Working with Problems of Narcissism in Entrepreneurial Organizations

In his 1914 essay on narcissism, Freud discussed particular ways in which this set of concepts* -- which, the essay recognized, had moved developmentally from the margins to the origins and center of his emerging conceptualization of psychic life -- were informed by an examination, not of normal development or normal functioning or even "normal" (i.e., neurotic) patients, but of unusual psychic states -- organicity, hypochodriasis, and erotic relations.

Contemporary practitioners, both clinical and organizational, are faced with the pervasive presence of narcissistic disorders in those who consult us. It is a disquieting encounter, because -- even as we recognize that our work to understand and assist persons and organizations with narcissistic pathology has increased the reach and efficacy of our interventions, and the lessons of this ----work in turn have transformatively impacted psychoanalytic theories -- there are particular qualities to work with narcissism that are painful to work with analytically, perhaps in significant part because they militate against a defensive introduction of non-analytic methods into analytic work. It is in the nature of narcissistically organized persons, and perhaps also, I will argue, narcissistic organizations, to deny the reality of the other (i.e., the analyst), to wrench the analyst into playing a hated but necessary part in the patient's internal drama, to try to disable or destroy the analyst in the service of a soothing return to a narcissistic self-sufficiency, and to project into the analyst, with resentful hatred, a whole internal world of persecutory and toxic part-objects, as the first step toward eventual understanding, health and wholeness.

Psychoanalytic work with organizations has the potential to complement and add to our understanding of narcissism, in that the projection of narcissistic dynamics into the interpersonal and social fields of organizational life can bring such primitive dramas into life in a way somewhat different from the analytic encounter in the consulting room. There is a fascination as well as a risk in using concepts from the psychology of individuals to try to think about organizations. The metaphors and structural similarities are inexact, and there is no fail-safe method that protects against distortions. Perhaps, though, we can gain some grounding from one of Freud's most basic observations about narcissism: that at its core lies a displacement of cathexis away from autonomous, whole, external objects. Our encounter with externality in the diffusion structures, object seeking and task orientation inherent in organizational life can thus help us gain a perspective that can elucidate the workings of narcissistic dynamics. In doing so, in turn, we may be able to work out some elements of conceptual and technical tools that can help us work effectively with organizations struggling to overcome the limitations of narcissistic pathology.

Freud locates the impetus for narcissism in the frustrated withdrawal of libido from a non-accommodating object back into the ego structures themselves. This notion of ego-libido is widely uncomfortable to contemporary analysts, either because it has mechanical and economic resonances inconsistent with modern philosophies of science, or (particularly for Kleinians) because it can be construed as tending to deny the intimate intertwining of this primitive shift with object-relational dynamics (Segal and Bell, 1991). Less controversial, if also less actively considered in contemporary discourse, is Freud's notion that, in the course of normal development, narcissistic fixations and regressions are worked out by the development of the ego-ideal and its subsequent cathexis. When the child (or childish organization?) moves beyond idealization of the ego-ideal, its own projected product, and can at least partially sublimate its energies and creative effort into the productive work of object-relatedness, the substrate of effective learning, intimacy, autonomy, and productivity becomes established.

As I will develop further in the fragments of case experiences that follow, entrepreneurial organizations seem particularly vulnerable to problems with narcissism. Some of this seems to me to have to do with externalities and conditionalities that face such organizations. Market pressures that force organizational flattening, and with it the collapse and disappearance of the internal object structure of contemporary organizations, can force energies that would have played out in object-relatedness in the past to take up residence in individuals cast adrift, either as entrepreneurs or "entrepreneurial workers", from an accessible and reliable relational matrix. Similarly, the accumulation of vast amounts of information in reified computer systems, and the widespread shift from manufacturing identifiable products to various kinds of service and information work where the end-product seems elusive or ephemeral, can make working and managing feel like problematically self-absorbed activities. The paradox that the "ante" in entering mature and high-technology industries is prohibitively high, while the vigorous emergence of large global markets and sophisticated, efficient production technologies makes for relative autonomy of productive niches, radically shortened production cycles, and rapid, extensive penetration of new products into informed consumption markets, can make production and circulation seem delinked from traditional market (i.e., object) demands.

Yet, as may be apparent just from this brief discussion, these external demands do not play out in the world absent a mediation through internal individual and organizational structures and dynamics. Even when pressed by harsh external circumstances, the behaviors of workers, managers and organizations are not automatic. Sets of potential responses are elaborated, perhaps more unconsciously than consciously, but by lawful processes. Already weakened by environmental forces not facilitative of psychological development, and further constrained by widespread idealization of narcissistic relating as a kind of counterphobic social defense, workers and managers in entrepreneurial organizations, and entrepreneurs and their organizations themselves, seem almost dragged by inertia into object-delinked modes of work. How to generate creativity and productive developmental momentum out of such frightening chaos is the task.

II

I began what was to become a six-year consulting relationship with the ABC company when its founder and chief executive had publicly savaged two members of his executive committee, bringing to a head powerful tensions that had been building for the past two years. A senior vice president had arranged a flight to Europe for the CEO. (The facts that a senior vice president was involved in booking a flight, and that the VP was in charge of a different department from the one that was to have been involved in this internal task, are not irrelevant to the anecdote.) A 45-minute flight from the city where the company was headquartered to the departure port of the international flight was booked on a medium-sized airplane with only one class of service. The proximal cause of the blow-up was that the CEO was incensed that he "could not do the work he needed to do" because he did not have a first-class seat on this flight segment. When another senior VP, hearing the loud argument, intervened to say that she understood the CEO's displeasure, but was "happy that the rest of the trip went well," the CEO lashed out at her "gross insensitivity." Bitter feelings lingered and intensified, and a consultant was brought in.**

Mr. A., the CEO, was universally described as "brilliant but crazy". He had built up a small, local service business into an international conglomerate, When I began working with the organization, yearly gross revenue was $54 million, and the trade press described it as "an emerging national power". Within four years, strategic leveraged buyouts had turned it into a visionary global leader in its industry, with $2.2 billion in annual revenues.

As I got to know the organization, my sense was the core problems in the organization had to do with features of very primitive narcissistic dyne established between us that there was no push for me to say much. My stance, of the range of possible analytic stances, became that of the empathic, neutral, container (Bion, 1957). A core struggle and conflict for Mr. A. was between a sense of his use of me as an effective container, which in some ways he found difficult to bear because it represented the fulfillment of a very primitive, long-unfulfilled wish, and his sense of me as a willing sufferer of his narcissistic preenings, and therefore somehow weakened and polluted by his projections. Much of my work with Mr. A. happened -- as Bion has suggested is often the case in work with patients with primitive organizations (Bion, 1959, 1962) -- in my own mind. He would feel soothed, stimulated, and helped by our conversations, but could not say why.

My impression was that Mr. A. has never achieved a stable template of anaclitic relatedness. Freud (1914) speaks, in his essay on narcissism, of anaclitic relatedness in contradistinction to narcissistic relatedness. The concept of anaclitic relatedness is easier to appreciate in its German original, Anlehnungstypus, which refers to a type of relationship in which one person leans on another, implying that the other is available and competent to accept this leaning-on. The emphasis is thus not on attachment or on mutuality, but on a very basic element of connection conceptually and developmentally prior to this -- a first step away from ego- to object-cathexis. In the case of Mr. A., the mother was experienced as not available for this type of relatedness: the father's abusiveness destroyed any capacity to introject from him a non-punitive, positiviely cathected ego-ideal: and Mr. A. instead idealized elements of his own self-structure.

These dynamics in the company's leader infused the life of the organization. Two examples will be cited. Mr. A. was a voracious reader of the business press and of self-help literature. Like many narcissists, he lived in a world of de-corporealized ideas; ideas, for him, "were more real than people or events", he once told me, and they could "come to life" through what he called his "perse established between us that there was no push for me to say much. My stance, of the range of possible analytic stances, became that of the empathic, neutral, container (Bion, 1957). A core struggle and conflict for Mr. A. was between a sense of his use of me as an effective container, which in some ways he found difficult to bear because it represented the fulfillment of a very primitive, long-unfulfilled wish, and his sense of me as a willing sufferer of his narcissistic preenings, and therefore somehow weakened and polluted by his projections. Much of my work with Mr. A. happened -- as Bion has suggested is often the case in work with patients with primitive organizations (Bion, 1959, 1962) -- in my own mind. He would feel soothed, stimulated, and helped by our conversations, but could not say why.

My impression was that Mr. A. has never achieved a stable template of anaclitic relatedness. Freud (1914) speaks, in his essay on narcissism, of anaclitic relatedness in contradistinction to narcissistic relatedness. The concept of anaclitic relatedness is easier to appreciate in its German original, Anlehnungstypus, which refers to a type of relationship in which one person leans on another, implying that the other is available and competent to accept this leaning-on. The emphasis is thus not on attachment or on mutuality, but on a very basic element of connection conceptually and developmentally prior to this -- a first step away from ego- to object-cathexis. In the case of Mr. A., the mother was experienced as not available for this type of relatedness: the father's abusiveness destroyed any capacity to introject from him a non-punitive, positiviely cathected ego-ideal: and Mr. A. instead idealized elements of his own self-structure.

These dynamics in the company's leader infused the life of the organization. Two examples will be cited. Mr. A. was a voracious reader of the business press and of self-help literature. Like many narcissists, he lived in a world of de-corporealized ideas; ideas, for him, "were more real than people or events", he once told me, and they could "come to life" through what he called his "personal capacity to transmogrify".

So it was that, one day on an airplane, he read an article about "empowerment," and decided that this was exactly what his company needed. His employees needed to be empowered. As I grew to understand it, however, his notion of the concept was colored by his narcissistic organization; in his mind, empowerment had more to do with a sense that employees should be narcissistic and autarkic on all levels, that they should not bother him or his agents/managers, and that "empowerment" had more to do with others magically reading his wishes and style and enacting them in the world than with any real sense of autonomy or distributed power. Thus, the empowerment campaign he ordered created -- headed by senior VP, organization-wide, expensive and expensive -- had at its core permission for employees to make decisions on their own as long as the cost was under $50. Anything over that had to go through the traditional deadening chain of approvals, reaching very high up in the organizational structure. So the employees felt so toxically disempowered by empowerment that it was maddening and deadening to them, and to the organization as a whole. No real forward momentum along the lines envisioned was achieved.

The playing out of Mr. A.'s narcissistic dynamics could also be seen in his sense of what it meant to grow by acquisitions. Mr. A., as will be recalled, at first ran a successful, local service business. The growth of his company began with his not wholly unrealistic sense that he could run other such businesses better than they could run themselves, and that an empire of such businesses could come to dominate its industry by economies of scale and monopolistic advantages. In a period of recent history where such visions achieved a status approaching collective myth, and flows of investment capital were adequate, the larger business environment was receptive.

A problem that most, if not all, such business plans encounter is the tension between the demands of continuing a flow of acquisitions and the demands of running the businesses. The skills, perspectives, and developmental needs of the two lines of effort are very different, and it is often quite difficult for a corporate structure to attend to both adequately. Mr. A., I came to learn, experienced the acquisition of a business against a template of oral incorporation, fundamentally a phenomenon of the paranoid-schizoid position (Klein, 1946). "Watch me eat up my competitors," he once told me. As he spoke with me about his feelings, thoughts and plans about acquisitions, and as I spoke with others in the organization who shared with me their experiences of Mr. A.'s vision and mode of acquisitions, I had the deeply unsettling experience of feeling that what I was hearing about was structured in the patterns of an infant bragging that he had incorporated the breast -- with all the shock, paranoia, and sense of toxic omnipotence infants often feel when they have the sensation that they have achieved this kind of part-object victory.

Acquired organizations were given little direction or corporate-level attention. The expectation was that they would grow in the way Mr. A. had experienced that he had grown: minimally nurtured, delinked from object-relatedness, and gratified, to the extent there was any gratification, by being allowed a radically ego-cathected existence that would nevertheless somehow intuitively know and appease the wishes of the narcissistic father. Further, the expectation was that acquired businesses would continue this pattern of unmetabolized incorporation of new acquisitions of their own.

The organization came to take on characteristics of a pyramid scheme. Failing to develop structures and business patterns at the developmental level of whole-object relatedness that could enable it to achieve sustainable, healthy growth, it ultimately fragmented. Senior executives, feeling not just frustrated but deeply impacted and personally wounded by what they experienced as their sojourns in a psychotic work environment, were fired or left. Other organizations bought up some of the most dynamic and profitable acquisitions. What intervention strategies were tried, and what were their fates?

Rosenfeld (1971) has stated that, in work with narcissistic patients, "[c]linically, it is essential to find and rescue the sane dependent part of the patient from its trapped position." Segal and Bell (1991) have expanded on his views:

The narcissistic omnipotent aspects of the self often exert a powerful and seductive influence that makes it increasingly difficult to make any contact with the sane, needy aspect of the patient. This is particularly so in patients who are more psychotic, who often hate life and idealize death as a solution to all problems. It is as if they are being lured toward death as a state in which they will be free of all need and frustration. These patients often feel as if the analyst is burdening them with the will to live, which they hate.

In my work with the ABC Company, I felt very much like an analyst, not a therapist. The decision to retain me, and to maintain a sustained relationship, was as much unconscious as conscious. Talking with me, or to me, seemed to help. There was an odd resonance between my regular meetings with the CEO, the executive committee, the board, individual members of the executive structures, department heads, subsidiary leadership, and work groups and the sense of the rhythm and feel of daily sessions: I was there a lot, and a sense developed in the organization that my being-there-a-lot, doing what I did, was part of life, in this case organizational life. Again as an analyst, and unlike a therapist, I accomplished much of what I accomplished by not doing very much, in the sense of doing-in-the-world. I would listen, watch, contain, struggle to metabolize, comment. In an environment where thinking, in Bion's (1962) sense, found minimal space, I would think.

Two parts of the experience were difficult for me, and perhaps because of that unusually instructive, One was that I was rarely asked to explain what I was doing or why; when I was asked, and tried to explain, the typical response was that what I was saying was very hard to follow, but that what I was doing was tolerable and often quite helpful. This resonates for me with much of what Bion has written about the mutative mechanisms of containing, and with some of what I have read about the experiences of clinical psychoanalytic patients before the contemporary era, where knowledge about psychoanalysis was less diffused in the general culture.

My other disconcerting line of experience centered around the problem of having different kinds of sessions, some with individuals, some with groups. My worry had been that this would violate a sense of secure frame, and, more specifically, that working in this manner would reflect rather than contain the sense of inadequate external supply that seemed pervasive in the organization, and would represent my failure to metabolize, and thus my acting out, of pattern s of part-object relatedness flowing from my "identificate" (Sohn, 1985) with Mr. A.

I do not feel I have completed working this out, some two years at the writing after my work with the ABC Company was completed. I have a sense that my ability to remain a model of a thinking, object-related person helped, but I am not sure quite how. Mostly, I have the experience that the work worked -- the consultation was sustained, changes happened, and the process was one where I could track the pathways between data, analysis, intervention, and effect at least to a partial extent.

When the company died, it was not a wholly unsatisfactory death. Many of the most creative and dynamic executives -- and most of these left before the company went down -- went on to find successful careers elsewhere. In many cases, very interestingly, they went on to found companies of their own, something that several had commented they would not have been able to envision doing before their experience in the ABC Company. It was as if their encounter with a narcissistic leader, perhaps facilitated in some way by the ability of the analytic interventions to help them understand Mr. A. more clearly or more deeply, helped them conceptualize, and then achieve, a non-narcissistic way of building a company -- a template for object-cathected business growth. Similarly, several of the de-aquisitioned companies went on to healthy growth, possibly in ways that would not have been as feasible or as apparent to them before their experience as part of the ABC Company, and the intervention process that had taken place within in.

As for Mr. A., when the ABC Company expired, he was left in charge of a fragment of it, headquartered in Europe. As is sometimes the case in analytic work, we lost contact when the work together was over. I am not sure what parts of me has may have introjected, or what he has done with them, at all.

III

I was asked to conduct a retreat for the International Student Office of the D. County Public Schools some eight years ago. Their problem, as the leader of the group initially explained it, was that their work load had become unmanageable.

For years they had been a "sleepy backwater of a quiet suburban school district," as she put it to me. The school system in which they worked had been 90 percent white and 10 percent Black; the foreign arrivals the office processed constituted far less than one percent of the pupils in the system. The eight-person staff -- one director, six professional teachers who had risen through the ranks to central-office positions, and one clerical worker -- were cohesive and all very friendlywith each other. They were familiar and competent with their specialized area of work.

They knew what to expect: the occasional well educated children of diplomats and international executives, and the less advantage, but still occasional, children of immigrants from southern European countries and domestic workers on sojourn visas from the Third World. They went beyond their formal work assignments of determining the children's levels of prior education and of English skills to being, as one of them put it to me, "a kind of Welcome Wagon, introducing people to America. It felt like doing a job at the airport -- simple and not too demanding, but interesting because it was different. We would think about the exotic people we were meeting, and go home at he end of the day and have pleasant dreams." The pace of work was gentle, perhaps one or two children most weeks.

What had changed was that the flows of immigrants form the Third World into the county had increased, and by the point I was brought in seemed like they would only continue at a high level for the foreseeable future. This has been the case the whole time I have worked with the group. Large numbers of Central Americans, Mexicans, people form the Andean countries of South America, Koreans, Southeast Asians, people from the Horn of Africa, Afghans, and people from sub-Saharan Africa have moved intothe county. As one worker put it, "Before, at least we knew where people were from and what language they spoke. Now we can't even determine that anymore sometimes." In psychoanalytic terms, they had encountered the Other. And not in the gentle, containing frame of the consulting room. Dozens of children now came in each day; in August, as families got ready for the new school year, hundreds.

I soon learned that the problem had different dimensions from what I would have expected, however. The work culture prior to the demographic shift in the county was not that of a task-oriented bureaucracy. It could instead be described as a haven for narcissists. Here is a narrative I collected early on, from one of the teachers:

I just never liked it very much in the classroom. All the children just seemed to want so much form me. "Miss E., tie my shoe. Miss E., I don't understand, I need help. Miss E., take me to the bathroom." I mean, don't people become teachers because they don't really want to do grown-up jobs in the real world? I became a teacher because I thought that every day would be like when I was a little girl, and imagined that I was the teacher on Romper Room. I'd wear pretty dresses with bows and we'd all play school together, every day.

For a long time, that's what my job in the International Student Office was like. The kids and the families would come in, and they'd be so cute, all smiling and helpless, and we would help them. We would show them how people did things in America -- how we did things. Like, if I needed something from the supermarket, or if I needed to get my nails done, I would take them with me so they could see how it was done. That was part of my job, to take them along with me on errands. Well not really (laughter), but that was what I would do -- what we would all do.

The unity of the staff was a narcissistic unity. Imagining that what the clients of the office needed was what the staff needed, there was a comfortable symbolic equation of the needs of the office and its clients with the needs of the staff. Going on a personal errand became work. Getting one's nails done became helping an immigrant acculturate. The dynamics of the office had much in common with Freud's (1914) description of narcissistic love:

At the most touchy point in the narcissistic system, the immortality of the ego, which is so hard pressed by reality, security is achieved by taking refuge I the child. Parental love, which is so moving and at bottom so childish, is nothing but the parents' narcissism born again, which, transformed into object-love, unmistakably reveals its former nature.

The beginning, and perhaps the shaping, of my work with the International Student Office, involved interpreting their phantasies as a way to try to move them toward some kind of authentic engagement with their massive sense of loss. That is, while, in their initial description of their problems during the first retreat, they were able to give me a very tangible and clear sense of what they had lost -- boundaries, identity, a tolerable level of stimulation and stress, an arcadian sense of privilege -- I was palpably aware that I was hearing descriptions, as in the excerpts quoted above, framed within the dynamic rules of a paranoid-schizoid position -- in psychological terms, thoughts and feelings orthogonal from any engagement with real loss or mourning.

In this sense, the initial request of me was to share with them, narcissist to narcissist, an appreciation of the precious former state of affairs, the self-contented autarkic infant state. I felt they were trying to keep this alive by projecting it into me, with the phantasy that, if they were successful, it would live on in me untransformed. I remember feeling like I was being asked to lead a psychoanalytic cargo cult, where frightening affects and pessimism could be kept at bay because a primitive phantasy could be kept alive with my "help".

My dilemma at this early point of engagement was a considerable one, On the one hand, I could not imagine trying to interpret to this group what I sensed was the substrate state of affairs, not at this early point in our work and not without some framework or contract for an ongoing relationship. On the other, the intensity and particular character of the projective process I experienced as being afoot, as I have just described it, seemed intended to destroy my ability to contain (Bion, 1959). This was not projection with even a split-off wish of containment and metabolization, but its opposite, projection in a context of phantasied fusion.

I felt that my initial encounter with the group needed to somehow acknowledge that this level of phantasy existed, and to engage with it. I asked the group to draw --to draw their work as it used to be, and how they wished it might be in the future -- and we ended up speaking together for several hours about these pictures. It was a mutative experience, that took on the qualities of transitional space (Winnicott, 1971).

The work with the drawings was not very interpretive, though the symbolism that emerged in the drawings could have been fertile material for a Kleinian field day. Symbols of all-giving and sadistically withholding breasts, equivalences between phalluses and feces, odd containing structures that seemed unstable and fragile, and omnipotent infantile creatures abounded in the "before" drawings, though whatever awareness of these revealing images the members of the group has seemed to remain preconscious. The act of drawing seemed symbolically equated with a reconnection with body-ego, which, with my presence in the field, seemed to feel soothing and grounding. "Something very important came out in the exercise," I was told, though what that might be was not put into word. By the end of the day, I was asked to consider continuing to work with the group.

There is no way, within the confines of this paper, I can hope to dissect systematically the rich work this group and I have done together over the years. (The group, interestingly, has remained cohesive. Only two of the original members have left, none through termination or dissatisfaction.) I will confine myself to discussion of what I understand to have been the mechanism of change.

In a way, I think the group has experienced me as their child. Freud has discussed, as I have alluded to earlier, that the experience of parenthood can be a mechanism through which parents sublimate that aspect of their primary narcissism that survives into adulthood. We are used to discussions of the ways that analysts are perceived as parents, and certainly there has been some of that in the ways this group has used me. But there has been a way that my arrivals at the organization -- I have worked with this organizational unit almost exclusively as a whole group, first in weekly and now in monthly meetings -- have often had the feel of the teachers re-finding the narcissistic self-object alluded to in the excerpt from one of the teachers I have quoted here. At times, there is a paranoid-schizoid feeling to these encounters, as if I embodied a regressive phantasy. But the shift out of this position now happens quite rapidly. What I have become, in many ways, is someone on whom new ideas can be tried out -- one might say, the child who is father to the man.

I can give an example from a recent meeting. A teacher was describing how needy most of the children were who now come through the office. In past work with the group, such descriptions often had an uncomfortable quality, as if the people being described were images from National Geographic of noble savages, their needs dissolved into an exotic, distanced image. On such occasions, I had been struck how, in the process of the telling, an unbearable need got transformed into something not real, ephemeral and then dismissed with a sigh -- killed on the level of phantasy, so the conversation could move on oblivious of the wish to get rid of these unbearably needy others. "Our task," I was once told, "is the task of educators. We are not here to provide mother's milk."

This time, the conversation turned to how some of these needs could actually be met. I was reminded of the formulation in Segal and Bell (1991) of the need for the analyst to help the narcissistic patient encounter his/her "sane, needy" part, and thus began thinking what part I might play, or be playing, in the conversation. I felt the group was experiencing me in the moment as able to bear innocently what they were discussing, neither shocked nor intrusive -- I felt experienced as if I were in a depressive position, and, though I was listening to themes the group had discussed ruminatively many times before, this sense of their construction of me seemed different. I was not being spoken to; rather, speaking and thinking were going on in my presence. I wondered whether the staff might be projecting into the clients some of their own needs, while re-introjecting from me a sense that these were bearable.

Ideas of substantial interest were generated. They could start a toy closet of a food pantry, a lending library, a clothing exchange. For the moment, their energies were limitless, and their nostalgia for "the old days" was gone -- a developmental advance against stuckness in arcadia, but still, I sensed, a phenomenon of narcissistically colored object-relatedness: "we will give you from our endless supplies," rather than "we will nurture your ability to get what you need."

The tone of the conversation turned again, Perhaps, instead of distribution centers, they would start a kind of store, In local "school stores," children can "buy" stickers and pencils and the like with "points" they earn for good behavior and academic achievement. Maybe a "store" along similar lines could be established for the office's clients who had gone off to beginning their placements in school. An interesting idea, I thought, but then immediately I felt very sad that eight years of work with an analyst had ended up recreating a token economy. The idea felt empty, shabby somehow.

At the moment I was thinking this, a sadness seemed to grab hold of the group. "But we won't know what to put in the store," one teacher said. "We've learned that we don't know what the children and the families need, and what they like -- that we have to let them tell us. And that even our fantasies of who they are, and what they'll ask for, are often wrong." "And that's fine," said another teacher, the group members beginning to nod. "We'll ask them, and we'll work it out."

I am not sure what the group registered about the moment, though I later asked. What I can report is what it was like for me. It felt like what has been described in individual psychoanalysis as the good hour, when a defense softens -- the opposite of narcissistic relatedness, I saw the store in operation a few weeks ago. It's a good place.

IV

What I want to try to draw out by way of closing this paper are some ideas, first, about what encounters with narcissism in entrepreneurial organizations can offer to our efforts to understand the basic phenomenology of narcissism, and, second, about the ways that psychoanalytically informed consultants can think about how we can make a difference in our client organizations that we assess as organized in a narcissistic mode.

Many of the debates in the recent analytic literature on narcissism *** take up two central questions: whether there is a valid distinction between primary narcissism, developmentally prior to the infant's experience of differentiation from the mother, and secondary narcissism, developed repressively out of frustrations inherent in the struggle to achieve tolerable object-relatedness; and the related question of the lines of distinction between healthy and pathological narcissism. Followers of classical Freudianism, Klein and Kohut take radically different positions in these debates.

What I think works with organizations may potentially be able to offer is a certain contextualization of this debate. Freud seems to have presupposed that the drama between mother and child that could or could not end up in pathological narcissism took place in what one might call a good-enough environment. Indeed, in his work on narcissism -- which played a very significant role in his later development of thinking about group psychology -- the social backdrop was assumed and not analyzed.

Even in the essay, though, there are hints, perhaps unconscious ones, that this assumption is problematic, when Freud briefly observes that narcissistic dynamics might play out differently in the lives of "primitive peoples". Their "overestimation of the power of their wishes and mental acts" and their "technique for dealing with the external world -- `magic'" were seen as proof

that the libidinal cathexes can indeed be withdrawn from external objects back into the system ego, though in a different way from contemporary adults, who Freud saw as playing out narcissistic fixation in narcissistic as opposed to anaclitic love. These same processes, he felt, occurred in the contemporary children of his society, but he felt that they -- that is, contemporary children -- had "development . . . much more obscure to us."

Freud's words evoke for me much of my experience of work with present-day entrepreneurs. Delinked from traditional production processes built on the model of manufacturing, and from corporate structures that linked production to consumption cycles and created structures in which organizational leaders could develop, I wonder whether there is something in the deep intrinsic structures of the entrepreneurial leader and enterprise that tend to trigger narcissistic fixation or regression. Yet there are also successful entrepreneurs -- bold, innovative, generative. Can the deference lie less in the person than in the environment in which s/he works?

There is a theme in our culture that exalts the return to primitive. Scarification and tattoos are fashion trends; haute couture houses sell deconstructed clothing for unimaginable prices; political life celebrates the autarkic pioneer family rather than the astronaut or the engineer; even in the intellectual life, many of us seem to delight in deconstructing ideas into their most primitive elements and in thinking that treats externality with suspicion, if not disdain. Can this trend somehow be picking up on a sense that the social environment has ceased to be capable of providing broad sectors of workers with basic, necessary provisions?

There is suggestive evidence from the business press that this is so, but weighing that is beyond the competence of a psychoanalyst. What I can suggest is that further psychoanalytically informed work with organizations stuck in nonproductive narcissistic dynamics, where the workings of narcissism become visible on a social field, can be an important balance and complement to our work on the level of clinical theory developed with individuals to further deepen and clarify our understanding of narcissistic decathexis of external objects, and the limitation, damage and pain it can cause.

Such work, of course, takes place most productively in the context of our efforts to facilitate change in organizations, not merely to study them. Many of us encounter a paradox in our work with organizations: we find that our experiences are rich and exciting, that our analytic ideas and the way of thinking that subserves their development seems uniquely capable of bringing murky organizational dynamics to light; but our clients do not share our intellectual excitement. It frightens them. They want from us practical help with wrenching problems. We are valued, in no small part, to the extent we can provide it.

I wonder whether there is a parallel between the phenomenon where the ability of contemporary analytic methods to treat narcissistic individual pathology has fueled much of the contemporary practice of clinical analysts -- Kernberg (1991) observed that "narcissistic personality disorders proper . . . has now become one of the standard indications for psychoanalytic treatment" -- and where we might find potential working space for extending the practice of psychoanalytic intervention with organizations.

I return to my observation that what my narcissistic organizational clients seemed to want from me, to find helpful from me, was more analytic than therapeutic work. Their search, if only at an unconscious level, for relief from the travails following from decathexis of the object world did not find satisfaction at the level of advice or of techniques. Though I cannot identify an instance when this specific mechanism was articulated, my sense was that my presence as container, as interpreter, and as live external object was what they found mutative. "You are helping me -- helping us." Mr., A once told me. "Keep coming back."