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In the advance publicity for this Symposium we are told that it offers an opportunity to explore "the future of organisations and how psychoanalytic theory can help us understand this future." I should say at the outset that I have two difficulties with this optimistic statement. The first is that I doubt that psychoanalytic theory can help us understand organisations at any time [I am not persuaded that it can help us understand individuals at any time either.] What I believe may help us to understand organisations at some time and certainly in my experience does help us to understand ourselves in the time of our personal lives, is psychoanalytic practice. Without experience of that practice, on either side of the analytic encounter, no amount of acquaintance with theory is likely to prove all that useful. Psychoanalysis is an applied discipline, in the sense that it is discipline applied to the phenomenology of the consulting room. Theory is extrapolation at best, and the conjunction of such theory with the world of organisations, which are neither subject nor object of psycho-analytic practice, is extrapolation once removed. I have argued elsewhere(1) that the relevance of psychoanalytic experience and understanding to working with and thinking about organisations lies primarily in its heuristic value : as a method of attention to and interpretation of emotional experience. I have suggested that this methodology can have an analogue in the organisational domain and that the practice of this analogue can yield insights into the dilemmas, challenges, paradoxes and discontents of organisations that may elude other methods of enquiry. Perhaps I am making too much of this objection. I raise it mainly as a way of trying to ground what I say, and mainly to and for myself. When I first began thinking about this paper, I was under the sway of a particular psycho-analytic account of the genesis of meaning and its significance in development. I thought it might be possible to deploy this account in thinking through a number of observations from recent consultancy assignments, each of which in different ways seemed to touch on questions of meaning and the clients' openness to meaning as a factor in organisational life. However, this trial venture proved increasingly difficult and irksome. I felt I was compressing phenomena from one domain into a frame of reference derived from another : nothing quite seemed to fit, without distortion. I was trying to exemplify and apply something 'known', when what I had to do was venture out from something 'unknown' and risk what links I would find. This paper is the outcome : more tentative, provisional, confused than I had hoped. But by the same token, perhaps, more relevant to the content and the process of this Symposium. Which leads me to the second difficulty I have with the organisers' statement of intent. How can "psychoanalytic theory" or psychoanalytic practice or indeed any other theory or practice help us to understand something that is not yet here. We may believe that the future can be predicted, although the precedents are not particularly encouraging. But in what possible sense can it be understood here and now. One available answer is contained in Wilfred Bion's evocative phrase, "the shadow of the future cast before". This could be taken to mean that the seeds of the future exist now, as a kind of inner resonance or presaging of things to come, something that can be captured and given provisional expression. An example that comes immediately to mind, in relation to this setting, is Fred Emery and Eric Trist's formulation of the theory of turbulent environments and its implications for organisational development.(2) However I do not think that this interpretation exactly catches Bion's meaning and its emotional undertow. It is hard for example not to hear in association to it, Freud's image in Mourning and Melancholia, of "the shadow of the object (that) falls on the ego" - something impending that heralds loss, abandonment, "catastrophic change". On this reading the shadow that the future casts darkens rather than illumines. It heralds the arrival or return of the not known : a world without something or with something unprecedented. I want to argue that it is in encouraging our acceptance of, our readiness to receive this darkening, that psycho-analysis (more accurately a psychoanalytic approach) can help us most to understand the future, organisationally no less than personally. Or rather not so much to understand it as to understand our not understanding, in a way that prepares us or tunes us to meet it, to make it and to develop with it. Explorations 1 Two years ago I was invited to work as an external consultant to a one day meeting of staff working in the Counselling Department of a new University. This Department was part of the Student Services Division of the University and was responsible for providing a counselling service for students, presenting a variety of emotional or welfare worries and concerns. The meeting had been planned at the end of the Academic Year and was intended as an opportunity for staff to reflect together on their experiences during the year and their working relations with each other. (One issue they were facing had to do with a difficulty in sharing and handling anger.) The agenda for the meeting was set by the staff themselves, but at the outset and after a preliminary discussion with the Head of Department, I proposed the following as a way of getting going. Each member of staff would find a space in the Department's offices where they could reflect alone on their experiences as members of the Department: the things they were feeling and thinking in themselves, the patterning of their relations with each other and with the students and staff they met, how they responded to the different situations they encountered. As they reflected in this way, I suggested, they might follow the chain of associations they were making and see if some image or series of images came to mind through which they could visually represent their present picture of the Department, in the context of the University, with themselves in it and without using words. Large sheets of paper were provided with different coloured pens. After they had drawn their picture staff were invited to come together again and each in turn to present their picture and talk us through it. Other members would share any associations they had to the picture and, if they wished, comment on the impact that the picture and its imagery made on them. It came to the turn of a very experienced and long standing member of the Department, who worked on a part time basis, to present his picture. He then said, with a great deal of feeling, that he had been quite unable to find and draw any image. All he had come up with was a list of single words, which he had scrawled across his sheet of paper. A little later he linked his inability to an experience of feeling as he put it, "de-centred as a person". He said that he associated this with the feeling in himself that he was not acknowledged by the University as a person, but only as a "hired hand". This in turn he thought reflected a number of recent changes and negotiations in respect of his contract. Things might have been left there : that is, the 'no-picture' might have been seen simply as a reflection of one individual's personal and emotional relation to the Departmentand/or the University. However, I found myself increasingly preoccupied along another direction. Might the experience this Counsellor had come in touch with in himself also be conveying or mirroring something of the experience of the students he worked with (a reflection of his counter-transference). At the time this was no more than a vague speculation, which reflected something of my own sense of disorientation in the face of his list of words. But subsequently, as we worked through the pictures and what they might represent, it became possible to see that the feeling of "de-centredness", named in this Counsellor's response, had an aptness, an exactness beyond the emotional boundary of one individual member of staff. What students were presenting in counselling was indeed itself describable, at least in part, through this vivid phrase. They too could be said to feel "de-centred" as persons, unable to discover a relation to their institution except as "part-objects": consumers, candidates for examinations, inputs to courses. I do not want to deny the contribution which the dynamics of late adolescence for example, or the psychological tensions of transition (from school to college, or home to away) may have made to this feeling. But to emphasise just this aspect of the transference/counter transference relation of counsellor and students risked missing something else, rooted in the organisation as a whole and its relatedness to its context. Viewed from an organisational perspective, as a kind of organisational analogue, the Counsellor's presented experience r | |||