Introduction

In this paper, I explore the fantasy that an organization must exist, that the world outside cannot go on in its absence, and that the organization is somehow woven into the fabric of society so as to make it inevitable. Inevitability is part of a grandiose fantasy, and is therefore linked to what has been referred to in individuals as pathological narcissism (Kernberg 1970). Inevitability exists in both traditional and modern settings. I suggest that for the former, inevitability appears not as a fantasy, but as a part of consensual reality, while in the latter the idea is driven underground. There, it exists as an unconscious fantasy held often in opposition to the conscious knowledge that the organization is not, in fact, inevitable. This opposition has important implications for the possibility and nature of organizational change, which I also consider.

The One True Organization

Let me begin with two examples that exhibit the fantasy with which I am concerned, though in different ways, and with different outcomes.[1] I would like to present a summary of two conversations that took place at organizational retreats, each of which exemplifies, in its own way, the fantasy of organizational inevitability. These retreats occurred at points in the organizations' histories at which their survival was in certain respects uncertain.

The conversation in the first organization went something like this. Our members have little or no active interest in the organization, although they continue to provide financial support and to attend the larger annual events the organization sponsors. Members do not volunteer their time, nor do they act as if the organization is a meaningful part of their lives. This situation constitutes a clear threat to the organization's viability. What should be done about it?

The answer to this question arrived at during the retreat was to intensify and renew the Executive Board's efforts in the area of outreach. Subsequent to the retreat, there was a series of successful activities, including a large conference and publication of a newsletter. Though successful as events, there was no discernible change in members' passivity and lack of interest. As time passed, a decline in the energy of the Executive Board mirrored the membership's lack of energy. At what turned out to be its final meeting, the Board agreed to suspend, though not terminate, the organization. The Board decided that it would hold an annual meeting at which suspension could be reconsidered, and thus to maintain a minimal existence. The annual meeting was never held.

We can see here the activity of our fantasy in the form of an initial refusal to recognize the clear signals from its membership that the organization did not really exist for them, and later in the decision to suspend rather than terminate the organization. Yet, while it could be said that the organization held the fantasy with which I am here concerned, it can also be said that a reality based assessment of the organization was possible, and in the end took place. The Board did accept the death of the organization, even if it insisted on formulating death as suspended animation. We could even interpret the latter not as the work of the fantasy of inevitability, but as offering space for mourning the loss of an organization, which, if not a vital part of the members' lives, was important to those serving on the Executive Board.[2]

Consider now a second example. In this organization, the idea of suspending or terminating activity was never considered. When the question of viability was raised at its retreat, that question was immediately redefined as a matter of organizational uniqueness. A lengthy discussion ensued over what made this organization unique within the universe of like organizations. The conclusion drawn was that, while other similar organizations exist, none of them produce a product that could really be considered comparable.

Here, the fantasy of inevitability took the form of an idea of uniqueness. While the members are, on one level, aware that the world outside will continue without the organization, that there are others that can serve its function, they also insist that those others are fundamentally flawed, however successful they may seem to be. Thus, while the members are aware that their organization is not inevitable, that awareness has no salience for them. What has salience is the idea of what would be lost to the world outside if the organization ceased to exist. This idea expresses the operation of a fantasy of inevitability that must be kept outside of awareness so that it will not directly conflict with knowledge of the opposite situation in reality. The fantasy carries the emotional significance that the reality does not, because it has been withheld from it.

The difference in outcome for the two organizations may have a root in the different connections the organizations bear to their member's life prospects. The first organization served members' professional needs for connectedness, networking, and education. The second organization provided members with their primary or only source of income (that is, it acted as employer). It can be said, then, that more (indeed much more) would be at stake in any move toward dissolution of the second organization.

Higher stakes tend to promote and intensify anxiety, which fosters regression. Yet, while we might be tempted to attribute the observed difference to this factor, there is reason to believe that the different conduct of the two organizations stems not primarily from the difference in what is objectively at stake, but from subjective factors internal to the organizations and those involved with them. More important than what is objectively at stake is what is subjectively at stake. Put another way, subjective survival remains an issue whether income is at stake or not.

The conflict between fantasy and reality can be mediated in a number of ways, including the one briefly summarized here. The idea of uniqueness allows the organization to hold both the fantasy of inevitability and a kind of abstracted and emotionally uninvested knowledge that the world might go on without it. The idea is that, yes, the world might go on, but only in a diminished way, and without something vital to it, that, in other words, the organization contains the world's essential vitality, in Winnicott's (1960) sense, its "true self". Then, there may be many similar organizations, but this is the only true one.

For this organization, true also carried the emotional meaning of "good." While there were many other organizations ostensibly offering the same "product," their products were not good; indeed, they were viewed as bad. Members of the organization tended to view it as a center of the good in an evil world. This incipiently paranoid construction is important if we are to identify the emotional significance of the fantasy of inevitability.

The Stamp of Reality

A difficulty arises for the organization's judgment of itself as true or good when that judgment does not bear the stamp of reality. The stamp of reality must come in the form of recognition from outside. To have others embrace the fantasy of uniqueness will turn it from fantasy to reality. So, the energies of the organization will be invested in the effort to get the word out. Indeed, at its retreat, members of the organization repeatedly voiced the sentiment that the organization's only problem was the lack of outside recognition of its virtues. The organization's problems would cease to exist if only the "truth" about it (which is to say its fantasy of uniqueness) were "known."

In contrast to the first organization whose experience I summarize above, the second is an organization that will not die. It will not die because it cannot acknowledge that it does not alone serve a vital function, that other providers may offer a better product, or an equally good one at a substantially lower price.

What makes acquiring the stamp of reality for the fantasy of uniqueness difficult is the proliferation of competing organizations. This proliferation is an attribute of the modern world of organizational life, and I think it might be useful to allude, if briefly, to the situation in a more traditional setting to see how the dynamics considered here work out there.

The most obvious difference we will find in pre-modern society is that the fantasy of inevitability is no fantasy at all, but a part of the reality of social and economic organization. Where being a member of society means adhering to its religion and submitting to its God, there is only one God (or only one set of gods), and only one religion. This makes society's one religious organization inevitable, at least within that society. We can say that the organization of religion is religion; it is not one among many, but the only one.

Similarly, if economic activity is organized into units of production each having a state sponsored monopoly over its product (as was the case for the medieval guilds), those units are also inevitable. There is no competition; there are no others that might claim to produce the product better, or even differently. Uniqueness is no mere fantasy, but something secured by law. We might surmise that what drives the fantasy of inevitability underground (makes it an unconscious fantasy) is the destruction of state sanctioned monopolies: in religion, in production, and so on.

What gets in the way of establishing the reality of the fantasy is the presence of competitors. The presence of competitors changes the meaning of the particular activity of the organization. It creates a dynamic tension between fantasy and reality that plays itself out in organizational life. One of the most important things it does is to make a new idea available, although availability need not mean that the new idea will take hold. This is the idea of indeterminacy, which is the modern alternative to inevitability.

Indeterminacy

What I will refer to as indeterminacy has many expressions. All of these are linked together by the idea that we can suspend what we know and what has been given to us, that what is is not inevitable. I would like to discuss this idea first with reference to a problematic essay by Wilfred Bion on the subject of memory and desire (Bion 1967). In that essay, Bion argues against the idea that, in the therapeutic setting, what is "known" about the patient is important, and should shape the events that transpire during a particular session. Bion insists, on the contrary, that the "only point of importance in any session is the unknown" (p. 272).[3] What happens during the session should be experienced as it is, without the influence of memory or desire.

We may take Bion's comment to mean that the analyst attempts during the session to relate to the patient as if that patient were unknown. This may, indeed, be what Bion has in mind. But, if it is, the proposed orientation must tend to undermine the effort to establish that connection between patient and analyst arguably essential to the purpose of analysis. Such a relationship surely depends on the patient's conviction that he or she exists for the analyst as a person, and that the analyst can hold the patient in his or her mind both during and outside of the session. I will not here concern myself with what Bion did or did not intend by his comments, or with their implications for therapeutic technique. I will, however, concern myself with the connection of his idea to what I refer to as indeterminacy, or the suspension of knowing.

Bion's remarks can be interpreted to suggest that we can know in different ways. In one way of knowing, knowing precedes thinking, which is restricted to variations on a theme already given. An alternative way of knowing is to suspend any conviction we may be given about the object of our thought, and to attempt to construct it without presupposition. It will be objected, of course, that we can never think in this way, that we can never create both our current thoughts and the scaffolding of thoughts in which they find their home. This may be true (though I think we would do well to question it). But, even if it is, it does not follow that at any given point in time, and with regard to any given thought, we cannot engage a special mental capacity to suspend our conviction about it, and wonder if it is true or even what it really means, if anything.[4] Such a thought, for example, might be the thought that a particular organization with which we are engaged is inevitable. Once we suspend that thought, we no longer know whether the organization is or is not inevitable, or possibly what it would mean to take the organization for granted as we have been doing.

Of course, we can all suspend at least some thoughts. Our problem arises when there is one thought, or one interconnected group of thoughts, we cannot suspend. This thought, or group of thoughts, then becomes the foundation of our thinking, the precondition for what we think in the sense of the litmus test for what we are allowed to, or prevented from, thinking. The ability to suspend thoughts with which I am here concerned only has meaning if it applies not only to this or that thought, but to the set of thoughts that constitutes the foundation for all our thinking.

I would like to consider the ability just considered a human capacity, one that may or may not be exercised depending on what the environment allows and facilitates. Indeterminacy is, then, the result of the exercise of this capacity, of "being disposed to engage with not-knowing" (French and Simpson 1999).[5] With this capacity, we need treat nothing that we "know" as if it were indeed "known." And, this applies as well to the memories and thoughts that provide the context for what we think about a particular object at a particular moment in time. We can, indeed, approach an object with neither memory nor desire, with "no history and no future" (Bion 1967: 272).

In an immediate sense, the result of the exercise of the capacity to which I have just referred is to destroy knowledge, to leave us in a state of not knowing. But, this is only the immediate result, and we need not assume that the ultimate result is that we do not know. The ultimate result may be that we know, but that we know differently, and it is this possibility I would like to consider here.

I think that a comment of Winnicott's can help make sense of this idea of indeterminacy as a moment in a process. In the course of his discussion of creativity, Winnicott makes the following remark: "The fact is that what we create is already there, but the creativeness lies in the way we get at perception through conception and apperception" (1986: 52). To conceive is to create in the mind rather than take what is for granted. If we must conceive what is, then, of course, what was already assumed to exist might come to exist for us; but it might not. As a result, there might be space to think differently (French and Simpson 1999). We might conceive something that was not previously meant to exist, so that existence might be other than what we are meant to assume it is. Either way, the act of conception invests what is with a special meaning for us, a meaning different from that invested in a reality that must be as we are required to assume it is.

Indeterminacy as an Emotional Capacity

What sort of capacity is the capacity to suspend knowing? And, what allows us to, or prevents us from, exercising this capacity? We may be tempted to assume that suspension of knowing is something an individual or organization chooses, or does not choose, to do. Then, it is a matter of convincing the individual or organization that it would be worthwhile to suspend knowing if it is to achieve certain valued ends. Yet, if we approach the problem this way, it becomes difficult to make sense out of the intense resistance the call for indeterminacy provokes, as expressed for example in the way some organizations hold to the fantasy of inevitability. This resistance suggests we treat indeterminacy not as a stance one can choose to adopt, but as an emotional capacity the exercise of which depends on the configuration of emotional forces.

By emotional capacity, I have in mind the capacity to have, and be able to use, an emotion. Whether we can exercise this capacity, then, depends on what is implied in having the relevant emotion, especially on the danger having the emotion might pose. The alternative to having an emotion is to repress the emotion, or to transfer it onto another. When we cannot have an emotion, organizations become vehicles for the transfer process; they must help assure that we can avoid the danger the emotion poses for us.

I would like to suggest that we consider holding fixed assumptions such as the assumption of organizational inevitability a way of coping with a specific emotion, which is hatred. Coping with hatred in this way becomes necessary because of the intensity of hatred in the organization, and thus the need to get rid of its destructive force. Indeterminacy is linked to the destructive impulse because indeterminacy involves the destruction of what we are meant or assumed to know. Then, if we cannot have our destructive impulses, we cannot destroy what we know, and we cannot gain access to the capacity for indeterminacy, which is the capacity for not knowing.

Hatred is a specific modality of the aggressive or destructive impulse, one distinguished by its intensity, its form, its organization, and its end (Kernberg 1995). Hatred is a form the destructive impulse takes when it is split off and isolated from the impulse to sustain, replenish, and restore. When aggression takes the form of hatred, its connection to creativity, and therefore to what I have called indeterminacy, is thereby lost. Creativity is the unity of destruction and restoration. We cannot be creative unless both moments are present. Splitting that results from the anxiety provoked by the destructive impulse blocks creativity by preventing access to the capacity to suspend knowing.

The anxiety to which I have just referred can be traced to the intensity of the destructive impulse itself, and thus to the weakness of the opposing impulses to restore and sustain. The more the emotional configuration that dominates the individual or organization is marked by an intensity of hatred and a weakness of moderating forces, the more dangerous the emotional capacity (destruction) expressed in hatred is felt to be, and the greater the anxiety.[6]

The anxiety is that acknowledging our hatred means we will lose our connection to what is true and good. Since pure hatred is associated with evil, unless the organization becomes explicitly devoted to evil, the larger the measure of hatred in it, the more the hatred must be gotten rid of. This does not mean, of course, the absence of hatred in the organization. On the contrary, hatred is its primary emotional reality. What it means is that the organization's hatred must not be acknowledged as its own. Ways of disavowing hatred in organizations are familiar. They include transferring hatred to other organizations or external constituencies viewed as a threat, or transferring it onto selected members internal to the organization but still deemed a threat to it because, for example, they refuse to accept the organization's grounding assumptions (possibly including the assumption of its inevitability).

When hatred is moved outside, the foundation is established for a paranoid orientation, since the organization's goodness is purchased at the expense of the goodness of the world. If to be the one true organization means to be good in an evil world, and if to be good means to be without hate, then to be the one true organization is to be the organization without hate. To be the organization without hate means to be the organization that rids itself and its members (or most of its members) of hate by projection. But, to be without hate in this case means to be without the capacity for destruction. Then, to be without hate means to be without the capacity for indeterminacy. So, for the organization to be good, it must hold to a set of unexamined assumptions. It cannot exercise the capacity to suspend knowing because there are certain things it must not know, which is to say certain ideas it must not have. The ideas it must not have are the shape of the hatred it must not recognize as its own.

Separability

When the organization is primarily engaged in assisting members in their efforts to deal with intolerable emotional states, we can say that the organization exists as part of the psychic life of its members in a special sense. Specifically, we can say that the organization is subsumed into its members' emotional lives, and that it cannot, therefore, be allowed any separate existence.

I think it is useful to apply here a term Fairbairn uses in describing the relationship between patient and therapist. When the patient attempts to incorporate the therapist into his or her fantasy life via projective identification, Fairbairn (1958) describes the result as a "closed system." Specifically, he suggests we consider the "distinction between behavior originating within a closed system constituted by internal reality and behavior in an open system in which inner and outer reality are brought into relation" (1958, p. 381). For this relation to develop, of course, there must be a separation between inner and outer reality, subject and object. The pressure operating against this separation is pressure toward incorporation of external reality into fantasy life, and thus into a closed system.

This same effort at incorporation can operate outside the therapeutic setting where it can shape connections not simply between individuals, but between individuals and organizations. When it does, the organization is not allowed a separate existence from its members' emotional needs. The inseparability of organization and member is the prelude to the fantasy of organizational inevitability, and to the effort to make that fantasy real.

The effort to create a closed system linking member and organization is also reflected in the effort to create a closed system linking the organization and the world outside. Organizational inevitability expresses this effort. To make inevitability real means to establish a special connection between the organization and the world outside, one in which no separation between the two is possible.

Change

Organizational inevitability tends to impede change. The unique mission of the organization, to contain and express the only real vitality and true virtue available to society in the particular area of the organization's work, equates change with loss of virtue. It is not the organization or its members that must change, but the world outside. Change means making those outside recognize the organization's unique mission and submitting to it.

Change is similarly impeded by the impulse to incorporate external into inner reality, and thus constitute a closed system. As Fairbairn points out, closed systems are particularly resistant to change. The reason for this is that they are shaped to protect and preserve certain constituting assumptions about reality that must not be questioned. These assumptions are put into reality (in a sense made real) via projective identification. Because indeterminacy means the absence of any constituting assumptions that cannot be brought into question, including especially those assumptions the closed system is organized to protect, closed systems exclude the indeterminacy that makes change possible.

Because it means giving up fixed assumptions, indeterminacy invites change, but only up to a point. The relationship of indeterminacy to change depends on the balance between destruction and restoration. When that balance is within the range we associate with creativity, then indeterminacy has a productive outcome. When indeterminacy is a moment in a creative process, a starting point for shaping something concrete and definite, which is therefore also bounded and limited, indeterminacy also limits adaptability to change. When indeterminacy takes a concrete shape, the result is a shape of individual and organizational life that is inherently finite, that, while consistent with change, cannot always adapt to it, and will eventually reach the end of its productive existence. The capacity to acknowledge the inevitability of death is, then, the other side of the capacity to give up prior assumptions, to refuse to know the shape of life before life has taken shape.

Notes

[1] Neither of the organizations is a profit driven business enterprise. This becomes relevant further on, when I consider implications of the business mentality.

[2] The idea of rebirth may not have been wholly fanciful so we can also interpret the outcome as part of an effort to remain hopeful about the organization. Hope is a complex and problematic emotion that may or may not involve something like the fantasy with which I am concerned here.

[3] This idea has been further explored with specific reference to organizations in French and Simpson (1999).

[4] If we acknowledge this mental capacity, then there is no reason to insist we must restrict its application to a particular part of what we know. On the contrary, the capacity can also be brought to bear in thinking about knowing itself, and all of the foundations presumed to be necessary for it. The result is to disrupt the idea that all we know is contingent on prior assumptions or arbitrary foundations; see Maker (1994).

[5] Winnicott refers to the exercise of the capacity to which I have just referred as "creative living" (1986: 35-54).

[6] When I refer to an organization's emotional configuration, I do not mean to suggest that an organization has emotions in the way we speak of individual's having emotions. Rather, I mean to consider organizations vehicles through which individuals express, control, and disavow their emotions. Organizations can channel, intensify, and moderate emotions. Thus, they do not have, but they do organize and direct, emotions.

Bion, Wilfred (1967) "Notes on Memory and Desire," The Psychoanalytic Forum 2: 271-80.

Fairbairn, W.R.D. (1958) "On the Nature and Aims of Psychoanalytic Treatment," International Journal of Psychoanalysis XXXIX, Part V, September-October (374-85).

French, Robert and Peter Simpson (1999) "Our Best Work Happens When We Don't Know What We're Doing," Socio-Analysis 1:2.

Kernberg, Otto (1970) "Factors in the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personalities," Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 18: 51-85.

___ (1995) "Hatred as a Core Affect of Aggression," in S. Akhtar et al. (editors) The Birth of Hatred (Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson).

Maker, William (1994) Philosophy Without Foundations (Albany: State University of New York Press).

Winnicott, D.W. (1960) "Ego Distortions in Terms of True and False Self," in The Maturational Process and the Facilitating Environment (New York: International Universities Press).

___ (1986) Home is Where We Start From (New York: Norton).