In this paper, I explore the hypothesis that the emerging and blooming field of Psycho-analytic Study of Organizations is infiltrated and contaminated by sweeping mechanisms of thought - I use the term 'Basic Assumption' (1) - which tend to shift the development of that field into a quasi-academic, quasi-rational, respectable, cozy and reassuring common venture. I borrow the term 'Basic Assumption' mainly for two reasons: first, because these mechanisms are implicit, if not unconscious, and pervade much of the published material on Psychoanalytic study of organizations, if not of its practice. Second, as from within the community of practitioners (2) there is almost no critique of any kind towards the practice and the published material, it can be interpreted as a sign that practitioners and writers might be engaged not in a rational, scientific 'ego-reality function' pursuit, but in the fulfillment of some phantasies. Scientific, rational, logical, methodological critique would seem to pertain to the realm of 'work', as opposed to the uncriticized world of 'basic assumption'. The bulk of this paper consists of such a positive and constructive critique, enunciated from within the ranks and file of the field. In that, I consider myself to stay very much within the tradition of Bion and psychoanalysis generally, as their endeavor was to put in question established wisdom, and their stance might be considered radical, even subversive to the established order, the Authorities and the conventional ways of interpreting the world (3)

I will examine here two of these thought mechanisms and then try to propose that we can meaningfully and fruitfully engage in the Psychoanalytical study of organizations without resorting to them. In order to get straight to the crux of the argument I will not develop here two of its premises: the first, is that with Freud and psychoanalysis, psychology made a radical, quantum, controversial leap from what was traditional psychology, and revolutionized the field (4). The second concerns the definition of the field of psychoanalysis itself nowadays; elaborating on these might throw us in too lengthy a discussion even to be summarized here. Suffice it to say, to quote Kenneth Eisold at a recent ISPSO Conference, that

" psychoanalysis in any sense that could lend itself to adjectival clarity and consistency just does not exist ".

Eisold stresses two main historical developments: the so-called post-modernist stance, shaking any belief at their very bases, especially the belief in reality and truth; and the proliferation of schools in the psychoanalytic world. However, whatever the school or strand we espouse in Psychoanalysis, it has to do with search, and looking beside, or underneath, and with questioning.

"...psychoanalysis is a domain of study or exploration: the domain of irrational behavior that cannot be accounted for by consciously understood motives(...). Psychoanalysis may come to be thought of as defining an area of inquiry. (...) it is an area of investigation that is defined by the limits of the rational, an instrumentality for probing problematic experience" (Eisold, 1995 ).

So far for a working definition of psychoanalysis.

But it seems that the proliferation of schools ( Object Relations, Ego psychology, Self psychology, Lacanian, etc.) has brought psychoanalysis as a field into a defensive, quasi- 'Establishment' position where each school strives to build its own autonomy and orthodoxy, and mobilize theoreticians, practitioners and patients. The radical dimension of Psychoanalysis - so characteristic when it first appeared - seems a forgotten legacy of the past.

The second starting point is that the application of psycho-analytic terms, concepts, views, etc. to organizations is developing, whether as a new discipline ( Messer-Davidow, 1993 ) or a new paradigm ( C. Harvey, 1982 ), surely as a field of inquiry and practice. The development of a field means that more people are engaged in somewhat converging activities; are rallying around some main concepts, problems, types of discourse, etc. Along with that, also, are emerging some classics, prominent figures and texts, traditions, basic issues and controversies, etc.

What one observes, in this respect, is the establishment of texts and views that are accepted quite on their face value or by virtue of the eminence of their writers. As I mentioned before, from within the field of psychoanalysis of organization, there is hardly any criticism nor critical examination and study of texts and views. This tendency might contribute to good feelings within the emerging profession and between practitioners, but it is more characteristic of a closed club than of a learned society, and might give headway to the common claims that psychoanalysis is a closed system, quite opposed to a scientific, open ethos.

One crucial question often mentioned, en-passant, but not really debated, concerns the very definition of the field, and its boundaries: it is no small nor a semantic issue whether we deal with psycho-analytical study of organizations, meaning by that that we really tackle with the question of what is an organization, how can it be apprehended as a whole, which might be dealt with, or should be dealt with, differently than individuals, etc. In short, do we open a new field, or are we just using a metaphor. This questioning should enlighten the relevance of psychoanalytic theory and concepts developed for individuals or even groups which are not organizations, to the field of organizations. The other position taken by some writers and practitioners being that we deal with people working in organizations (see, for example, Armstrong, 1995 Bar-Lev Elieli, 1994; De Board, 1978; Eisler, 1995; Obholzer and Roberts 1994). This basic yet unresolved issue pervades the whole field, and not to its advantage.

This is the scene: a powerful and growing invitation to use psycho-analytical terms and apply them to people in organizations and to the organization as a whole. Looking at what is done and written in the field, one gets the impression that there are some tacit understandings about what that field is, and what we do when practicing, but some
part of those understandings fall under obscuring themes. Two of them are developed and examined below.

THE BASIC ASSUMPTION OF PSYCHOLOGICAL PRIMACY: PSYCHOLOGICAL REDUCTIONISM

Maybe the most pervasive basic assumption in the field is the tacit belief that psychological factors ( couched in psycho-analytic terms ) are also the only ones that matter; they are so important in the determination of organizational behavior, that any other factors in the life and analysis of organization ( for example, political, social, or technological forces and processes; structural variables, as the size of an organization, or its pattern of ownership, etc. ) are barely mentioned. They might be called 'exogenous' factors, and they are deemed to have, in fact, no influence. For example, one can find that the psychoanalytic study of organization, in fact, means some kind of psychoanalysis of people within organizations; for example, a straightforward definition like the following:

"Consultation to organisations is based on the fact that it is important for those of us involved in painful and stressful work to be given space to think about the anxieties aroused in us as individuals and as a working group " (Mawson, p.1).

An almost classical formulation of the field of psychoanalytic study in organizations might be found in David Armstrong's paper presented at the London ISPSO Symposium of 1995( Armstrong, 1995, p.8):

"What is the 'analytic object in organisational work'? What is it one is looking at, or rather since it is not just a matter of sight, nor of any common sense or senses, what is it one is apprehending ? I think the simplest answer is - emotional experience."

and later on, (p.9)

"Organisations, I suggest, can be seen as punctuations of inter-personal space, punctuations defined by the boundary conditions of the organisation (...) I think of what I do or try to do, in working with organisational clients, as seeking to bring into view the emotional experience present and presented within such a space, as this is disclosed in the resonances set up in the inner world of my client".

The few words I have skipped in this short passage show the lip service paid to 'exogenous' factors in most of the psychoanalytically oriented study of organizations: "to adapt a well known formulation of Eric Miller's, conditions of task, technology, territory and time, and by a certain history and a certain culture" - as no mention, later on in that article, is made of those factors and their probable influence.

The other significant part of the definition - as regards the analysis presented here - is the use of the term: "organisational clients". In this article, which is an important contribution to the definition of the field, Armstrong is very candid about his position in the non-debate: here he takes the position of analysis of persons within organizations.

On the perspective of the organization as a whole, it is as if the Psycho-analytical consultant is quite blind to, or ignorant of, those factors deemed, in the ( non-psychological ) literature about organizations, to be crucial and elementary in the understanding of organizational dynamics. By keeping to his exclusive psychological focus, the Psychoanalytical consultant reduces the organization to a field of psychological conflicts and forces, and completely wipes the substratum of power, positions, differential access to resources and decision making, rewards, relationships with the environment, culture, climate, etc. Otto Kernberg in a critical article on the field, rejoins Katz and Kahn 's( 1966 ) critique that the Group Relations Conference tradition, and for that matter, we might add the psychoanalytic study of organizations, neglects

to analyze the stable features of the organizational structure and the relation between that structure and the real ( in contrast to fantasied or irrational ) conflicts of interest which such organizational structures mediate. ( Kernberg, 1984, p 12 )

Kernberg's own style of psychologism, in this issue, is straightforward: in his view, the field should put greater emphasis on the

impact of the personality of the leader on organizational conflicts.( pp 12-13 )....At one extreme, we find the self-indulgent narcissist who can lead the small dependent assumption group or pacify the large group with a simplistic ideology that soothes while preventing envy of the leader, or, in a more "sophisticated" combination, the sexually "liberated" narcissist who preaches sexual liberation in the group's ( symbolic or actual) bathtub and condenses polymorphous preoedipal sexuality with messianic merger. At the other extreme, and more disturbingly, we find the sadistic psychopath, with a well-rationalized cruelty, who energizes the mob into destructive action against a common enemy and frees it from responsibility for murder. In a earlier work...[ Internal World and External Reality, 1980, chapter 13 ) I attempted to describe the effects on organizational regression of personality characteristics of the leader, with particular references to schizoid, obsessive, paranoid, and narcissistic personalities (...) The question is to what extent (...) small, self-contained types of social organization surround the leader with a structure of reality that would avoid the takeover by a sadistic or narcissistic leader or neutralize his regressive efforts over an extended period of time.(...) But larger organizations, such as national bureaucracies or international corporations (...) may no longer offer such a possibility of ordinary social control.(....) the authoritarian power generated within organizations, stemming from both individual psychopathology and from organization regression, not to mention the ordinary discharge into the organization of unacknowledged narcissistic and aggressive needs by all individuals, may rapidly escalate, given certain social and political conditions, into socially sanctioned cruelty and dehumanization ( Kernberg, 1984, pp17-18 )

Even when Kernberg points to the institutional variables, and their influence - without explaining, for example, what does he mean by 'institutional regression' - his main interest is in the nature of the personality of the organization leader. In that sense, Kernberg belongs to the second basic assumption, to be dealt with later on.

The institutional or organizational variables cover quite a large range of phenomena: but common to them is the view that certain processes belong to the institutional, or organizational, realm, not to the psychological one - and therefore should not be reduced to psychology, at least not to personal, individual, psychology.

If a manager of Engineering struggles with a manager of Marketing - shall we look for psychological reasons, and probe some hidden conflicts, or examine the here-and-now dynamics with the consultant - when we know that managers of Engineering always struggle with managers of Production because it is a built-in, structural tension in organizations, and is not whatsoever directly dependent on any psychological characteristics of any of the persons concerned.

How do sophisticated analysts or consultants deal with this occultation of 'real-life' factors - as opposed to psycho-analytical concepts ? The main mechanism used is that of a split between both domains. For example, in a paper on consultancy with the British National Health Services, the 'real-life' changes are enunciated separately from the 'psychodynamics'' concurrent to those changes.

Over the past couple of decades we have seen a considerable crumbling, in human service provision generally (...) in Britain dwindling resources have meant that public sector providers such as the national Health service ( NHS ) or colleges and universities offer ever less long-term treatment. (...) At the same time, the workplace has become unpredictable, even unrecognisable, as organisations restructure and downsize over and over: far from looking forward to promotion as inevitable, we can no longer be sure of being employed at all, let alone be fulfilled by our careers. The large human service systems - health, education, social services - are providing less and less to more and more, with demand outstripping resources everywhere.( Roberts and Stapley, 1996, p1)

One page later, referring to, without explicitly citing the so-classical paper of I.Menzies Lyth, the authors claim that

"Losing one's job brings with it loss of the defences against psychotic ( paranoid - schizoid anxieties ) which the organisation provided".

The logical-rhetorical twist is revealing: it is no more the organizational arrangements which are made to contain anxieties, as originally claimed in that paper ( Menzies Lyth, 1959 ), but work environment contains, by its familiarity and stability, defences against 'psychotic (paranoid-schizoid) anxieties', apparently brought in from home. Psychological elements, couched in psychoanalytical terms, are subrepticiously introduced, without it being clear which value they add if any, to the analysis given before. The paper, on the whole, describes a series of interventions where the consultants act professionally as any good consultant would have acted, with common sense, with good understanding of the situation, with enlarging the scope of vision, etc. And here, they actually cite Menzies Lyth, in a less classical excerpt:

" the consultant's responsibility lies in helping insights to develop, freeing thinking about problems, helping the client to get away from unhelpful methods of thinking and behaving, facilitating the evolution of ideas for change, and then helping him to bear the anxiety and uncertainty of the change".( Menzies Lyth, 1989 )

Another variant of this split, is what I call 'decoratism'. Decoratism means that psychoanalytical, or psychologistic terms, are used and explained - but without adding any apparent value to the explanation or description .

See, for example,

" While politically and culturally expedient, the illusion of management control, like all illusions, also fulfills important psychological needs - fulfilling in fantasy wishes that cannot be fulfilled in actuality and reducing anxiety. For some, management control represents a grandiose dream in which individuals groups and organizations may be commanded with no fear of recalcitrance like machines, or symbols on a computer screen. for others, it meets a dependency need, a re-assurance that someone is in charge, even if he or she is not liked. (...) For yet others, it fulfills a need for victimization and scapegoating - someone may be blamed, so long as someone claims to be in charge. Subordinates collude in the hubris of management, endowing leaders with truly super-human qualities, such as omnipotence, omniscience and total composure (...) Pretending that the world... can be controlled and managed helps us cope with the anxiety caused by the chaos that is threatening our lives." (Gabriel, 1996, pp 10-11).

All well, especially as everything is included from management to followership, from dependency to omniscience - so no real explanatory power of the argument, as it explains everything - but also that kind of statements just escapes the issue of what exactly are the relations between psychological and 'real-life' variables. In fact, the psychologistic bias of the whole argument is well exemplified in this paper in the following quotation

"...uncovering the underlying, psychological processes in organisations is very similar to the problem that doctors face when dealing with psycho-somatic patients. Initially the doctor needs to start where the patient is. He or she needs to accept that the effect is as real to the client as is physical disease or damage. However, to immediately inform the patient 'that its really only all in the mind' is unlikely to be believed and also unlikely to be helpful." (Gabriel, 1996, p 12).

I won't refer here to the tactical recommendation made by the author, but to the tacit assumption that organizations are like psycho-somatic patients, and thus need to be treated like them. But the practitioner has not made any test, or does not show us which tests he has made, which might show us that there is no 'organic' basis to the 'pathology'. So that this very psychologistic or 'psychosomatic' bias just makes them confound between cause and effect, or vice versa: the effects of the disease are real, be it a 'somatic' or a 'psycho-somatic' disease, the etiology is different. The author does not give us any clue to help us differentiate between 'psycho-somatic' and 'somatic' organizations. In fact, he seems to claim, by that omission, that all organizations are 'psycho-somatic'. That is an interesting and strong claim, which should be clearly defined, and supported by facts. It echoes the classical discussion within and outside psychoanalysis, about reality vs. phantasy, memories of a real past vs. (re)construction of a phantasied past, etc. If this basic discussion is important in psychoanalysis relating to what happens in a room between someone on the couch and someone else beside it, it is even more important and relevant when we speak of a whole organization 'on the couch'. As we can easily see, the logical development of such an argument, which might smoothen the way to the second Basic Assumption studied here ( see next section ), brings one to psychologistic holism(5), if not to straightforward mysticism, or at least plain idealism. The pattern is unclear, as actually, in the paper just cited, as I have shown, the author gives us quite strong 'somatic', 'organic' or 'real' indications, pertaining to the ever changing market, to pure economic competition, to power struggles to organizational changes, etc. Thus blurring the limits between Basic Assumptions and Work, phantasy and reality, which, as we have learned from Bion, live very close one to the other.

Psychologistic sweeping 'explanation' is not typical only of psychoanalytic study of organizations; one recent example can be found in an article deploring the

"revival of individually-focused research in the European tradition, the increasing strength of reductionist models even within group research is something to be tackled...".(Parker, 1997)

Here, the main mechanism mentioned is a supposed anxiety of a whole cohort of researchers: using the later Bion's concepts of 'container' and 'contained', and 'revolutionary change', the author links the changing fate of social psychological research and researchers to dynamics occurring in groups. In fact, what is denied, or repressed, or not considered at all, is the whole sociology of knowledge, all the line long, as representing and researching something deemed to exist in reality: the existence and influence of cliques, research institutions and programs, the place of universities and the struggles of departments for funding and students, the existence and vitality of centers of learning outside the universities, of the role of the editors in professional journals in the screening of papers for publication, etc., all that is lost, or hastily summarized in one single explanation: so we are led to think that the epistemological developments in a whole field of knowledge are

" a response to anxiety, the fear of an impending catastrophe (...) [and] can be understood as the reflection of anxieties about the breakdown of differentiation from other disciplinary groups" ( Parker 1997, pp 191-191 ).

In an important paper - also presented in a different form with David Armstrong in the Bion centennial conference - Gordon Lawrence stresses the crucial but often overlooked or misunderstood contribution of Bion in his study of groups, namingly the place and modalities of thinking - metaphorically presented as the 'Sphinx' perspective:

" Psychoanalysis as a vertex for understanding the nature of thinking in social configurations of which Bion has been the leading proponent "(Lawrence, 1997, p. 3 ).

Lawrence contrasts this perspective on thought and thinking, much neglected by many other practitioners, to the conventional psychoanalytic perspective on unconscious emotional contents, centred on the dyadic and Oedipal relationship. But, for the most part of his paper, Lawrence focuses on psychology, not necessarilly in the Oedipal sense, as it is presented in that paper, but nevertheless a psychological viewpoint. For example, in page 4 :

"My tentative working hypothesis is that these phantasies [about survival] can be clustered together as the phantasies formed in infancy. Through infantile and subsequent maturational experiences these phantasies are modified as life events, are experienced and learned from. But they are never expunged and can be reactivated when tragic events are experienced in later life. These infantile phantasies of tragedy influence how real, lived tragedy is interpreted in the mind. At worst, the phantasies are held on to in order to evade the experience of tragedy in reality - and to disregard the 'poignancy of the human condition' (de Duve, 1995...) By holding on to these phantasies of a private nature the chances are lessened of individuals learning from the experience of tragedy and growing in maturity as a result . Sphinx represents the capacity for learning from experience. In organizations there can be, on occasion, a resounding resonance between individual phantasies of tragedy and the potential tragic fate that any organisation has to face in a real, chaotic environment. If the former swamp the latter it is less possible for role holders to learn from their experience of being in an environment that is continually changing and surprising because its realities are pre-construed by phantasy. Thinking which is prompted by issues of organisational survival always raises phantasies of tragedy, no matter how well disguised. Sphinx symbolises the capacity to question the presence and emotional content of thinking of any kind including that which has not been voiced and articulated but which is present in the minds of role-holders in the organisation..."

Thus, even if his original purpose was to operate a shift from Oedipus to Sphinx, Lawrence finds himself back from thinking or thought ( from a quasi cognitive or philosophical point of view ), to 'emotional' psychology, to infantile phantasies, in the classical psychoanalytic vein. The practice of Lawrence does not succomb altogether to the Basic Assumption of psychologism: on the contrary, in a particularly lucid excerpt, he points to the danger of Oedipus once more overcoming the Sphinx:

" ..recently I was supervising two psychiatrists who are strongly committed to psychoanalysis. They work in a country which was formerly communist. They have a consultation project with the first bank established in their country to make loans to business ventures.They described their work and said that they had succeeded in persuading the President of the bank to go/come into therapy...When I suggested that they had not really looked at the work of the bank and what its primary tasks might be, that they had screened out the economic, political, social and cultural factors involved in establishing such a bank in a country which had no memory of private enterprise ...that they had become caught up in their interpersonal issues without identifying the complexity of the context, etc., they were surprised. At this point in the project Oedipus had triumphed over Sphinx."

My general point of a basic assumption can hardly be more richly illustrated. Practice and common sense pull in one direction. Theorizing pulls in the other. Truly, Lawrence emphasis is much more on the realm of thinking than on that of feeling, but it remains a psychology:

"The acknowledgment of the limits of comprehension is shadowed by the fears and anxieties of 'catastrophic change'."( p 7) "the prospect of 'catastrophic change' inevitably raises existential anxieties.."( p 7) "This, to repeat, is an emotional achievement as much as an intellectual one" ( p 8) "this is not just intellectual but profoundly emotional, for often, primitive feelings are involved "( p 10 )

Another way to bypass the place and importance of non-purely psychological factors in the life of the organization, is to deal with universal, existential dimensions, such as anxiety, or depressive feelings ( for example, the classical work of Menzies-Lyth,1959, or also G.Lawrence,1995 ). In so far as they are presented as all inclusive, pervasive elements of organization life, they leave no rule for the study of an historical or 'clinical', unique situation: a sweeping, grand theorethical concept pre-empts any particular case, and assumes that any other factor, in fact, does not make the slightest difference.

The question one may raise is not how Psycho-analytic concepts and viewpoint can or should replace ( substitute for ) other views of organization, but what can Psycho-analytic concepts add to those views, and may be re-position them or 're-place' them, enrich them with an additional perspective. That would be a task for new theoretical and research developments of psycho-analytic concepts: not just mentioning Bion's early works on groups, but developing his and others' insights and examine their application in the psychic reality of organizations and groups - and seriously tackle the very question of the existence of such a reality; linking this work to the extensive literature on Organizational Culture, for example, or the whole new stream of organizational learning.

THE BASIC ASSUMPTION OF UNITY & REPRESENTATION: PSEUDO-SYSTEMIC MONISM

This Basic Assumption is perhaps not less pervasive than the previous one, but is more intricate. It is the tacit belief and assumption that all the dynamics, or the whole dynamics of the organization is in fact represented into one of its parts, either a particular element in the organization - for example top management, or any part whatsoever of the organization. This view points to a very peculiar - and possible - type of system: we might call it 'fractal' ( Gleick, 1987 ), to use a term now quite popular with the so-called 'new science' of chaos - it means a system where any or some part is really isomorphic to all or any other parts, so it might be considered a representation of them (6). It is important to stress how peculiar is this type of system, if we take seriously the fractal or isomorphic quality. It means either, a) that the system is closed and finalized: it is so built, according to some master plan or mechanism - some metaphorical DNA - which ensures the reproduction of every part as a replica of any other; or b) that there exists a very sophisticated mechanism which ensures the continuous maintaining of this isomorphism throughout the various parts of the system, in real time. The mechanism in question needs to keep much more than boundaries, it needs to translate any change in one part simultaneously or consequentially, in the other parts ! But such a system is not very much of a system: it is, at most, a complicated amalgam of parts, related by fixed, or similar, links. Even if we concede that this amalgam is a system - with such complicated self-regulating mechanisms, it is not an open system. Moreover, do we know of such a system embodied in any organization ?

Is it possible to have an actual organization which fulfills this pattern ? Would you claim, for example, that any particular fast-food restaurant, whatever similar it is to any other in the same chain, in terms of food, prices, practices, management style, etc. does in fact represent the whole company. Many similar processes might occur in all of those restaurants - in fact we would expect it. But, any single restaurant is not the organization as a whole, nor are, for example, the central headquarters which co-ordinate or dictate the chain's policies and practices. The organization, at least, is the sum of headquarters and restaurants, nothing less than that; so that any part cannot represent the whole.

What is difficult to conceptualize for an organization potentially built along similar or identic units, seems even more irrelevant for any other kind of organization. So that we cannot accept at its face value the view presented, for example, by David Armstrong in his paper presented at the 1996 ISPSO Symposium ( Armstrong, 1996, p3 ):

"What had begun as an expression of dis-ease with his own relation to the university could, now, be reframed and given new meaning as a representation or registration within the individual of a more pervasive experience of dis-ease within the whole institution"

The conceptual problem here stems from the issue of representation and interpretation. It goes the following way: some phenomena are not only, or not really, what they are; they primarily represent something else, from another realm or from another magnitude of importance. So that in order to understand the real order of things, we ought not only study those phenomena in and by themselves, their own dynamics, etc., but we need to understand, at a deeper level, what these phenomena represent, and which kind of reality hides behind or beneath those 'epidermal' or superficial phenomena. For example, following the analysis given about the first basic Assumption, downsizing and re-sizing are not organizational tactics which deal with shrinking returns; they are the representation of infantile phantasies of omnipotence and omniscience, hubris and quick fix, etc. I will not dwell here on the peripetiae of this idea, from Plato's cave, through psychoanalytic interpretation of symbols and symptoms, to contemporary hermeneutics(7).

A slightly though significantly different variant of this meta-theory of representation is that which deals with similarities, parallels and mirroring. It consists of pointing to similarities between phenomena, either in one realm of life, or in different realms; in some distant parts of the organization, or between certain things that happen in the organization and others that happen in society at large, in history, etc. The effect to the reader when these similarities are pointed to him/her is usually striking; the surprise might be quite overwhelming, and give a sense of insight. But, it might be a mere coincidence, a nice trick of our imagination or wit, nothing really consequential. On the opposite, when those similarities are pointed out in the psychoanalytic literature about organizations, they are deemed to be non-random, non-trickery, but immensely significant: it is as if one image merely mirrors the reality of another, distant realm, or sub-unit in the organization. The mirror, or similarity image can be used with much sophistication. For example, in his 1995 article, D. Armstrong, citing his work with a Chief Executive in Health Services, and some of the directors under him, says:

"These experiences of vulnerability in the presence of my clients had an institutional undertow, in that I became aware both of feeling the vulnerability of my own institution - what would happen if I made a mess of this assignment; and of feeling the vulnerability of my own relatedness to my institution. I believe these experiences, registered in myself, could be understood as correlates of the experience of my clients. More exactly, I would say that I experienced myself temporarily as both in and of their institution: something akin to a kind of institutional projective identification." (Armstrong, 1995, p.5)

The use of the noun 'correlates' is fantastically ambiguous, and so is the phrase 'something akin to': the listener or the reader is left to his or her own associations with those terms, but the main idea is there: through work with one, or some, managers, the main issues of the organization as a whole can be adequately apprehended.

In relating his work experience with a staff in an Adolescent unit in a child clinic, Chris Mawson also uses the mirror image:

"It can also be shown how the feelings of the staff mirrored those of the parents, who had repeatedly been made to feel useless and impotent. When such feelings of inadequacy are unbearable the temptation to "pack it in' can be stoo strong to resist, and this is precisely what had happened with many of the children there. Their presence in the unit represented this feeling in the parents that had been dealt with by "packing in" the job of parenting them. The children had made the staff feel much as they had made their parents feel, and in turn the staff had made me bear the impact of these violent and demoralizing feelings."(p.2)

Here, once more, the practice, en passant, pre-supposes as a self-evident truth and as the very bases of its establishment what will then be used as a standard practice, and which is bound to reinforce or 'prove' the soundness of the premises. The conceptual system is hermetically closed - but not after it has been critically examined and found coherent; rather, it is build, from the outset, as a closed, tautological, self-generating mechanism.

On the whole, the metaphor of the mirror has had a quite succesful career in the literature, but the implications of that mirror image, if it is not taken merely as a metaphor, are not dealt with. A further discussion of this point would lead us to discuss a third Basic Assumption, that of 'Mystical Unity', which is clearly beyond the scope of this paper.

Suffice it now to say that the application of these ideas of mirroring and representation to the psychoanalytic study of organizations calls for a more careful step than just a tacit extension of some principles, traditionally applied with some success and great skill to the therapeutic, one-on-one situation, onto a complex, organizational scene. It is clear, though, that this extension of the representation principle is closely linked to the reductionist assumption studied above.

That monistic, anti-open-systemic view, in fact, is surreptitiously present in most one-on-one practice of the psychoanalytic analysis of organizations. For example, this assumption has it that if you work with the head of an organization, or if you work with one segment of the organization, for example, a certain level of management, it is as if you work with the organization as a whole. The 'Organization-in-the-mind' phrase adequately exemplifies the methodological twist of this basic assumption: it is just like the prestidigitator who causes something so big and ubiquitous to disappear and replaces it by something so wholly different, without anyone in the audience being able to see how he did it. It is no more the-view-of-the - organization-which- exists-in-the-eyes/mind-of-the-manager- and-which- might-be-different-from-that-existing-in the-mind-of-other- people- within- the-organization"- it has become 'the organization in the mind'.

Hocus-pocus, just disappeared: interests, real and imagined, power and power relations (8), authority and influence, struggles and strife, positions, roles, technology, structure, beliefs, attitudes, strategies, classes, social categories, gender and ethnic and religious groups: everything is (represented) / (synthesised) / (co-existing) in the (head) of the General Manager.....

Thus, we see that the second basic assumption, also, just like the first one, diffuses, in fact, the reality of an organization, either as a significant construct or as a thing in itself; it rejects - without ever discussing them - the basic ideas of sociology; it blurs the dynamics of organization. What is repressed here, what is hidden, is the reality, for example, of interests, of domination, of power and of power relations within the organization. So that the radical bias of Psychoanalysis just have disappeared. And, in the kind of methodology criticized here, who can really put in question the place, role and mechanisms of authority, or of domination ! So that this second basic assumption tends to turn the Psychoanalytic Study of organizations into an 'Establishment' venture. And this does not stem only, or primarily, from the fact that the fees of the analyst are paid by the organization - a fact that would be easily overlooked in a purely psychological perspective. The very stance adopted by this kind of psychoanalytic study seems to support, willingly or not, a very ideological, functionalist, elitist, conformist, "from-the-point-of-view-of-the-establishment", dominant and simplified view of the organization, as viewed by the authorities. And this happens notwistanding and despite the liberal or humanitarian leanings of most writers. The way is paved for the practitioner to become, willy nilly, a servant of the powers, and keep good conscience.

The following example shows the building of the 'system' into a monade in two ways: firstly, an overall trait of the whole system is linked to one special stratum in it - here, as quite usual, the executive top. In a very touching and vehement paper on the aggressiveness and cruelty of downsizing in America, we are told that

"Downsizing in business, industry,health care, education, and government, is a culturally 'logical' extension of the widespread eradication of all pasts and of an arrogant monochromatic and foreshortened vision of the future. This new vision is one often imagined and imposed by upper-level executives isolated and self-isolated from the rest of the organization." ( Stein, 1996, p7).

It is left completely unexplained how this view of the owners and top executives came to become the dominant view of whole organizations, if not of a whole society. Karl Marx and his followers were much more explicit on that.

Secondly, this same attribute is deemed to be characteristic of society as a whole, though especially in a certain historical period ( here, the 1990ies), but without any indication why just now, and how it happened to get there, except in a pseudo-historical analysis so much stretched and over-generalized that it does not hold much water:

" (...)Downsizing a widespread institutional solution that is in turn embedded in an orientation according to which life is nothing more than a globally competitive marketplace."

"Downsizing is but a single institutional form taken by bloodless as well as bloody domestic, internal wars now occurring between groups inside the United states (...).Since 1990,the Cold war is ended, the 'evil empire' of the Soviet Union is but memory. But the aggression that bi-polar world contained is now let loose among us.(...) Historically, I would situate the downsizing as one expression of our domestic internal wars against a myriad of internal enemies, all of which wars erupted in the wake of the end of the Cold War and the emotionally destabilizing effect of the loss of the Soviet Union as our 'shadow', that 'Evil empire' that served so well as a focus and vessel of our disavowed agression" ( Stein, 1996, p4 )

History is seemingly mobilized to explain a present situation. Following this 'historical' analysis, just to take one example, ethnic strife in the United States before the crumbling apart of the Soviet Union is unexplainable, or unexistent. In fact the argument is totally a-historical, because it does not relate specific results to specific causes. On the contrary, general results are 'explained' by just one cause: that is historicism, as its worst (K.Popper, 1960).

WORKING WITHOUT THOSE ASSUMPTIONS

It seems to me that it is quite possible, may be even necessary, to keep on and undertake psychoanalytical study of, and work with, organizations, without assuming any of those assumptions, and that the results can be quite interesting and rewarding. The problem is not really with the application of the main principles, or techniques, of analytical work, which may be summarized, across various schools and trends, as at least containing the following: a) the presence of a self-acknowledged analyst, b) working with and through transference and countertransference, meaning also working on the here and now, and, c) the search for hidden and repressed meanings and motivations.

Many practitioners show that way in very clear terms, even if they once in a while fall into the basic assumption described above. Gordon Lawrence criticizes the over-emphasis on the Oedipal vertex, as opposed to the Sphinx.....David Armstrong stresses the unmediated, thickly rich encounter between the practitioner and the client, full of transference and contra-transference, which gives so much material for work. Or Ken Eisold 's examples of work with the transference, and putting it back to the client, and many more.

Given that we can work on those lines, I believe the main challenge, if we aspire to make a genuine psychoanalytic study of an organization, is to put as our client, or target, the organization itself, as a whole, and as a sociological construct.

By that, I mean not just a person within the organization, whatever her or his role, or a defined and special stratum in it. And not just a disembodied field of psychological or psychoanalytical forces, or a place where we can find, in these times of shrinking clientele, 'patients' whose fees are paid by the organization, nor just a mythical locus where feelings, ideas, interpretations and meanings, somehow hover over two or more persons.

Apart from work being done by practitioners and not examined in this paper, as well as some work reported in the very same papers critically examined here, at least two 'classical' streams of work embody those principles.

The Glacier project stands as a category by itself ( Jaques [1956], even if lately he seems to disavow some trends of his previous work ) with its continuous work with the Organization as a whole, not only Top Management, but also middle management, Workers representatives and councils, etc., is a quite untypical example. To my knowledge, there is no other example even approaching such a work done with any organization, so widely spread among the layers and functions of the organization, and in such a long time span, and so much influenced by psychoanalytic concepts. But the other, classical works of the Tavistock Institute, in the days of socio-technical concepts, in Britain and in India, certainly do belong to that stream.

Another, related line of work, is exemplified in OPUS, and its methodology of working with the whole community or organization.

We, in Innovation and Change in Israel Society ( ICS ), when working "in-house" with some organizations - for the time being, in the public sector and with the helping professions, mainly - we try to apprehend, somehow in a tradition derived from the Tavistock Conferences, and through 'institutional events', some basic modalities of work of the organization as a whole. From our experience, quite a number of the main dilemmas and characteristics of the institution - 'as a whole' - are surfacing, not only in the small groups sometimes established, but in them and especially through the 'spontaneous' developments we and the participants experience during the 'institutional event'. But the limitations of the model, so far, are quite clear: it is a short term work, usually without the top-management and without the clients, and because of that, without an understanding that can be checked on the spot, of the relations, phantasied and real, between management and the organization at large, and between organization and its meaningful environment.

The other strand, which can enrich our perspective on the Psychoanalytic understanding of organizations, is the so-called Leicester Conference, or Tavistock tradition conference( Rice ,1965; Miller, 1989 ). That type of Conference strives to work with the organization - of the Conference ! - as a whole, including Management and Staff, usually on some themes which characterize organizational life, as Authority, Leadership, Political processes, Women in management, etc. As regard the Basic Assumptions presented in this paper, the Tavistock Conferences, strongly embedded in their own tradition, are well equipped to escape their dangers; no one there dreams to claim that working with one small Group ( it tends to be called sub-system, nowadays, following Gordon Lawrence conception ), or only with one of the Institutional Event sub-groups, is enough ! We know there that no single part ever represents the whole, even if representations and links and interconnections are intensively sought for, maybe sometimes even imposed on the evidence. But, the conference design by itself, and its tradition in itself, do not pre-empt the possibility of falling into the two Basic Assumptions mentioned earlier. In fact, more than one such conference has fallen prey to psychologistic or monistic generalizations. More seriously, even, such conferences, for reasons space does not permit to treat here, sometimes escape the primary task of their establishment, i.e., the task of studying Authority. This theme - so much present in the (early) Bion writings on groups, and in his own demeanour in the groups he 'took', and so well stressed in the first Leicester or Tavistock conferences - seems to fade into distance by now.

The relevance of authority to organizations - as hierarchical devices - is obvious; but, Authority, as a theme, or as a mechanism to be questioned and examined, is also obviously absent from the literature on the psychoanalysis of organizations !
But, a Conference in which 'Authority', or rather, at least the Conference's management's authority - in the 'here and now' of the Conference - is not challenged is, in fact, a waste of time, an escape from the work and the task - or just an elaborated and sophisticated T-Group experience. Similarly, an organization where Authority is not examined cannot be called 'analyzed'.

It seems that our developing field of Psycho-analytic study of Organizations, has, for now, made a full circle. Rice (1969) proposed

"to apply to individual and group behaviour the system theory of organization, normally used for the analysis of enterprise processes".

Now it seems that we tend to apply to the analysis of enterprise and organizations processes, concepts developed from individual and group behaviour.

I have suggested here that this reversal of concept application does not really enhances our understanding of organizations, but rather impoverishes and masks some potentially disruptive understandings.

* Part of this paper was presented at the May 1996 meeting of ICS - Innovation and Change in Israeli Society, the first organization in Israel to sponsor an annual Tavistock tradition Conference, from 1987 on. I thank my colleagues at ICS for their patient attention and remarks, and Yossi Triest for some comments on an earlier draft.

NOTES

(1 )The reader does not need a lengthy introduction to Bion's terminology and way of observation ( in his classic Experiences in groups ,W.Bion, 1961 ). Basic Assumptions, because the practitioners write as if they assume those statements or assumptions - which are not fully declared, or even fully conscious - to be true, and they take great care not at all examine or discuss them, but accept them as self-evident truths, not to be contradicted in any manner.

(2) From close outsiders, see, for example, Kernberg critique, (1984). See also the debate at 1992 ISPSO meeting, around E. Jaques' paper. ( see Jaques, 1995 ). The paper itself, as it rejects the field as such, might be considered as a critique from outside the field. Some points raised there are echoed in this paper.

(3) See, for example, in the wake of the seduction theory, the defense of Freud and psychoanalysis by Prof. Jonathan Lear: "....psychoanalysis is crucial for a truly democratic culture to thrive....[it is a] vision of how one might both take human irrationality seriously and participate in a democratic ideal...It is a technique that allows dark meanings and irrational motivations to rise to the surface of conscious awareness. They can then be taken into account; they can be influenced by other considerations; and they become less liable to disrupt human life in violent and incomprehensible ways." and " psychoanalysis thus becomes the first therapy which sets freedom rather than some specific image of human happiness as its goal. Other kinds of therapy posit particular outcomes -- increased self -esteem, overcoming depression - and, implicitly or explicitly, give advice about to get there. Psychoanalysis is the one form of therapy which leaves it to analysands to determine for themselves what their specific goals will be "( Jonathan Lear, 1995 )

(4) " Genius apart, what is it in the very work of Freud that makes him a Copernicus and not merely just another contributor ? The first reason is very simple: psychology before Freud was utterly dull. Love, hate, friendship, envy, sex, loneliness, even the normally observed urge to know, the pleasure we take in all those wonderful books we read, in the music we listen to, etc., not to mention the love of God. Who did not introspect, experience, slowly or by spurts, about oneself, others, the enigmas of life, beauty ? Who was not in this way an active psychologist in his/her teens ? yet classical psychology kept all of this out: all this is part of life, it was admitted, but it must be ignored by psychology since it is not science. Psychology is scientific, then, and hence, not real life !(......). In brief, the main-stream of psychology sought to make psychology scientific and empirical by turning away from problems of psychology as known to any old layman and gained status as such and only very very slowly; it is still of a relatively low esteem. Against the background of this stands Freud. He, too, was not very respected, and never had a university post. He even declared his American hosts childish on account of their esteem for him which they freely expressed...the general public was like wild fire. He, firstly, touches experienced life in its very flesh, he deals directly with most problems of actual psychological human life. He is there with no intermediaries, no statistics, no laboratory artificialities.(.....) It is not easy to sum up our image of Freud in an uncontroversial manner, still Freud is still controversial. It is hard even to pinpoint the uncontroversial part of his teaching without becoming thereby quite controversial. ( Fried and Agassi, 1983, pp 145-147 )

(5) I borrow the term from the profound and provocative articles of Joseph Agassi on Methodological and Institutional Individualism ( Agassi, 1960, 1975 ), which develop much further some ideas only adumbrated here. My own methodological stance is quite influenced by his', and much strengthened by the arguments presented there.

(6) See the now famous Mandelbrot's fractals ( Mandelbrot, 1988 ) For example, the Southern coast of England ( or any other ?) where any zooming of any part would, in fact, according to that view, keep the very same pattern of the coast at large.

(7) Michel Foucault's The Order of Things deals with the disappearence of the idea of representation in the birth of modern science of man.See also, in another vein, the desastrously brilliant fable of Umberto Eco against the fallacy of similarity and representation, Foucault's Pendulum.

(8) See Paul Hoggett's pertinent remarks on power in his review of The Unconscious at Work, [Obholzer, 1994], 1996).

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