Beyond Anxiety: Passion and the Psychodynamics of Work: Learnings from Lacanians

Larry Hirschhorn, Ph.D.

Draft: Not for Citation; Responses Welcomed
March 1998

I. Introduction

The Tavistock Tradition

The Tavistock tradition focuses on the way in which people respond to the anxiety associated with working. While the proximate roots of anxiety may vary, a boss is experienced as persecutory, a conflict arises between groups, the ultimate cause of anxiety, in the Tavistock tradition, lies in the risk associated with all meaningful work. Everyone faces the prospect of failing at their work. Even the proverbial dishwasher, may break dishes or the dishwashing machine, or wash dishes too slowly. Moreover, as jobs become more complicated, the sources of failure and, thus the level of risk, grows. People become more skilled, but there is always a race between what people have experienced in the past and what new or novel problems they presently confront. Risk and work are two sides of the same coin. Much of Tavistock theory focuses on the way in which the risk, associated with the activity of the enterprise as a whole, is experienced as anxiety by individuals and subgroups.

Consider the following example. A salesperson is penalized for his poor record of selling when in fact the product he sells has deteriorated in quality. Looked at from a rational point of view, we might say that the company’s incentives are structured inappropriately. Since the salesman does not control or even influence product quality, he should be judged by the number of calls he makes not the sales he closes. However, in the Tavistock tradition we would hypothesize that the company utilizes an apparently inappropriate incentive structure to contain anxiety. We might surmise, for example, that senior managers are reluctant to acknowledge the decline in the product’s quality. To protect themselves from the anxiety they would feel if they faced this problem directly, they maintain instead an incentive system that makes the salesperson appear to be the failure. Under these conditions we call the incentive system a "social defense" against the reality that the product quality is falling. Consulting to this company we would work with the senior executives to focus on the problem of improving the quality of the product before working to change the incentive system. Taking this step we would, in effect, help redistribute the anxiety so that the enterprise as a whole can face up to and accomplish its primary task.

Beyond Anxiety

This framework for linking anxiety states to work has proved to be immensely powerful; however, at the same time it represents a peculiarly narrow framework for considering the emotional experience of work itself. People do not simply experience anxiety at work, they are also excited by work, satisfied by their work and enjoy their work. People do not simply seek to reduce their anxiety; on the contrary, people often want risky assignments because they are exciting and challenging. Indeed, we put great store in the passions that people bring to their work, Because meaningful work is risky and difficult we presume that people need a certain amount of passion to help them weather its difficulties. We are particularly concerned when we meet leaders without passion. How can they possibly lead others if they do not demonstrate a passionate commitment to the work they ask of others. We need to develop a theory of work and organizations that gives an account of such feelings and helps us diagnose workgroups that lack passion, excitement and enjoyment.

To develop this account I draw on the work of two authors, Mihaly Csikzenthmihalyi’s concept of "flow" and Jacques Lacan’s concept of "subjectivity." Combining the two, I believe, we can construct a psychoanalytic theory of work that takes us beyond anxiety.

II. Flow

Everyone has had the following experience. You are focused so deeply on accomplishing a piece of work, such as writing an article, developing a balance sheet, planting flowers, preparing a dinner, that you startle when someone addresses you. The task was so engaging that you temporarily lost sight of the world around you. Indeed, after completing your work you may suddenly realize that you are "starving." Apparently the pull of the task allowed you to suppress or disavow your feelings of hunger.

This is the substance of what Mihaly Csikzenthmihalyi’s calls the "flow" experience. In flow we become so absorbed in our work that we lose touch with ourselves, our body states, our internal conflicts and our preoccupations. Five dimensions of flow are important. First, flow is experienced in the context of an activity. It does not emerge from a state of quiescence or passive acceptance. It is not a meditative experience in the strict sense. Second, the activity is rule bound and poses constraints on what can or cannot be done. It does not evoke a playful stance; instead the performer experiences the activity as serious. The activity has structure, and it pulls the performer forward to complete its intrinsic developmental trajectories, e.g., finishing the paragraph, planting the seed, solving an equation. Third, the performer gets continuing feedback on her performance. The writer tests if the sentence just composed is clear, the gardener if planting is exposed to the sun, and the cook if the spice tastes right. Fourth, the flow experience frees the sense of psychological time from clock time. Hour-long activities can pass like minutes; a minute of focused attention can be so engrossing that hours seem to pass. The experience of the future comes under psychological control. Fifth, and most importantly, people feel "immersed" in the activity, they are not conscious of themselves, or as we say in the common language, they are not "self-conscious." This lack of self-consciousness significantly reduces their anxiety.

III. The Flow State as a Psychoanalytic Idea

Csikzenthmihalyi does not work in a psychoanalytic tradition, but we can apply psychodynamic concepts to the experiences he describes. Let me propose the following. In flow states the ego and its conflicts are set aside. Using Freud’s topographical model of the mind, we can say that the ego and its conflicts represent both what is conscious and what is unconscious but not what is preconscious. Reaching a flow state the conscious, the unconscious and their relationship to one another are set aside or dissociated from the experience so that the preconscious is given free reign. When we inhabit our preconscious we suspend our drive states (hunger, sex, fatigue) and, therefore, forget that we are tired, hungry or attracted to a particular man or woman. Moreover, by suspending our drive states we feel "freed up," and this freedom enables us to do our work in ways that feel creative.

Every reader, I am sure, is deeply familiar with this experience. This is what Csikzenthmihalyi found as well. By paging research subjects at random intervals who were instructed to then write down what they are thinking, feeling and doing at the time of the page, Csikzenthmihalyi found that flow state is an everyday occurrence. It requires no special skill nor particular setting, just a piece of good work.

Lacan and the Concept of the Ego

As we have seen, we can draw on Freud’s topographic model of the mind to help explain flow. However, his later structural theory of the mind, the mind of the ego, superego and id, seems inconsistent with the finding that flow state is ubiquitous. How can the ego which is the mediator between unconscious and reality be so easily suspended? After all, it is engaged in the important work of repression, and we know from psychoanalysis that people do not forgo their repressions easily. This is what we mean by resistance in psychoanalysis.

Yet despite the apparent ubiquity of resistance, we also know that patients are prone to suggestion, that many people are readily hypnotized, that people are easily influenced in the presence of persuasive people such as salesmen. Indeed, one reason Freud proposed that analysts take up their role with neutrality and abstinence is that, failing to do so, they could too readily influence their patients! So what is the ego, the resistor or the patsy?

Here is where Lacan is helpful. As Elizabeth Grosz argues, Lacan’s conception of the ego is based on Freud’s theory of the narcissistic ego, a competing conception to his concept of an ego that mediates internal and external states. The ego of the "ego and the id," what Grosz calls the "realist ego," is the mediator between internal and external states, and as it matures it becomes the repository of the sense of self. The narcissistic ego, however, is the ego that can be cathected as a love object, and in this sense takes its place as one object among many internal objects that compete for a person’s love and attention. A person who is readily influenced by a persuasive salesman has simply replaced his narcissistic ego with the internal representation of the salesman. Indeed, Freud’s conception of love was based just on this fluidity of attachment. We fall in love with another by decathecting our own ego while cathecting another. In Freud’s energetic model we divest our ego of libido, and reinvest it in the love object.

For those readers who find these energy concepts musty and therefore suspect, object relations theory comports with this concept of the ego as well. In Klein’s terms, we can readily say that the ego is simply one internal object among many. In contrast to Anna Freud’s concept of ego and its defenses, Klein talks less about the ego and more about objects that occupy inner life. These objects and their relationships give rise to the phantasies of our inner lives and these phantasies in toto give rise to a sense of self. Because our phantasies are themselves subject to the ongoing and ever fluctuating processes of projection and introjection, the ego is never a completed or stable object. As Grosz writes, "The narcissistic ego is an entirely fluid, mobile, amorphous, series of identifications, internalizations of images/perceptions invested with libidinal cathexes."

Indeed, Lacan suggests that our experience of ourselves as coherent or whole is in fact illusory. This illusion first arises in what he calls the "mirror" stage of development. The child, he suggests, mistakes the smooth contours of its mirror image for the fragmentary nature of its own being. The child sees a whole object where in fact part objects dominate. Using the concept of the mirror stage as a metaphor (there is not empirical proof that a child’s confrontation with the mirror has this particular meaning), we can sustain a sense of integrity by converting a three-dimensional experience into a two-dimensional one. We flatten our experience to create the illusion of integrity. We become our appearances. This is consistent with the common sense notion that people who are frightened by their emotional life often appear to us as "superficial." We do not experience the resonance of their phantasies.

Indeed, I want to suggest that Freud’s long-standing fear that psychoanalysis as a practice might succumb to the psychodynamics of suggestion is based on just this conception of the ego. When we say that a patient is suggestible or easily hypnotized, we mean that the ego as an internal object readily introjects the person of the psychoanalyst or healer enabling the person to substitute the healer’s desires for his own. This is why psychoanalysts have worried so persistently about transference cures. The patient gets better simply by loving the psychoanalyst rather than by developing his own inner resources. This is also why Lacan believed that a psychoanalyst should not reveal her countertransference; to the patient it could be seductive.

Thus the ubiquity of such processes as identification, transference cures, trances and hypnotic states indicates that the ego is easily sidestepped and absorbed. I want to suggest that the experience of flow is based precisely on the dynamics of this kind of ego. Flow so to speak is a nonpathological state of dissociation in which the work itself displaces the ego. The person or subject supplants the ego as a self-system with the structure of the task itself. This substitution enables a person to subordinate himself or herself to the task. This is what we mean when we speak of the "authority of the task" and our subordination to it.

IV. Lacan and the Subject: Permanent or Impermanent?

As we know from trance states, and indeed as we might surmise from a conception of the weak ego, Csikzenthmihalyi argues that flow states are impermanent. They come and go with great regularity and, therefore, cannot constitute the basis for any sustained sense of identity. If we stay with a theory of a weak ego, how can we account for the latter, what are its roots? This is more than an academic question. If we want to develop psychodynamics of the work experience we surely must be able to account for the simple fact that people make plans, that they have longer-term goals, that in moments of frustration when work does not flow they still remain attached to their work roles. By contrast, the distinctive nature of the flow experience is that the goal is embedded in the task itself and is experienced as the pull to complete one’s work. Within the flow state one does not ask the question "what are my purposes," purpose is produced by the work. This means that to understand the psychodynamics of work fully we must ask: How do we relate to our work when we are not in flow? How do we identify with our work when it frustrates us, when we are between tasks, when we cannot get closure etc.?

Lacan, Subjectivity and the Symbolic Realm

Here again Lacan’s concept of subjectivity is very helpful. To explore this concept and see its links to states of mind that take us beyond the state of ego loss we have thus far described, we need to take a further detour through Lacan’s work. In doing so, I draw heavily on the work of Bruce Fink, a Lacanian analyst and theoretician. I will show how Lacan’s concept of the "subject" helps us construct a theory of how we relate to work in both flow and nonflow states and how in turn these states of mind are linked to one another.

Just as Lacan’s concept of the weak ego helps us interpret the flow state psychoanalytically, his concept of subjectivity and the symbolic order helps us understand how work gives rise to the flow state. Lacan developed a concept of the person or psychoanalytic subject, (and Lacan’s theorizing is rooted firmly in an attempt to understand the psychoanalytic process first and only second lived experience in general) as someone who is a vessel for unconscious mentation. When a patient speaks in psychoanalysis, at least when he is truly free associating, he does not direct his speech but is instead directed by it. Moreover, the chains of association themselves are not bound by the referential meanings of particular terms, they are not logical in this sense, but rather take advantage of the interplay of words as things in themselves. Thus, for example, if in describing a visit to his or her parents’ home a person means to say I "dropped by," but says instead I "slopped" by, the unconscious, we say, has recruited the sound of "drop" to the meaning of "slop" to create a sentence the person had no intention of speaking. This sentence in turn points to a potential set of new meanings, e.g., that there is something "sloppy" or disorderly in a person’s relationship to his parents. In this sense speech, at least as it unfolds in psychoanalysis, has the character of "automatic writing" in which people write down thoughts they apparently had no conscious intention of expressing.

Consider the phenomena of conversation. When we speak we rarely plan what we are going to say (except perhaps when we are in the witness stand) and are often surprised by the verbalization of our own thoughts. We ask ourselves, "Now where did that come from?" This is what we mean when we describe a particular conversation as "spontaneous." In the conversation we are often surprised by the thoughts we produce and wonder how and why we "sounded" so surprisingly insightful to ourselves. Similarly, writers are often surprised by their writing. A novelist reflecting on the creative processes once noted that she often laughed at the jokes her characters told, remarking to herself "well that’s funny." The characters take on a life of their own. For example, I frequently find that I am humming a tune without plan, but when I examine the lyrics associated with the tune, it becomes crystal clear to me that the words are comments on my immediate experience.

Consider the example of a mathematician discovering a proof (and Lacan was quite fond of mathematics). By definition the mathematician cannot plan the proof. Instead he lets mathematical symbols guide him as he moves from one tautology to another. Indeed it is well known that the form of mathematical symbols, the ways in which they are designed as visual indicators of ideas, play a powerful role in shaping how mathematicians think. This is why, for example, Leibniz’s notation for the calculus won out over Newton’s. The former was much more evocative of the processes of mathematical differentiation and integration.

These experiences all have in common their dependence on what Lacan called symbolic systems. Why the term "symbolic"? Think about the everyday example of being surprised by an insight we express. This happens because the ways in which one thought leads to another is powered in part by the rules of language themselves, by the way in which one word might evoke another, or one thought suggests another, or the way in which one logical proposition provokes another. Even though these symbolic systems cannot exist without us, they also have the power to direct us. This is why we often experience such moments of creativity as strange or in more vivid cases as examples of the uncanny. This is also why Lacan often describes the symbolic realm as the playground of the "other." We feel directed by something outside ourselves, and our subjectivity seems to drop out of the picture.

Drawing on Levi Strauss’s structuralism, Lacan suggests that we also engage one another socially through symbolic systems. Observing men and women at a bar we can infer the existence of rules of "engagement," which we are sure no one in the bar is in fact aware of or can verbalize. For example, we might observe that the number of times men approach a particular woman in a 15-minute period is determined by how far she sits from the door. Or perhaps more complicatedly, when a woman turns down two men in succession she will not be approached by another man for at least 15 minutes. These rules constitute a kind of spontaneously arrived at order behind the backs of people. They have their origin in both the concrete configuration of the bar, people’s ability to preconsciously scan their environments and the desires that men and women experience when they are "sniffing" each other out.

While these social rules constrain behavior they do not simply repress it; rather they are more usefully seen as affordances. Like the hills and valleys of a landscape they help us identify the most efficient ways of reaching a desired destination. Moreover, any complicated set of rules enables us to be creative in how we combine rules to achieve an objective. Thus in the above example of our bar, a man, intent on approaching a woman who has turned down two men in succession, may approach her in less than 15 minutes by approaching her in stages, each time making eye contact to assure that she seems friendly. The critical point here is that in contrast to Freud’s conception of social order as repressive, that is it keeps the instincts or drives at bay, in Lacan the symbolic order is also a realm of freedom.

My hypothesis should now be apparent. I believe that Csikzenthmihalyi’s discovery of the flow state is the empirical rediscovery of Lacan’s symbolic realm. In the former case we subordinate ourselves to the structure of the task, in the latter to the rules of the symbol system that shape our behavior. Making this connection thus allows us to use Lacan to solve the problem we stated above: How do we relate to our work, how do we preserve a work identity when we are not in flow?

V. Jouissance

I suggest it is passion that allows us to sustain a relationship to our work even in the presence of frustration, delay and disruption. The term "passion" like the term "desire" is curiously underdeveloped in psychoanalytic thinking. This flows in part from the use of the term "drives" to characterize the forces that lead us to want a something or someone. While the term "drives" is often confused with the notion of "instincts," Freud always linked his notion of the drives to fantasy, to the representation of our biological instincts in the psyche. In contrast to drives, I believe we reserve the word passion for fantasies that culminate in some expression, some action, that also marks out our identity, that is who we are for others.

To mark out our identity we must in psychoanalytic terms use an object or create an object relation, whether the object be another person, "I am passionate about X" or cultural objects, "I have a passion for Mozart." Bollas calls these objects "integral objects" in the sense that their integrity takes us out of the confines of our internal world and brings us into some relationship to a world that others can share and understand. It is these integral objects that help define our identity for others. Indeed, this is the meaning of the colloquial expression, "He is a nut for … (jazz, baseball, Freud)." The term "for" defines the object relation; the term "nut" points to the fantasy, the irrational construction of meaning, that gives the passion its motive force. By contrast, while obsessions share with passion a preoccupation, the obsession remains much more private and is not readily influenced by other objects, be they cultural objects, material objects or other people.

Lacan developed the concept of "jouissance" to describe the genesis of a person’s passion. The term, in French, evokes the sense of one’s "rapture" or climax and is used to refer to orgasm. It also evokes the idea of a mystical union. Lacan’s theory of jouissance helps us give a psychoanalytic account of the passion we bring to our work. The subject Lacan suggested is constituted between "language and jouissance," or in our terms between "flow" and "passion."

Consider the following. On February 23, 1998, the New York Times published the obituary of John Fulton, the first American to qualify as a matador in Spain. As a 12-year-old boy, the son of a Hungarian house painter, he saw the movie "Blood and Sand" starring Rita Hayworth and Tyrone Power. "The movie so stirred his sense of gallantry and romance that he decided on the spot to become a bull fighter." He spent the next 40 years building his skill and experience, first fighting in backwater places in Mexico without pay and supporting himself with blood paintings of bull fighting. While no more than a journeyman bullfighter "he won the grudging respect of the Spanish," shared his large house in Seville with aspiring matadors and adopted a gypsy youngster as his son. He died of a heart attack while writing his autobiography provisionally entitled "The Memoirs of John Quixote."

This is an appealing if not quixotic story and probably the obituary, though published in the venerable New York Times, contains some exaggeration or at least convenient omissions. However, it serves well to highlight Lacan’s concept of jouissance and its links to work. The story highlights the following five features. First, Fulton’s emotional life is shaped by a generative or fundamental fantasy, which is sufficiently rich in its elements to help him create a life plan. Second, the fantasy emerges at the crossroads of a culture’s symbols, Fulton’s unconscious processes and his capacity to plan and decide. Third, the fantasy is not about Fulton acquiring or possessing an object. Indeed, he remains a journeyman matador throughout this life. Instead it is a fantasy about Fulton as the object of adoration, attention, fame or notoriety. Just as he was the audience for the Rita Hayworth and Tyrone Power film, he can be an audience for his own life drama. He sees himself on the stage. Fourth, the fantasy is nourished by the drives, for sexuality and aggression, which play central roles in how we experience bull fighting. Fifth, these drives have been worked upon, elaborated to give them a structure, a way of being represented in fantasy and acted "from" rather than acted "out."

A person’s jouissance is built out of these features of mental life. In Lacan’s developmental scheme, each of us has had a taste of being at the center of our mother’s world, or at least of imagining that we were. However, in Lacan’s rephrasing of the Oedipus complex we learn sooner or later that our mother has interests besides us. Coming to terms with this trauma we work to create our own fundamental fantasy that integrates our drives, our culture and our own capabilities in an absolutely unique way. Lacan calls the fantasized audience for our own life story (which may include our own ego) "object a." This object becomes the cause of our desires. These desires are not directed at possessing the object, of having it, but rather at securing the object’s gaze and attention. In this sense, Lacan argues, we never fulfill our desires. No one’s adoring gaze, not even the ego’s gaze on the self, is permanent. We are all, so to speak, about to be forgotten. This is the sense (in which for Lacan) desiring signifies a permanent "lack."

The central thrust of analysis, Lacan posits, is to help the analysand find their "jouissance." Lacan does not posit that in possessing our jouissance we are necessarily happy. The fundamental fantasy is nourished by the drives that take many forms of expression. Rather we are excited. Moreover, one’s jouissance may have little to do with one’s social roles or obligations. Lacan, I believe, when compared to object relations theorists or developmental theorists, strikes a deliberate amoral pose. At stake are our desires wherever they may lead us.

Jouissance and CEOs

Passion plays a singular role in organizational life because it enables people to pursue a goal single mindedly. Consider, for example, the provocative article written by Alan Noel on the "magnificent obsessions" of three CEOs. Noel argues that behind a chief executive’s activities, contacts and preoccupations their lies an obsession that gives coherence to his strategy and helps define the character of his leadership. ("Magnificent Obsession: The Impact of Unconscious Process on Strategy Formulation," Kets de Vries, 1991, 140 – 166). Observing and interviewing the three CEOs, he identifies an obsession that each uses to guide their decision making. One executive, who runs a sheltered workshop for the handicapped, is obsessed with the need to remain autonomous; the second, in charge of an advertising agency, is obsessed with accumulating as much wealth as possible; and the third, the head of a printing firm, is obsessed with doing everything with panache, with quality. These obsessions, Noel argues, are held in the mind as unconscious objectives, but suffuse the contacts each executive makes, the activities he engages in, the strategies he formulates and his leadership style. Thus the executive obsessed with accumulating wealth refuses to share ownership in the firm with his professional employees, even though this limits his ability to attract the most qualified professionals. Similarly, the executive obsessed with quality has purchased the most up-to-date machinery and refuses to compete on the basis of cost. Indeed the latter, though living in a relatively rural area, has built the most modern house in the region, "drives an expensive German car, drinks expensive French wines and travels to exotic countries during his holidays." (161) Noel suggests that he has become obsessed with quality to compensate for the fact that he had returned to the countryside from the city to take over the family’s printing business.

As Noel makes clear, these magnificent obsessions, or in our terms these passions, enable each executive to pursue goals with single-mindedness even when frustration or failure renders their initiatives problematic. Indeed, an executive may pursue a magnificent obsession even if it interferes with his success.

Consider Steven Feldman’s description of the case of Mr. John Smith, the CEO of an engineering company. Like the printing executive in Noel’s case, Smith was obsessed with product quality but often to the detriment of understanding what his customers actually wanted. Feldman argues that Smith had an idealized as against an personal relationship to his environment, that is he saw situations and the people within them as exemplifications of his ideals. This meant in particular that in designing new products he ignored the actual habits and requirements of his customers and built machinery that reflected his personal conception of the "best" or most advanced machinery. His subordinates believed that he was motivated not to make profits but to be recognized as a leading industrialist: "He was primarily in business not to make money but to build an organization that would bring him substantial recognition from society." (93) As this last quote suggests, Mr. Smith acted with an audience in mind, in this case the community of business people, engineers and political leaders who valued technology and honored technological pioneers.

VI. Two States of Mind at Work

When people are engaged in the activity that stimulates their excitement, that represents their jouissance, that expresses their fantasy, they are in a psychological state far from flow. While in flow they set the ego aside; in the state of jouissance, their ego is at the center of the internal drama they have created in which they are in fact adored, admired and recognized. This suggests that we can be in two relationships to our work. In each we are engaged, but the psychological texture of our engagement differs significantly.

Table I: Two States of Mind at Work

The terms on the left-hand side describe a state of mind in which we are thinking about where we are going, what glory we can obtain (in our own eyes as well as the eyes of others), what deeds we must accomplish. We are excited by our work. The terms on the right-hand side of the table describe a state of mind in which we are focused on the present, we are pulled to complete our work, and our intense concentration affords us a quiet enjoyment. The interplay of jouissance and flow holds the key to understanding the psychology of work. Let me give a simple example. I was consulting to the administrative group of a large foundation. They were a grumpy group, and at one meeting they complained about how the program officers of the foundation mistreated them and took them for granted. As their petulance and grumpiness deepened, they turned to the chronic problems of keeping the office kitchen clean. They noted how program officers left their dirty cups and dishes for the administrative staff to clean.

Their complaints were undoubtedly justified. The administrators were professionals (they took up roles in the finance, personnel and computing functions) but appeared to be saddled with the scut work. Moreover, the program officers’ apparent contempt was not accidental. As is often the case in professional settings where individual professionals value their autonomy, the program officers resisted complying with a range of administrative requirements such as filing program reports in a timely fashion. Administrators, who in their roles represented the foundation as an organization—a group—would bug the professionals and were therefore resented. The dirty kitchen seemed to be one graphic example of this process.

Responding to their grumpiness, I urged them to pursue the problem of the dirty kitchen—what in fact could they do? The tone of the meeting changed immediately. They became animated and creative and produced a rush of ideas on how to focus the officers’ attention on the problem of the dirty kitchen. They decided to create a colorful poster, to create and post a count of the number of dirty cups left lying about, to post rules about using the dishwasher and, at the suggestion of the finance executive, to include friendly reminders in with people’s pay stubs. They were clearly enjoying their new found energy as well as creativity.

This shift in tone highlights the links between flow and jouissance. My simple intervention focused them on a task—creating a "system" for keeping the kitchen clean and the structure of the task, for example, the interplay between the people’s habits, the dishwasher, the use of cups that stimulated their creativity. They gave themselves over with relish to the problem at hand. At the same time, however, they could invest in this task because they were able to convert their grumpiness and sense of beleaguerment into a stance of assertiveness. They were going to "fight" back with pizzazz. This stance helped them create a collective sense of their participation in an unfolding drama in which as performers of "heroic deeds" (the note in the pay stub, the dirty cup count) they would occupy center stage. In effect they linked their passion to their work.

VII. Organizational Diagnosis

We can describe group processes as the result of the interplay of these two states of mind. Consider the following table.

Table 2

As the table suggests, we can assess the emotional climate of a group by understanding how in the course of its functioning it links up states of excitement to states of "good work."

One hypothesis is that because the board did not review the documents closely, program officers became their own overseers. This created, so to speak, a collective superego to ensure that the board’s laxness would not result in their own carelessness. I believe that this hypothesis has value and accounts for the officers’ obsessiveness. Psychodynamically, the obsessive can be understood as a person who has constructed in his own mind an overly harsh superego.

There is also a simpler hypothesis. The officers enjoyed writing and editing. It was integral to their craft, they were skilled at it, and they appreciated a well-turned phrase and sentence and a clear argument. Each officer wanted to show off their best writing to their peers, and they were quite critical with our own memos and documents. We think they overvalued the pleasure they experienced in writing documents because, broadly speaking, the foundation as a whole was going through a significant transition and people were uncertain about its direction and purposes. Indeed, when we first contracted with the president for a consultation, he told us that his staff of officers seemed unexcited and withholding, and that he himself felt depressed. In other words, people could pursue the task of writing and editing as a refuge from the foundation’s wider dilemmas of purpose and direction. They overinvested in their craft to compensate for the absence of excitement. They substituted enjoyment for excitement.

Similarly, consider the following. I joined a colleague of mine, an expert in decision theory, as he was helping a group of pharmaceutical executives assess the value of their development pipeline, i.e. the potential economic value of the drugs that they hoped to bring to market. The work rested on a decision making method in which executives assigned numerical values to a range of drugs in development and the criteria used to evaluate them. The result upset some of the executives on the team because it suggested that they invest less money in their "crown jewel," the drug they hoped would sell in the billions of dollars world wide, and instead distribute some, though not all of their resources among many smaller projects. The decision model suggested that if they did this,the economic value of their pipeline would increase by a billion dollars, the hoped for value of the block-busting drug itself

Why would executives be upset about this finding? The term "crown jewel" is suggestive, since it points to the feelings they attached to the drug. It was the source of the company’s wealth and power. Identifying and then securing the crown jewel was an exciting process. It helped the executives create a drama in the mind, in which they overcome obstacles and hit the big time. It functioned as a container for excitement in way that the accumulation of many small success from many drugs could not.

I suggests that pharmaceutical executives want drugs that stir excitement, because the work of drug discovery and development can be in itself quite tedious. It frequently means that scientists in almost a mechanical fashion screen thousands of potential chemicals for their potential biological activity. The work of discovery has been in this sense partly industrialized. To compensate for this tedium, for the lack of enjoyment, the executives needed excitement. That is why they could not relinquish the crown jewel.

Similarly, consider the situations facing law firms. Law Firms today are very vulnerable to fragmentation. In terms of the framework developed here I suggest that this results from the loss of both enjoyment and excitement. On the one side many lawyers complain increasingly that they do not enjoy their work. The deeply litigious nature of their work, a results of an increasingly litigious society, makes their work feel burdensome, and oppressive to them. Many cannot tolerate nor sustain the level of chronic aggression the work requires. On the other side, the role of the lawyer was once exciting insofar as it proffered the lawyer the chance to join the elite of the community, to be on a first name basis with the key decisions makers in the community and to share in their confidences and secretes. This meant that lawyers could tolerate the aggression their work required, because they felt simultaneously part of the power elite. What they lost by way of enjoyment the gained by way of excitement. But today, lawyers and law firms are losing their special social ties to business elites. Clients feel less loyal to particular firms and instead purchase legal services based on price, expertise and service quality. Lawyers describe this by noting that increasingly they have a "transactional" as against an "institutional" relationship to their clients. The firm no longer functions as an adequate container for lawyers’ fantasies about being "at the top" and being powerful. The loss of this fantasy combined with the growing difficulty of the work itself makes law firms increasingly vulnerable to the normal conflicts facing a professional partnership e.g. conflicts over money, client access, reputation etc.

Thus for example, I once consulted to a law firm that had once strong ties to the Jewish community in the city. But as legal marketplace became more competitive, and the Jewish business community less cohesive, these ties became less salient. Facing problems of lagging billings and profits they asked us help them develop a strategy for repositioning the firm. Our consultation did not succeed. But what was most striking, indeed astonishing, in this case was the rapidity with which the firm then fell apart. Within a week of the departure of one senior partner, the other partners fled to the exits taking their clients and business with them. There was no firm left. I puzzled then over how an institution with such a long history could seemingly evaporate in a week. In retrospect I think we can say that the firm’s decline in billings signified that it had already lost its elite standing in the business community, that it was now simply another business. Combined with the stress of the work itself, the firm could no longer function as an adequate psychological container for the work. It stimulated neither excitement nor enjoyment.

The Basic Assumption Revisited

Table 2 suggests that when a group is in a state of high excitement but is not linked to a piece of work that has a structure and autonomy of its own, it is in what Wilfred Bion called a basic assumption. The concept of the "basic assumption" is both rich and ambiguous. On the one side, people who write and practice in the Tavistock tradition often use the concept of the basic assumption to describe a group emotional state that takes people "away" from the actual work they have to accomplish. Thus we can say that when a group in the basic assumption state of "dependency," it feels like a lump on the log waiting for someone to give its members orders. On the other side, they sometimes use the concept of basic assumption to identify the emotional state consonant with the group’s task. Thus, for example, we can say that any army platoon stimulates the "fight" basic assumption.

This framework proposes a different perspective on the basic assumption. The basic assumption represents the state of mind in which people focus on the fantasies, the internalized dramas, which makes the work exciting. This suggests, however, that we extend the scope of what we consider basic assumption. In Bion’s framework they were restricted to three emotional states, reflecting in part their defensive nature and their link to primitive mental states. Here we link them to what Lacan calls the fundamental fantasies, the ways in which each individual constructs an internal drama—in Klein’s sense a "phantasy" through which they approach "object a" or the cause of their desire. This means that at any given point in time there can be as many fundamental fantasies in a group as there are group members. This suggests in turn that a group is capable of creating a collective passion when these fantasies are coordinated, when each person can find in the group’s collective activity an adequate representation of his or her individual fantasy. This may happen through several routes, but the most common of course is when individuals identify with the leader’s fantasy. Conversely, the workgroup leader is one whose fantasy provides an adequate container for the different individual fantasies of workgroup members.

Organizational Diagnosis

Table 2 provides us with a grid for diagnosing a group’s functioning. The alienated group is one in which the work itself provides not structure or pull, and people feel no contact with a shared phantasy about the group’s future or potential. The craft group is one in which the work itself provides pull, structure and enjoyment, but individuals do not share a fantasy about the work that excites them. Many professional service settings, such as law firms or consulting firms, often have this character. The professional feels close to her client and linked to her skill, but the firm remains a psychological shell that at its best provides phone services and at worst gets in the way.

Finally, the "phantasy" group provides a great deal of excitement, but members are confused about the work they have to accomplish and the skills they need. Thus, for example, a colleague of mine consulted to a consulting firm whose charismatic leader had a vision for revenue growth that was breathtaking. It was based on an imaginative conception of how information technology, out-sourcing services and management consulting advice might be integrated to sell big-dollar, long-term contracts. However, the leader’s subordinates had not designed or crafted a new way to package, price and sell these services. They felt stymied by the complexity of the challenge and by the internal difficulties they faced in collaborating with one another to confront it. As a result, the different professionals, the consultants, the technologists and the out-sourcing experts continued to sell in their own way and separately, and the firm as a whole could not reach the revenue targets the CEO had envisioned. As in the case of the foundation described above, they could find some pleasure in the work they knew how to do, but as the year end approached and their failure to sell was evident, some despaired. None, however, lost faith in the CEO’s vision.

We can interpret their situation as one in which the group was unable to create the task system, the work process, here defined as a method of designing and selling services that would pull their day-to-day work in new directions. They faced a vacuum at the center of their work, while at the same time participating in the full, even overly-full, phantasy about the future. I believe that the resulting congeries of feelings—excitement despair, pleasure, hope—was the proximate stimulus for the consultation request.

Finally, this framework helps us deepen our understanding of the problem that the prototypical "bad boy" of leadership studies, the narcissistic executive, creates for subordinates. We can say that the narcissistic executive’s fundamental fantasy cannot include others. He is the only person with the right to adoration.

VIII. Summary

We noted that the Tavistock perspective takes as its starting point a workgroup’s experienced anxieties. We have argued that this is too narrow a framework for considering a psychology of work. People do not simply manage their anxieties at work, they can enjoy it and are excited about it. We need to give a psychoanalytic account of these states of mind at work as well. By drawing on the work of both Csikzenthmihalyi and Lacan we have developed a more complete psychoanalytic account of the work experience. In our framework a person can occupy two states of mind in relationship to work. In one, the state of enjoyment, the ego and its conflicts are set aside; in the second, the state of excitement, the ego and its conflicts are integral to what Lacan calls the "fundamental fantasy."

This fantasy stimulates desire because at its center lies the adoring object, whose gaze and attention ensures our centrality in a loving world. We are always at risk of losing its attention so we always desire it. This interplay constitutes the basis for the passion we bring to our work.

This framework for understanding the work experience helps us diagnosis the workgroup’s process leading us to assess how the work itself and the passion associated with the work do or do not combine to create a group climate or culture of feeling. We saw that a workgroup can exist in one of four states of relatedness to work, with each posing particular challenges for the workgroup’s development. This framework also helps us understand the vicissitudes of leadership. The "good enough" leader is one who cultivates a fundamental fantasy that has room for the fantasies of subordinates. When by contrast he projects an exclusive fantasy, one in which only he can be adored, we experience him as the narcissistic executive. Subordinates unconsciously recognize that their primary task is to protect this executive’s fundamental fantasy.

This framework also gives us an added perspective on anxiety. I want to suggest, along with Lacan, that anxiety emerges in the absence of desire. In other words, as we saw in the case of the foundation when confronting an organization that provides no psychological container for people’s individual fantasies, people seek substitute mechanisms in the work itself. There is enjoyment, but it is compensatory enjoyment, and in its absence people would feel anxiety. Moreover, if over time the lack of passion begins to undermine the work itself, for example, because the enterprise loses customers and business, anxiety is once again uncovered. Unmetabolized it results in a workgroup crisis or a state of more severe alienation