glory of men like Augustine were unobtainable by readers of the Dark Ages, whose apprehension of the world was simple and immediate, framed by myth and magic. A man no longer subordinated one thought to another with mathematical precision; instead, he apprehended similarities and balances, types and paradigms, parallels and symbols. It was a world not of thoughts, but of images… They did not argue, for genuine intellectual disputation was beyond them. They held up pictures for the mind... By the mid-seventh century, the visible image has assumed far greater reality than the invisible thought. (Cahill, 1996: 204-5)

These patterns of mental activity are familiar to psychoanalytic theory. The mental sphere of the "intellectual disciplines of distinction, definition, and dialectic," lies within the register Lacan called "the symbolic." The symbolic comes to us through internalization of the father, who represents external reality and the order we have made to deal with that reality. The sphere of "similarities and balances, types and paradigms, parallels and symbols," is characteristic of the imaginary. It has its roots in the early state of fusion between infant and mother before reality, represented by the father, intruded upon that intimate connection (Schwartz, 2003; Verhaeghe, 1999.

Optimally, the imaginary and the symbolic coexist with one another in a state of fertile tension, a tension whose specific resolutions give us the capacity to adapt to change through the creation of new form, which the sociologists call the diachronic aspect of civilization. Since these two are in tension, however, perverse possibilities exist in which each tries to resolve the tension by eliminating the other; attempting through this to bring the mind under its sole domination.

This ascendancy toward dominance on the part of the imaginary can be seen along a number of dimensions. When the symbolic attempts to eliminate the imaginary, we get what Freud called the "anal character," the obsessive-compulsive personality. When the imaginary takes upon itself the task of eliminating the symbolic, we get a mental configuration known as hysteria.

The obsessive-compulsive dynamic is consistent with organization, though organization that gives no place to the imaginary may be lifeless, strained and destructive of the human spirit. In fact, organizational structure is an expression of the symbolic (Schwartz, 2002, 2003). The hysterical dynamic, however, is not consistent with organization at all, and in fact takes organization as its enemy. If it were to rise to domination, that would mean the ascent of barbarism. Unchecked, it would represent the emergence of a new Dark Age. In this presentation, I will explore the nihilistic potential of this hysterization.

The Age of Hysteria

Not too long ago, received wisdom was that hysteria was long gone. For example, a book by Allen Wheelis that I read as a teaching assistant in graduate school maintained that the hysteria that patients presented in Freud's consulting room, in the form of apparent physical maladies with no apparent organic cause, had disappeared from the practice of psychoanalysts. Our times, Wheelis argued, were too psychologically sophisticated to support the kind of repression characteristic of Freud's time. As a result, hysteria, based as it was on repression, has become extinct by becoming impossible.

A more recent view, for example that of Showalter (1997), is that hysteria is not only alive and well, but positively thriving, and has simply shifted its symptoms. Yet this shift of symptoms is not some way that hysteria has hidden; it is precisely part of hysteria, and has been since it was given its name and thought to be the result of a moving womb.

What I think is most significant about this current view, and which differentiates it most deeply from that of Freud, is that hysteria is not seen as a "disease" that exists entirely within the person, as for example cancer does, but is a form of relationship between the hysteric and the other.

In a sense, hysteria is seen as a kind of collusion between the hysteric, usually a woman, and a person functioning as a doctor, or a therapist, or an expert of some sort, who is usually a man. The hysteric engages in a performance that is designed to bring a sympathetic response from those around her. On the basis of this performance, the expert diagnoses the malady of the hysteric in terms that reflect social concerns. These terms change over time and circumstance, and hence the performance that will create the effect changes; it is geared toward engendering that response. That is the reason that the "symptoms" of hysteria change; that is the principle of motion of the hysteric's womb.

Showalter finds hysteria in a wide range of contemporary social phenomenal. Some of these, such as chronic fatigue syndrome and Gulf War syndrome, are close to the classic picture. Others, including the terrible fear about sexual abuse of children in day care centers, and alien abduction, range farther afield. Still, disparate as they appear, these phenomena, which Showalter calls "hystories," have a number of things in common, which become clear from an observation of Showalter's data.

For one thing, the collusive relationship between the hysteric and the therapist never results in "cure" of the hysteric. The symptoms always remain, though they may change a bit, and are always seen as, in some sense, mysterious. The function of the therapist, then, properly speaking, is not to cure the hysteric, but to give a name to her condition. In this way, he legitimates it and makes it, in some sense, real. As such, he is not really a therapist at all, but rather a part of the hysterical drama. I will call him a co-hysteric and the group consisting of the hysterics and the co-hysterics I will call the "hysterical group."

Second, these are very noisy affairs. There is no suffering in silence among these folks. Rather, such suffering is extremely assertive, constituting the basis of a demand that attention be paid to it.

Third, there is nothing outside of these dramas. They are taken by the hysterics to be the whole world, reducing everything else to triviality. The demand they make is, therefore, categorical and absolute, and is asserted without recognition of feasibility or circumstances or any other limitation that reality might impose.

Fourth, on the basis of this demand, a confrontation always takes place between established forms of understanding and the hysterical group, which claims special knowledge that established authority refuses to credit. In every case, the knowledge of the special group is legitimated on the grounds that the hysterics just know what they know. The claimants, that is to say, demand to be taken seriously in the face of a skepticism that asserts the accepted contemporary criteria of what counts as evidence. They feel abused and outraged when they are not. The co-hysterics, of course, do take them seriously, which makes them part of the same confrontation.

Finally, the narratives of the hysteric, as adumbrated by the co-hysterics, always involve imagery of a certain kind of penetration. This penetration may come in a variety of forms; from children being raped, to penetration by a mysterious organism, to being sexually probed by alien beings, but it is always present. And we may recall that this was so right from the beginning of the psychoanalytic study of hysteria, when Freud found, or perhaps as a co-hysteric placed, the origin of the symptoms of his patients in sexual molestation by the father.

Yet rich as her descriptive material is, Showalter takes no clear stand on the causes of hysteria, referring to a variety of theories that posit, among other things, emotional distress, women's powerlessness, the authentic voice of silenced women, and so on. In the end, her argument borrows from the theory of hysteria as a disease, and the hysteric as a sufferer whose condition should elicit sympathy. In this way, she passes over the deeper realization, implicit in her own material, that hysteria is not an underlying condition to which attention must be paid, but rather a drama of an underlying condition engaged in for the purpose of garnering attention. To explore the question of where the need for that attention comes from, and the reason why it leads to the dramatics, we need to go beyond Showalter. Fortunately, we are able to do that.

Verhaeghe's Theory of Hysteria

Current understanding of hysteria owes much to the work of the Jacques Lacan, whose notoriously impenetrable writing bids fair to be considered an hysterical manifestation in its own right. We are fortunate to have the work of a number of his students who have cast his thought in constructive and creative ways, and whose work stands on its own merits. In this connection, I will rely on the work of Paul Verhaeghe (1999).

For Verhaeghe, whose debt to Lacan I will take for granted and will not explore, what is characteristic of the hysteric is a discourse, a form of relatedness to the physician. At its root, the condition of the hysteric arises from the fact that there is no signifier for the woman. This leaves her as a split subject, stuck in the space between being herself and knowing herself, her life therefore bereft of stable meaning. She turns to the therapist with the demand that he provide her with meaning, putting him in the position of the "one who is supposed to know." He takes up this challenge and offers her a discourse within which she is supposed to be able to find herself. But all he has offered her is language and it therefore, as she makes manifest, always misses the point. The problem is that his language is always his language. It is always masculine, and with regard to her it never suffices. There is always something left over, Lacan calls it object a, who is the one that attracted him to begin with and therefore cannot be ignored. So his discourse always fails, and she asserts her demand again.

What we can see from this is why the therapist always fails, and why he is not really functioning as a therapist at all. The female subject always remains out of his reach, but by staying out of his reach, yet bringing him to function in the manner of "he who is supposed to know," she comes to be dominant in the relationship. The confrontation between the hysterical group, of which he is a part, and the world of established meaning is therefore grounded in the spontaneity of the hysteric, which it can never capture. In a sense, it is a battle for control over who will establish the terms of her meaning, and of how they will be established. Hers is a bid to establish her meaning through this confrontation, defined only by her experience of herself as object a, which the language misses, but which represents her spontaneous idea of herself.

What we see here is a refusal of the Oedipus complex, and of the father who represents the common meaning through which the world is organized, but which always leaves her unique and ineffable self out of its account. Hysteria is her assertion of her unique self as against the common meaning that the father represents.

But this analysis leads to a further question. Hysteria, I have said, is a conflict between one's spontaneous self and the shared meaning that makes up the world. But there is the basis for such a conflict in every human being. Why does hysteria seem to be a feminine preserve? How does sex come into this? For Lacan/Verhaeghe, this sexual differentiation arises from the fact that there is no signifier for the woman. But why not? What is there about being a woman that resists signification?

On one level, the idea is absurd. Obviously, there is a signifier for the woman. It is "the woman." How is that not a signifier? But, of course, that is not what Lacan/Verhaeghe have in mind. What they surely mean is that "the woman" is a term that stands for the woman, but it does not signify. It gives meaning to no course of action. It is like a chain of signifiers with only a single link. It goes nowhere.

Now, to be sure, there are plenty of meanings that have been taken to follow from the idea of being a woman. One is a mother, a wife, and so on. The problem with these is that they provide a meaning for the woman only in the context of a relationship with a man, whose meaning has been antecedently, and presumably independently, established. Taken as referring to an independent self, the term "the woman" has no meaning. In other terms that Lacan/Verhaeghe would find useful, there is no desire specific to the idea of he woman that would structure a woman's life. The structure of her life requires the desire of a man. That would drive anyone nuts. Hysteria is just what we call that particular brand of madness.

But why does "the woman" have no meaning, while "the man" does? Why is there no desire specific to the woman, while there is specific to the man? To answer this question, I will turn away from Verhaeghe/Lacan for a while and toward another French psychoanalyst, Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel (1986)

For Chasseguet-Smirgel, the central feature of sex differences arises from different relationships to the maternal imago. The maternal imago, the infant's primordial image of the mother that we all carry, is the central figure in the psychic life of the child. As we imagine her, she is perfect and will make our own lives perfect. Her love is all we can ever need, and is indeed the end of need. From this arises the fact that her image is the most powerful figure in the psyche. What is more, her image is not only a powerful image, it is an image of power. Her very presence will make life perfect for us. Her power, and this is what marks feminine power off from masculine power, inheres in her simply being who she is. She does not have to do anything, but only to be. She is Aristotle's unmoved mover.

To again be merged with her is the ultimate object of all of our desire. By the same token, though, it is also the end of our separate existence. Yet since her power simply consists in her presence, the withdrawal of that presence means absolute devastation. Therefore, she is the object of our love, but for the same reason she is also an object of terror.

The boy and the girl relate to the primordial mother in different ways, though of course the difference is not absolute. The little girl loves the mother, just as the boy does, but she can imagine becoming a mother, as the boy cannot, and in that sense identify with the mother and her power in a way that the boy cannot. Therefore, she does not need to fear the power of the mother to the same extent. The mother's power, in the girl's imagination, and of course this is all taking place within her imagination, is the girl's power.

The boy is in a much more difficult position. He cannot identify with the mother's power, at least to the same extent, but needs it. Yet his very neediness makes him absolutely vulnerable to the loss of that love. His attitude toward the mother, and therefore his attitude toward women, is marked by total ambivalence.

This ambivalence may be resolved in a number of ways. In Western culture, the traditional way is through the formation of an agenda, which will on the one hand offer fusion with the mother, but on the other postpone that fusion through the project of doing something that will earn that fusion on grounds that maintain the man's existence. He will do something she desires, and this will provide a reason for her to keep him around, to grant him the ground on which he can comprehend and maintain his independent existence.

But what does she desire that will lead her to grant the ground of his independent existence? What, Freud famously asked, does woman want?

This is the question that breaks the matter wide open. It is the key to answering the questions of why there is no signifier for "the woman," while there is for "the man."

The answer is that woman wants herself. What else could she want? She is perfect in every way. Her very existence is perfection itself. She cannot want anything beyond herself because she herself is the very satisfaction of desire. She is the very meaning of the satisfaction of desire. She cannot have desire because, as Lacan says, desire requires lack; and she has no lack.

The man has plenty of lack. The desire to satisfy this lack provides the meaning for his agenda. What he lacks is her. She cannot have desire, but for that reason she can be the cause of desire. She wants herself; he will give her herself. She is omnipotent; he will create the conditions in which her omnipotence can be realized. These conditions are what we call home, and it will be the place where their fusion is realized. They will have children.

And all of this will take place within a symbolic framework appropriate to its time. The man will attempt to realize it within the world as it is, as he understands it through language as it is, but he will always fail. The fantasy of fusion will always elude him. Object a will always be left over. Yet there is nothing for it but for him to try again. So he will examine his failure. He will look at his thought and actions as objects, as taking the position of the father enabled him to do. He will learn something from them. In the renewed hope of fusion, he will create new possibilities for thought and for action. In this way he will create the world as it becomes. It is this created world, insofar as she buys into it and accepts the terms he has created, or even as he imagines that she does, within which he grounds the basis of an independent existence.

Out of this grows the chain of signifiers, with her as their end. And the meaning that these signifiers have arises from their position within the chain, the chain which leads from him-without-her to him-with-her. That is why there is a signifier for "the man." It means that a man can find himself within the chain of signifiers. And it is why there is no signifier for "the woman." She cannot find herself within a chain of signifiers because a chain of signifiers leads to her, and she is already there. The chain of signifiers, in its inevitable failure to reach her, will always be inferior to her.

But she needs signifiers because without signifiers there can be no desire, and without desire there can be no directed action, there can be no structure for one's life. One can only be overtaken by the upwelling of feeling and self-referential imagery that constitutes the psychotic dissolution of the self. Quite a problem. What will she do?

Well, traditionally, she has done the only thing she could do. If there cannot be female desire, but only male, she will find her place within male desire. She will define herself in the terms he has created to make sense of his own life. She will be a wife. And in this way, she will bring into herself his desire for fusion with her. She will see herself becoming the mother of his children.

More recently, she has fit herself into social structures, such as organizations of various sorts, created through male desire and, ultimately, given meaning by it. We can foresee that her place within these structures will always be occasioned by a certain incongruity, perhaps a certain strain. This is a matter to which we will return.

Meanwhile, we must pause here to reflect upon how marvelously the traditional arrangement fits things together. Neither man nor woman, though for different reasons, has meaning without each other. Yet these two empty contraptions, taken together, provide meaning for each other and through that have created the world in which they live. Without that, there was nothing; take it away and nothing will remain.

She was full and lacked nothing. But lacking nothing, she was nothing. Being full, she was empty. He was nothing and needed her fullness to have the idea of becoming something. His attempts to do so created everything, for the purpose of filling her, as they both needed her to be. The world created in this way was and will remain imperfect, but it is at least a world, and is there for them both to enjoy.

We have not yet gotten to the discourse of the hysteric. We will get there, but first we must go farther in our reflections on this arrangement.

The woman's desire for the man turns out to be her desire for herself, as mediated by the man. It is based on her recognition of the emptiness implied in her fullness. In the absence of an agenda, she cannot simply be herself because that would simply be psychotic explosion. Yet she cannot provide signification for herself because the entire signification that is available takes her as an object. It is all directed toward her pursuit and always contains the limitations of the man's lack. Yet how can she be limited at all, since the whole premise of her need is her fullness?

She can resolve this dilemma by using her power as object of desire to influence the man. He may have an answer to who she is, but for the reasons we have just seen, this can never be a really good answer. His signifiers, after all, can only be his signifiers. They can never suffice to tell her who she is, since they will never fit. There will always be something left over, which is precisely her -- the object of desire in the first place. Lacan calls this object a. He must therefore renew his pursuit of her, refashioning its terms in the hope of success. And each time trying to refashion those terms to better represent her. In this way, she gains meaning by being the object of his attempt to make meaning, ever renewed through the relationship of this pair and the tension between them. End that tension and they both disappear.

So it is that we understand what the tension is all about. It is a contestation about the source of meaning. His meaning is the masculine meaning of the symbolic, which ultimately gains its meaning from its attempt to encompass her perfection, which it can never accomplish. Her meaning is derived from her identification with the primordial mother, which validates and even deifies the spontaneity of her imaginary, but which goes nowhere without the symbolic that only he can provide. It is through the conflict of this tension that the imaginary and the symbolic interpenetrate each other and create the relationship without which both of them are nothing.

And so the tension is and has to be absolute. There is, as Lacan again puts it, no such thing as sexual rapport. And it's a good thing, too. There can, however, be rapport between human beings, who understand the meaning of this tension and recognize their individual dependence on this tension and therefore their mutual dependence on each other. This does not make the tension go away; it simply has its function understood. In effect, what has developed is a relationship between split subjects, a form of relationship that I will call existential. That is the aspect of the feminine. And this relationship takes place within the context of all the developed forms that civilization has wrought. That is the aspect of the masculine.

But where is the hysteric in all of this? What I have described here is the tension between the sexes. Hysteria may fit into that, but it is not the whole thing. Where do we draw the line between the hysteric and the feminine?

I think we draw it at the point where the meaning of the tension is not yet comprehended, where the dynamic is not yet seen as the eternal game that men and women play with each other, but is seen as being one-sided, as an invasion of the perfect female by the inferior male. We may therefore recognize it a developmental stage, occurring at the point where sexuality is gaining its ascendancy in the female, but where the place of sexuality in adult relationships is not yet understood. It is therefore the characteristic dynamic of the teen-aged girl, which we, after all, knew all along .

Now if the place of sexuality within human relationships is not understood, its meaning must be represented with imagery that gains its power from the girl's specific self-reference, both as a sexual being and as a plenum. Inevitably, then, the imagery will be that of penetration, and specifically the sexual penetration by an alien entity that seeks to corrupt and dominate the girl's perfection and self-sufficiency. Her attitude toward it will be disgust and the rage to expel it. There we have hysteria.

Hysteria therefore represents, on one or another level of abstraction, the attempt to expel the masculine, with all of its desire and all of the symbolic order that it has given rise to, and its place within the relationship between men and women. Within the dynamic of hysteria, the masculine is experienced as a threat to her perfection and self-sufficiency, indeed to her very existence, by an inferior agency, which seeks to limit her through terms that do not represent her. The attempt to expel, therefore, comes with a degree of self-righteousness and the assertion of the absolute self-sufficiency of her spontaneity -- in other words, of her imaginary. But consider that the whole framework of the symbolic, of shared meaning, is a product and representation of that masculinity and you can see that we have gotten to what we were trying to show. Hysteria is the motivating force through which the imaginary attempts to destroy and undermine the symbolic.

This analysis helps to explain one of the more peculiar, but characteristic, features of the hysteric. It enables us to answer the question of whether the hysteric is lying when she makes charges that are patently untrue. The answer is that she is not lying. She is telling the truth as she sees it, but she has a rather idiosyncratic conception of the truth. Truth is not, as it is in the symbolic, a correspondence between a statement and an objective fact. Her whole project, after all, is to deny and undermine the symbolic, and therefore to deny the validity of that form of truth. For her, truth means the vividness of the imagery she is using to represent her experience of invasion. This imagery, at the time, is all she is about. There is nothing outside itself. If she says, for example, and sincerely believes, that she was raped by someone, that means that the image of that rape represents, for her, at that time, the experience of being penetrated that is the center of her psychic life. Obviously, another image could serve just as well, in another time, and one should not be surprised to find movement here, for precisely the same reasons that the ancients thought that hysteria represented the movement of the womb.

Where does the therapist stand in all of this? The therapist, as I have said, must be seen as a co-hysteric. His function is to provide language through which the hysteric can symbolize her claim of penetration, but within the premise of the inadequacy of this language, a premise set by the absolute ineluctability of her spontaneity. So it is that the therapist never cures the hysteric, but simply names her condition; and names it, indeed, under the aegis of her hysterical psychodynamics, with its component of the expulsion of male sexuality. Thus, he only gains his standing by accepting his castration. At any rate, together they stand against the world of shared meaning, with its demand for Oedipal subordination and limitation.

Hysteria and Organization

To understand the threat that hysteria poses for organization, we must recognize that organizational structure is part of the symbolic, the register of shared meaning. The root of its meaning is derived from what I have called objective self-consciousness (Schwartz, 2003), though which one comes to be able to see oneself from outside oneself, a way that represents reality, as the members of one's society define it. This form of self-consciousness, which begins when one comes to see oneself from the point of view of the father, is not objective in the sense that one sees oneself as one really is, but in the sense that one sees oneself as an object, as others would see you who have no subjective interest in you. Its terms represent the social conventions that have been negotiated as a basis of exchange. It is a way for members of the society to pursue their interests in a way that others can understand and which can serve as a pattern of exchange. When this pattern of exchange acquires a certain stability, and when individuals come to rely on and depend on it, it can be said to be an organization, and the agreed upon patterns can be said to be the organization's structure.

Organizational structure may be considered the synchronic aspect of organization - the specification at any given time of what behavior is expected of participants as part of their jobs and of how these individual behaviors coordinate with each other. The fact that these structural elements are within the symbolic means that we can step outside of them and consider their advantages and disadvantages with some objectivity. In and of themselves, they are not important to us. This makes it possible to design an organization so that it can attain a goal in the most efficient way. This is, of course the great advantage of the bureaucratic form of organization, an advantage that carries forward into their more organic successors -- a transformation that can be thought of as representing only the rapidity with which bureaucratic design is reformulated.

This is not to say that the imaginary has no place in organization. On the contrary, it represents the principle according to which organizations move through time, both on the level of individual desire and on the collective level of refining organizational structure to pursue a collective goal. In either case, it contains the ego ideal, the motivational substrate that makes organizational behavior meaningful to participants and breathes life into what would otherwise be ritualized behavior. At its bottom, therefore, organizational behavior is driven by the desire for fusion with the primordial mother, a desire that, as we have seen, marks and defines the masculine and is at odds with the deepest drives of the hysteric.

The conflict between hysteria and organization takes place on a number of interrelated, though differentiable levels of hysteria. I call them individual hysteria, organized hysteria, political hysteria, and organizational nihilistic hysteria. In what follows, I will discuss each of them.

Individual hysteria

As was intimated before, what we can see from this is that the organization must be the site of a permanent confrontation between its behavioral expectations and the hysteric's experience of herself . She will always experience these demands as other and as alien, having no way to align herself with them in pursuit of an ego ideal. She will experience the organization as constraining her in an intolerable, stupid, and even destructive way. Her allegiance will be limited and she is liable to be seen by others as having a permanent chip on her shoulder, or perhaps to be a bit screwy. She will see making personal progress within the organization as a way of removing encumbrances to her being herself. Her orientation to the organization will be marked by an attempt to personalize her relationships with powerful figures, especially men, in this way bringing the organization's symbolic under her dominion and have it revolve around her .

Of particular note with regard to the hysteric's reaction to the organization are those confrontations that come under the form of charges of "sexual harassment." In saying this, I am referring to "hostile climate" sexual harassment and mean to clearly exempt the sort of sexual harassment that is generally called "quid pro quo." The latter represents the demand for sexual favors under color of authority, and should be seen as a form of extortion. I will not say anything in its defense, nor have I ever seen anyone defend it.

The charge of "hostile climate" sexual harassment is something else entirely. The American Bar Association defines it this way:

This occurs when an employee is subjected to comments of a sexual nature, offensive sexual materials, or unwelcome physical contact as a regular part of the work environment. Generally speaking, a single isolated incident will not be considered hostile environment harassment unless it is extremely outrageous and egregious conduct. The courts look to see whether the conduct is both serious and frequent.
http://www.abanet.org/publiced/practical/sexualharassment_hostileenvironment.html

But what the courts will establish as a valid claim is not entirely predictable and is expensive to find out. As a result, as well as for reasons arising from the shared hysteria, organizations tend to follow very conservative approaches in addressing claims of sexual harassment, which has the effect that often simply the claim of having been sexually harassed invokes the presumption of guilt.

This, obviously, is a situation tailor-made for the hysteric, whom we have defined through the fantasy of having been penetrated by masculine meaning, which is to say by the symbolic. This may easily lead to the experience of violation even where it has not occurred, either through interpreting innocent or consensual behavior as invasive, or through the fantasy that such behavior has occurred. These seem to often mark experiences with figures of authority, which may led us to the hypothesis that it is the penetration by authority itself, as an agency of the symbolic, that is often experienced as a sexual violation. The destructive consequences that can follow from this, in the form of the damage authority itself suffers, and in the wreckage of working relationships that often occurs, are clear enough.

We must add, however, that the incongruity between hysteric and organization is not always destructive. The artist, after all, is an individual who demands that her specific subjectivity be accepted in its own terms. If our hysteric has a rich and fertile imaginary, her friction with the organization can serve as the locus for considerable creative possibility. This is the root of what we call "artistic temperament," and we know that its burdens for the organization are often more than matched by the novel ways of seeing things that it affords.

The conflict between the hysteric and the organization does not become univocally malignant until it becomes organized.

Organized hysteria

But the idea of organized hysteria poses a problem for us. Organization must depend on shared meaning. But hysteria is a revolt against shared meaning. How can hysteria be organized?

Hysteria can be organized through a shared imaginary. It represents shared subjectivity, rather than shared objectivity, as organization based on the symbolic represents. The basis of sharing rests on identification, rather than a common framework of exchange.

Hysteria consists in the experience of being penetrated by masculine meaning, and the attempt to expel it, undermine it, and destroy it. But how that meaning is defined and experienced is susceptible to infinite representation. When hysterics share a representation of that penetration, that may be considered a form of organization. This gives us the basis for understanding what Showalter calls "hystories."

In all but one of these cases, we find the narrative of a penetration by an alien substance that is damaging to the hysteric or someone with whom she identifies. The specification of the imagery is accomplished by a specialist who, I have argued, should be seen as a co-hysteric who essentially refines the imagery and takes his cue from the hysteric's imaginary. The conflict with the outside world, which is often seen as being somehow in cahoots with the force that is penetrating the hysteric may be seen as the attempt to subordinate the masculine symbolic.

The one case that may be thought to be at odds here is the hystory of abduction by alien beings from outer space, who are thought to represent a superior form of life. There is penetration in this hystory through the defining narrative of being probed by these aliens, apparently for scientific reasons. This probing is experienced as sexual, but it is embraced and valued, and not seen as molestation. The reason for this difference is that these aliens are, after all, alien and superior. Penetration by them is not seen as debasing the hysteric but as raising her up. This is sex that she will allow, largely because it stands in sharp opposition to, and superiority to, what she can get from the local guys.

The destructive potential of organized hysteria arises from its power to gain the emotional energy of large numbers and in the belief they hold in common that they are in hostile combat with standard frameworks of meaning, within which organizations exist, and which are often seen as aiding, if not identical with, the penetrating force.

Political hysteria

Political hysteria develops when the imaginary and the symbolic are seen as arrayed in a Manichean competition for power. Unconsciously, the forces involved here are imagined as the primordial mother and the father, but they may be consciously represented in a number of ways. For example, one may think of the Romantic conception of nature versus technology. The conflict of tradition versus modernity is another rubric within which this if often caught up, itself taking various localized forms, such as the attempt by Japan to reject Western influence during the Tokugawa shogunate. At the most malignant level, one my think of the Hitlerian symbolism of the German motherland being penetrated by the Jewish bacillus (Koenigsberg, 1975). At the present time, within Western society itself, this conflict takes a very direct representation in those forms of feminism that explicitly see the maternal and the patriarchal arrayed against each other. This is the force that underlies "political correctness." I have discussed this at great length elsewhere (Schwartz, 2003) and for the present will only make two points and then simply refer the reader.

The first point is that within political correctness, the contemporary form of political hysteria, the partisans in the combat are given their precise names. Reason, thought and science are seen as masculine projects that have the malign intent and effect of dominating feminine spontaneity. The feminist philosopher of science Sandra Harding (1986), for example, refers to Newton's laws as a "rape manual."

The second point is that political hysteria is deconstructive and not constructive. The hysteric aims to denigrate authority but sees no necessity to construct a better authority. The reason for this is that she has perfect confidence in her goodness, which she feels will take care of everything if the figure of authority can be shown to be flawed. Her strategy is to denigrate him, to show that his claim to legitimacy is fraudulent and hypocritical. So we get, for example, the countless articles and books that remind us that some of the founders of the United States were slaveholders and the principles they developed therefore not worthy of being followed. What is particularly striking about this sort of deconstruction is that such individuals are never held up to a realistic standard to which other human beings are also held. This is because it is the local father, her father, that she needs to undermine, because it is his authority that she feels is subjecting her to intolerable limitation. That local focus is also the reason why, as I mentioned before, for the hysteric, nothing exists outside of the conflict between the hysteric and the agent she feels is penetrating her. Through her fantasy of her absolute benevolent omnipotence, her specific tormentor is raised to the level of absolute evil omnipotence, taking into himself everything bad in the world. Undermine and destroy him and the problems in the rest of the world will take care of themselves, or rather she, just by being herself, will take care of them.

Everything bad in the world, she feels, comes from masculine desire to limit and subordinate her perfection and effortless omnipotence. He has made the world and everything in it bears the stamp of his inferiority and malevolence. From this would follow the nihilistic premise that everything made therefore deserves to be destroyed. This nihilism brings us to the fourth form of hysteria.

Organizational nihilistic hysteria: Hysteria as a philosophy of management

Perhaps occasioned by the cultural power mobilized by political correctness, we see in our time the adoption of nihilistic hysteria broadly and widely in our society, and operating in every setting. Of particular interest to us will be the operation of this hysteria in an organizational context, the result of which is that the organization rededicates itself to the task of destroying itself (Schwartz, 2003).

Organizational nihilistic hysteria often takes the form of a campaign against the organization waged by those who see its processes as penetrating them, or to use the terms commonly employed, oppressing them and trying to destroy them. Often it is built, as campaigns of the imaginary often are, by anecdotes and stories that relate instances in which the oppressed individuals or groups felt violated. Those who identify with them amplify the force developed here.

However, feeding off the same psychodynamic, nihilistic hysteria can turn against the organization in a more basic way, attacking it, not for oppressing this or that group, but for being its very self. It can take the very meaning of the organization, expressed through the work that it does, and the organizational necessities that the work imposes, as oppressive, as penetrating the subjectivity. Through this, energy can be mobilized toward the end of expelling the system's impositions. What is more, these processes of expulsion can themselves become integral parts of the organization. When that happens, an organization's processes can be redirected toward the organization's own destruction, which is to say the destruction of the organization in its aspect of shared meaning developed through the process of exchange.

I believe that this redirection encapsulates the purpose of much of what is called "critical management theory," a way of thinking about organizations that now has a large following in schools of business, especially outside the US. But the cultural trend that it represents may also be found in organizational management.

Hirschhorn describes a case of this at the New York Times. The story revolves around the role of Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., who became publisher in 1992.

Sulzberger, Jr. took up a role that had been defined by previous Sulzberger's in terms of its position in the management and leadership of an institution. Hirschhorn shows how Arthur Sulzberger, Sr., in accordance with this tradition, subordinated himself to the transcendent, shared meaning of the work of the Times, permitting his interactions to be circumscribed and defined by the necessities of his position within that framework of meaning.

Arthur, Jr., however, a child of the sixties, redefined the role so that the work of the Times was given short shrift in favor of a project that Hirschhorn calls moralization, whose object would be the transformation of the Times itself.

On one level, this moralization took place under the now-familiar concept of increasing "diversity," whose emotional significance derives from the idea of the organization as an instrumentality for repairing past injustices. Thus,

[W]hen he first took the publisher role Sulzberger told a journalist "that his greatest challenge will be to bring more racial diversity and sexual equality to the paper".

Hirschhorn comments:

What is striking about this statement is that Sulzberger did not say that his most serious challenge was to sustain the quality and excellence of the Times while creating profits for the Times Company. If he failed in this goal, the goal of seeking diversity would be immaterial. It is as if he took the work of the Times for granted…

But he goes on to suggest that, for Sulzberger, the morality of oppressed versus oppressor is only a part of a broader project of moralization. In this regard he quotes the journalist as continuing:

"He wants more minority positions. He wants more women in executive positions. He wants a less authoritarian newsroom and a business side that is more nimble. He wants each member of the staff to feel empowered as part of the team."

Evidently, Sulzberger sees this project in which staff are "empowered as part of the team" as part of the same process of moralization in which the oppressed will prevail over the oppressors. Hirschhorn goes on to show that the object under moral assault in this campaign is the Times' authority structure, which undermines its necessary function within the work of the Times itself.

For instance, he describes a town hall meeting in which embattled editor Howell Raines faced the Times staff over his handling of the Jayson Blair fiasco as well as other shortcomings on his part:

Strikingly, at the "town-hall" meeting at which Raines first confronted the staff, Sulzberger unfortunately played a similar role. There was a sense in which he did not convene the meeting with dignity. Participants complained in harsh terms about the way Arthur had conducted himself. As one participant asked, "Why hold a meeting where it was certain to become a spectacle. Or say, when asked his opinion of the situation, something as coarse and inarticulate as "it sucks?" Or not put on a necktie? Or worst of all, reach into a paper bag and take out a stuffed toy moose-apparently a tool out of some management manual, symbolizing the 'moose in the room,' that nobody wants to talk about, used to loosen things up -and hand it to a perplexed Raines?" The participant is suggesting that Arthur behaved disrespectfully, in a manner not befitting his "office." It is plausible that by behaving this way Sulzberger stimulated the participants to behave disrespectfully to Raines. This may be why their fury was unchecked and what gave reporters license to complain about the Times and Raines on unrelated web sites- an assault that the family, as protector of the newspapers' institutional standing, could hardly tolerate. This may also be why Maureen Dowd, a columnist for the Times, said that the attack on Raines reminded her of the novel, Lord of the Flies, in which young boys, in the absence of adult authority, form groups that engage in primitive and destructive acts. This suggests that the staff cried to express regret for their destructive behavior, when Raines, at a subsequent meeting, announced his resignation,

Thus while Raines acted counter-culturally so did his boss Sulzberger. In this sense, we can say that Raines derived his authority to attack the culture of the Times from the publisher of the Times.

In brief, as Hirschhorn puts it, Sulzberger "elevated insubordination as a principle of leadership."

As I have said, all of these destructive processes came to light through the case of Jayson Blair, whose systematic lying had been known to the Times for several years before his case became public. In this regard, the subordination of the Times' work to the process of moralization was deeply implicated. Figures at the Times simply could not hold Blair accountable because the moralization program had undermined the shared meaning of the work when the two came into conflict. It had placed the realistic discussion of his deficiencies under the taboo of race, and in that way wrecked the meaning of the work of the Times, as defined within the symbolic and the process of exchange:

The result of such taboos is that people are unable to make meaning together on issues that deeply concern them. Such restrictions on shared meaning-making alienate people from one another, make them feel powerless, and undermine the psychological sense of community. This helps explain why the editorial community at the Times could never come together to create a shared picture of Blair's frauds, and their implications. The taboo undermined such meaning making.

In analyzing the causes of this moralization, Hirschhorn notes the culture of

"personalism" [which] elevates the salience of feelings in institutional life. This trend is rooted in the currents of a post-modern culture with its emphasis on subjectivity and psychic depth.

And also:

long standing currents in Western thinking associated with utopian thought and strivings - the idea that social life can be constituted so that conflict can be eliminated; that people can live in the social world without experiencing any alienation, any distance between what they wish to experience and express and what opportunities others afford them.

Taking these together, we can see the elevation of the imaginary as a principle of organization. With personalism, we see the apotheosis of individual spontaneity. With the utopian element, we see the guarantee that individual spontaneity may be safely followed. Psychoanalytic thought leads us to see that the omnipotent, benevolent mother must be the source of that guarantee. What it suggests is that the image of the group implicit in this model, the "empowered team," in Sulzberger's terms, is indeed a group: it is a fusion of infant and child, together with their associated identifications.

Taking this as a model for organization would certainly lead to the idea that the demands of exchange, demands based on a negotiated shared meaning which, by definition, is not our own, would be seen as an imposition, a violation, and a penetration. This draws the linkage with hysteria that we have come to recognize and leads us to appreciate the threat it poses to organization.

Conclusion

The descent of Europe into the Dark Ages was not occasioned merely by the onslaught of Germanic tribes. By the time the barbarians sacked Rome, Roman civilization was already hollow and its army was chiefly composed of Germanic tribes. In the long descent from its height, it lost something vital. What was that? Gibbon (1776) put the matter this way:

The vast extent of the Roman empire was governed by absolute power, under the guidance of virtue and wisdom. The armies were restrained by the firm but gentle hand of four successive emperors, whose characters and authority commanded involuntary respect.

The great emperors of Rome governed under a sense of fealty to, and indeed subordination to, the laws and institutions, the symbolic, of Rome. They saw themselves, and were seen by others, as agents who expressed the authority of shared meaning. That shared meaning and its agents have now come under assault is a matter that should concern all of us.

As Kenneth Clarke (1969) has put it:

Civilisation requires a modicum of prosperity - enough to provide a little leisure. But, far more, it requires confidence -confidence in the society in which one lives, belief in its philosophy, belief in its laws, and confidence in one's own mental powers.

References

Cahill, T. (1996) How the Irish Saved Civilization. New York: Anchor

Chasseguet-Smirgel, J. (1986) Sexuality and Mind: The Role of the Father and the Mother in the Psyche. New York: New York University Press.

Clarke: K. (1969) Civilisation: A Personal View. London: British Broadcasting Corporation

Gibbon, E. (1776) The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Harding, S. (1986) The Science Question in Feminism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Hirschhorn, L. (2004) The Fall of Howell Raines and The New York Times: A Study in the Moralization of Organizational life. Working Paper, Center for Applied Research

Koenigsberg, R. (1975) Hitler's Ideology: A Study in Psychoanalytic Sociology. New York: Library of Social Sciences.

Schwartz, H.S. (2003) Revolt of the Primitive: An Inquiry into the Roots of Political Correctness (paperback edition), Piscataway NJ: Transaction Publishers.

Schwartz, H.S. (2002) Political Cprrectness and Organizational Nihilism. Human Relations. 55 (11), 2002: 1275-1294.

Showalter, E. (1997) Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media. New York: Columbia University Press.

Verhaeghe, P. (1999) Does the Woman Exist: From Freud's Hysteric to Lacan's Feminine. New York: Other Press.