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"The Case of the Missing Author:
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Introduction At my first ISPSO Symposium in 1992 or so, Professor Laurent LaPierre amused and admonished those present in his repeated invocation of one of human life’s leading organizing principles: "Projection, projection, projection." In workplace organizations, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose (The more things change [at the surface], the more they remain the same [at the core].). For this presentation, my incantation changes, not tune, but key: Countertransference, countertransference, countertransference, as the central organizing principle of all human knowing. Its net ranges from astronomy, to organizational psychology and consulting, to zoology. The knower is part of the knowing, part of what is known and what must remain unknown. The knower is the best and worst and ultimately only instrument of knowing. At this epistemological level at least, even the dichotomy between "natural" or "real" or "hard," and "social" or "soft," science is spurious. Astronomical and geological debates over cosmology are ultimately debates about G-d, G-d’s absence -- or at least metaphysical and oedipal principles about origins and destiny – all fraught with: projection, projection, projection. All knowledge is personal knowledge. What we know about anything is how we know it. The instrument of knowing is part of the knowledge. Self is part of method, is part of theory, is part of intervention. Methodology is abstraction from the ability or inability to learn from experience (if I may borrow from W. R. Bion). Organizational learning and consulting are no different. The question everywhere is what we do with what and who we are – whether we have access to that often troubling data or cannot bear the anxiety such access would visit upon us (Devereux 1967; Boyer 1993, 1999). From the outset of my professional life, I have explored the unconscious as well as the conscious significance of group affiliation or identity. In the late 1960’s, I began my career as a medical anthropologist with a focus on understanding the effect of patients’ ethnicity (often termed "nationality") on physician-patient relationships and on the course of clinical work. In the succeeding thirty years, my interest in group contributions to clinical dyads and their work has expanded to include workplace organizations and their cultures, ranging from professional disciplines (family medicine, occupational medicine, psychiatry, internal medicine) to institutional units (departments, hospitals, clinics). Today, managed care, downsizing, RIFing, reengineering, restructuring, deskilling, outsourcing, flattening, reinventing, and autonomous functional teams are all as much "group" presences in the physician’s crowded examination room as is the patient’s Germanness, Polishness, Hispanic-ness, or African American-ness. Moreover, these notions are part of the wider national, even international, imagination, and have burst the bounds of organizational units. The organizational researcher and consultant have abundant wealth of material for use in countertransference. In this paper I explore my own "subjective" experience via my organizationally-related parapraxis and poetry in order to reach at more "objective" insights about the hatred, violence, and more generally the dark side of workplace organizations. This paper is part of my personal and professional journal toward seeing – feeling – what is there but is not supposed to be seen (Bollas’ "unthought known," 1989). The ultimate discourse (subject, topic) of this paper is not workplace organizations, but knowledge, knowing, not knowing, resistance to knowing, and coming to know. It is about what can and cannot be known, what may and may not be known, and what must and must not be known. It is ontology wrapped in epistemology, with psychoanalysis as Ariadne’s thread through the labyrinth of wrappings. Its discourse is the question or riddle of the enigmatic Sphinx (Lawrence 1997): What is man/woman? For himself or herself and others? And how is knowing of any kind bound up with these relations? This paper thus is about countertransference because it could not be about anything else: it centers on the nexus in which knowledge, knowing, knower, and the relationship among knowers takes place. If anything, it is an effort to map thought – to be a cartographer of mental space (Young 1994; Stein 1987; Stein and Niederland 1989). I. Opening Vignette From Sigmund Freud to L. Bryce Boyer and Thomas Ogden, many psychoanalysts have had the capacity and courage to use their pathologies as conduits to insight. In "A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis," for instance, Freud (1936) described his momentary feeling of unreality when he visited the Acropolis in Athens. He exclaimed to himself that the place really exists, just as he had learned long ago in school. The transient feeling that what he saw was unreal – that is, the feeling of derealization – was, Freud came to realize, due to the obligation of filial piety, not to succeed further than his father had. (It was as if to say: How could I be here? Since I am not supposed to be here, I cannot be here.) Yet he had far surpassed his father. The momentary distortion in perception was a flare-up of defense against the palpable fact that he was in the Acropolis. Freud’s momentary pathology became the source of rich insight into his own mental organization -- much as his attempt, nearly three decades earlier, to comprehend his own dreams, had been. Today, in object-relations terms, we might also suspect in this perceptual parapraxis an intersubjective residue from the early relationship between Jacob and Sigmund Freud. At any rate, the pathology of the self-observant observer becomes as much a "royal road" to the unconscious as is the dream of the patient (see also Erikson 1964). In this paper, I begin with an incident from my own pathography as a signifier of the interior life of workplace organizations – an experience of my own derealization. With this vignette I state the discovery I shall reiterate throughout: The interior experience of an organization on the part of worker, consultant, and observer alike provides a crucial guide to the organization "itself": its structure, processes, values, and so on. In March 1998, I was typing a reference list for the bibliography of a manuscript I was completing. An early entry in the alphabet was The HUMAN Cost of a Management Failure: Organizational Downsizing at General Hospital (1996). It was co-authored by four people; I could only remember three: Seth Allcorn, Howell Baum, and Michael Diamond. I felt a dreadful panic. I was flooded with terror. I felt as if I were going do die immediately. The feeling was utter, dire. "Emotional" was "physical." I turned quickly from my computer, picked up the telephone and called Michael Diamond, a fellow organizational consultant, a psychoanalytically oriented theorist, and dear friend. He quickly completed the reference. I was the "missing" fourth author I could not remember. I had disappeared to myself. I asked him to help me to understand what was happening. I felt confused, "crazy," out-of-my-mind. What Michael Diamond and I pieced together was that my temporary lapse of memory (a parapraxis, "Freudian slip," of derealization) coincided with the intolerable realization (1) that I was already, in fact, dead, at least symbolically; (2) that my experiences with several near-firings and constant job self-reinvention of my own in recent years did indeed feel like death-in-life; and (3) that I felt that at some level, or in some part of myself, I had already disappeared. I was already dead, missing, even to myself. At another level, in response to living and working at the brink of being dead, I made myself dead, killed myself off, first. At least I would be in control of the fatal moment and of the final deed. At least in that last act, I would destroy myself. I would perform the execution. I would master passive victimization by actively becoming the aggressor against myself (Freud 1920). Still, I could not contain my dread, my horror, of either prospect. With the confidence of a repetition compulsion, I had repeated toward myself the projective identification with which I had been targeted. In my own symbolic acting out, I fulfilled – embodied – an organizational wish: to make disappear, to kill off, an entire ethos and replace it with one that negated it (Erikson 1968). My individual, personal, symptom, consisted also of the institution-in-me. My extreme case of "countertransference" was not only my personal "dream"; it was a specimen of "social dreaming at work" (Lawrence 1998). It offered vital organizational knowledge. My fantasized deed was their "unthought known" (Bollas 1989). It could only be (recurrently) known in (my) action. In my daily work as clinical teacher, internal consultant, and organizational consultant, I serve as "container" and "holding environment" for others’ fantasies, wishes, hatreds, and ambivalence. I suddenly could not contain myself – which included everything and everyone I housed. I felt myself dissipating, disintegrating, falling apart (Ogden 1989). I needed to talk with Michael Diamond, to be contained by him (by my conversation with him) in order to get my own skin back, and thereby to understand the "social" dream of which I was the dreamer. I realized at that moment that, though I continued to "function" highly and "produce" abundantly in my workplace, a core and split off, part of me had disappeared in the relentless onslaught of emotional downsizings, close calls with termination, a constant questioning of my value to the organization. I also came to realize (once again) how enactment is often an essential part to insight (as precursor), and how that insight is often achieved intersubjectively. We not only contain or house one another, but – to draw from Plato – we also help to complete one another. Our phone conversation (an emergency consultation) convinced me, now as before, how powerful – often frighteningly so – an instrument of understanding our own unconscious responses are. This episode gave me unwelcome access to the interior experience of what researchers and consultants study mostly in others: downsizing, RIFing, reengineering, restructuring, outsourcing, deskilling, and similar contemporary business strategies. The above vignette – simultaneously personal and organizational -- is my point of departure for this conference. The vignette does not explain anything: it encapsulates, evokes, condenses, everything crucial – just as a dream, or a poem, does. What was happening to me? What was I doing to myself? What was the relationship between inside and outside? The remainder of this 1999 ISPSO conference attempts to offer some answers, and in the process it helps to identify the relationship between what we have come to label and parse into individual, group, organizational, and cultural psychology. I owe to you, who are the ISPSO, a further account. The symbolic death I described above is to be construed as a developmental improvement over a nearly literal one two years earlier when, in May 1997, I was hospitalized for twelve weeks for suicidal depression. The "event" was again simultaneously personal and professional. I was the dream my workplace dreamed. My life was the problem – what I represented. My death was the unsayable solution. It has taken much time and work for me to decode my wish to die into others’ wish that I be dead, for me to understand more fully whose wish it is, and what all it signifies. The more I strive to understand these last years personally and professionally, the more my experience makes emotional sense as a specimen of "social dreaming at work" (Lawrence 1998) rather than as an expression of my idiosyncratic history and pathology. Much as I have strived to fathom most of this by my grief over my father’s death in March 1996, the explanation feels partial and "forced." To ISPSO members, colleagues, and friends who wondered what led me to miss two years after five consecutive years’ attendance and participation at ISPSO Symposia, I share these facts as a crucial part of our relationship and my own healing. The secrecy, and the holding onto the secrecy, is part of the death-trap. I am neither an idealized island of self-contained knowledge nor a self-made holding environment. My pathology and my "slip" – both of them enactments (see Dervin 1996; Stein 1986) – are a crucial part of my continuing journey toward personal, organizational, and cultural insight. They are data at the nexus of culture and personality, organization and self. The mental space in which these data are located is a matter of group psychology, without which my "individual" psychopathology makes makes no sense except as group projection and rationalization. Despite my so-called "productivity" in teaching, research, and publication, I have been repeatedly notified by departmental and university colleagues and supervisors that (1) neither I nor my work deserve respect; (2) my writing style and content are unintelligible but to a few physicians in the United States; (3) I should not talk about "culture" since it is irrelevant or incomprehensible; (4) I am at best marginal in my university and in the field of Family Medicine; (5) I am a parasite on the physicians who generate income that supports me; (6) I should cease writing and publishing, and help faculty physicians to publish, even if it means "ghost writing" others’ manuscripts and receiving no acknowledgment for the work; (7) since I contribute little or nothing to the medical center, why am I here at all?; (8) I deserve little or no secretarial support or advanced technology to get work done; (9) whatever I do, it does not constitute bona fide work; (10) I am part of a Jewish plot to take over academia and the United States. Individually and in combination, these are articulated publicly with the weight of official authority, or in secret – in which case I am admonished that if I tell anyone what has just been said, the speaker will deny it. They are less a "job description" (which for the most part they could not officially be), as they are a tacit "organizational role" infused into a "psychosocial identity." Refutation is not possible. These imposed "facts" about reality supersede, if not erase, the fact that in 1992 I was recipient of the Friend of Medicine Award from the Oklahoma State Medical Association (an annual award to a non-physician for contributions to medicine in the state); in 1998 I received the highest award bestowed by the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine, the Recognition Award; and many of my publications have been favorably listed in and promoted by the STFM bookstore. Reality is defined, imposed, and enforced as obligatory workplace reality. As if both my life and work depended on it, I transformed (1) the enacted, (2) the "sayable" only in action, and (3) the "unthought known," into the imaginable, the thinkable, and the communicable in words. I began with the conviction that I am dead, or at least should be, and ended with the recognition that there is something dying or dead here, in this organization, and more widely, in this culture. From deadness in myself I discovered a far vaster landscape of deadness and dying. The equation of what I might call "their wish" and "my deed(s)" became clear in thought, in words, only after the enactment. Here at least, enactment was prelude, rather than obstacle, to thought. I had to do it before I could know it – in order for me to know it. It turns out that such seemingly incidental, anecdotal knowledge is in fact systematic knowledge, that vital cultural organizational knowledge can be obtained via the countertransference actions of the consultant. Elsewhere (Stein 1996), I have discussed how poems that I might write after immersion in a regional, ethnic, or organizational culture, constitute data about that culture as well as about myself – poems which I give in turn to colleagues, clients, and students as part of the intersubjective attempt to deepen cultural knowledge. My point of departure in this organizational study is the social fact of my death. I examine rather than flee from it now. I explore its ramifications, its boundaries. I inquire into what is to be killed in those who wish the killing, not only in the one who carries out the deed. In "Dostoevsky and Parricide" (1928), Freud remarked that, in the novel The Brothers Karamazov, "It is a matter of indifference who actually committed the crime; psychology is only concerned to know who desired it emotionally and who welcomed it when it was done" (1928: 189). Here, Freud was making a statement about group psychology, about unconscious delegation and complicity. I associate to this the fact that, while I am the one murdered and the murderer in my own organizational story, the (symbolic) killing was widely wished and welcomed – even as it was disavowed and rationalized by the medical model of "endogenous" depression. I begin with my countertransference. I end with a portrait of the American workplace and of the culture of which the workplace is a single institution. A study of the workplace that begins with my own inner darkness becomes a vehicle for a journey into organizational darkness. What many of my workplace colleagues and superiors (past and present) have insisted was "all in my head" was in fact projectively put into my head so that death and destructiveness would not be consciously felt by them. My study of organizational darkness is in part a study in psychogeography (Stein 1987; Stein and Niederland 1989): how things and people in objective space embody and play out phantoms of the inner spaces. The reader may question my reliance upon my imagination or "intuition" as the locus of social data. In the presence of increasingly totalitarian work environments, propagandized by policies and pronouncements of Orwellian proportions, one is increasingly called upon to draw from an inner well. How does one think when one is not supposed to? In such persecutory, fight-flight settings, the reality principle is best served by trusting oneself. What Rosenfield (1947: 126) wrote of his difficulties in interpreting to schizophrenics often applies to organizational and cultural understanding as well: "Our countertransference is frequently the only guide."
Countertransference, Poesis, and Organizational Knowing All social science is haunted by such epistemological questions as: How do we know what we claim to know? How do we bridge individual and group (cultural) process? How do we validate our interpretations of group life? What and where is "cultural" knowledge? This paper explores the question of the source, the "location," of our very data. It is "in" others, "in" ourselves (observers, applied social scientists), and "in" our emotional response to others. This paper attempts to map the interior world of that process. I shall argue that subjectivity is in fact inter-subjectivity (Boyer 1999; Ogden 1989; Mitchell 1993; Stein 1994), and a conduit to elusive objectivity in understanding and working with others. The problem of knowing and the problem of being understood (and misunderstood) are entwined. How one feels while working as an anthropologist or consultant is a crucial part of the "field data" about the organization or ethnic group with whom one is working. In this spirit, I invoke Blaise Pascal in a discussion of human knowing and knowledge. Far less famous and influential in the philosophical ideology of the West than Rene Descartes, Pascal gave us that wonderfully pre-Freudian aphorism that "The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing." The task of psychoanalytic training, of therapy, and of ethnographic learning is to expand and extend our official, conscious Reason’s access to the often disturbing, unconscious Reasons of the heart (or liver, gall bladder, or abdomen). In truly psychosomatic fashion, my organism often knows something long before it enters the realm of language. The intellect follows the lead of the heart. I have learned to rely on these organic cues as if my ethnographic knowing and my life depended on them. At times, they are all I have to "go" on. (Boyer 1993, 1999; Ogden 1989). They are "embodied" knowing: what we know with, or from, is inseparable from what we know (or fail to know). Wilfred Bion addressed this issue in his work on group dynamics. Bion (1959: 134) argued that the group observer’s countertransference response (emotional reaction) is a vital source of data about the group. Often that "countertransference" – the emotional sensations in the observer or therapist -- offers the only knowledge available. My point of departure – at once phenomenologically, methodologically, and theoretically – is a seminal passage by Bion, in Experiences in Groups. Although he speaks here from the context of group treatment, his insight extends to the far broader horizon of all understanding of other people. He is inquiring into the evidential basis for interpretations and directs the reader’s attention to "interpretations for which the strongest evidence lies, not in the observed facts in the group but in the subjective reactions of the analyst" (1959: 134). He continues: [I]n group treatment many interpretations, and amongst them the most important, have to be made on the strength of the analyst’s own emotional reactions. It is my belief that these reactions are dependent on the fact that the analyst in the group is at the receiving end of what Melanie Klein (1946) has called projective identification, and that this mechanism plays a very important role in groups. Now the experience of counter-transference appears to have a distinct quality that should enable the analyst to differentiate the occasion when he is the object of a projective identification from the occasion when he is not. The analyst feels he is being manipulated so as to be playing a part, no matter now difficult to recognize, in somebody else’s phantasy – or he would do if it were not for what in recollection I can only call a temporary loss of insight, a sense of experiencing strong feelings and at the same time a belief that their existence is quite adequately justified by the objective situation without recourse to recondite explanation of their causation. … I believe ability to shake oneself out of the numbing feeling of reality that is a concomitant of this state is the prime requisite of the analyst in the group…. (1959: 134-135). In this paper I describe my experience of frequent (1) "temporary loss of insight" accompanied by (2) "strong feelings," and (3) my belief in an objective, external, source of these feelings. I come to feel as if I am "going crazy," beside myself, that I am "possessed" by alien thoughts and feelings that are not mine, that at such moments of invasion I am literally "gone out of my mind." I have come to rely on these uncomfortably, often terribly frightening, experiences as crucial guides to interpersonal and organizational reality, and in turn, to culture itself. Because so often those with whom I am interacting (as co-worker, supervisor, subordinate, client, or consultant) disavow that they are doing what I know they are doing, I must rely on my often-violent internal emotional responses as a guide to what is taking place (Sievers 1997; Stein 1999). Here I emphasize two forms my emotional life takes: (1) the momentary recognition that "No matter what others are saying, I trust my own emotional, even physical, responses to the organization"; and (2) a poem I might write in response to a situation, as part of an effort to understand the outside from the inside. In this latter, the poem is as much an intersubjective project as is the former: they both represent the organization-in-me, which I attempt to comprehend as organizational data.
It is at this point in my understanding that the work of Gordon Lawrence, David Armstrong, Robert Young, and others in the exploration of "social dreaming" (Lawrence 1998) has become so vital. Their work in the mental space of workplace organizations extends my own study of psychogeography (Stein 1985; Stein and Niederland 1989) and of culture as largely dream, dream-work, and dreaming (Stein 1994). Social Dreaming at Work is about the same subject as Maps from the Mind (Stein and Niederland 1989) and The Dream of Culture (Stein 1994). They are about culture’s implicit order upon which all society (and its work) rests. I am awakening from a dream that is and was not entirely my own – but an obligatory dream I was expected to mistake and act upon as exclusively my own. Lawrence, for instance, writes that "there are dreams in search of dreamer" (1998: 8). He hypothesizes that in social dreaming, "the dream [belongs] to the matrix and not the individual" (p. 8). David Armstrong likewise suggests "the sense of the dream as "Other": a kind of visitation, something wider than a personal construct, which is giving voice to an experience that is not of oneself alone" (1998: xx). Further, "there is no privileged location for emotional experience: it is not always and perhaps net ever the property of the individual alone" (p. xx). Lawrence writes that "Social dreaming does not question the use and value of dreams in the classic, psychoanalytic tradition but, like Bion’s work on groups, affirms that dreams have also a social dimension, though there needs to be a dreamer to give expression to them" (1998: 125). Finally, in their conclusion, W. Gordon Lawrence, Marc Maltz, and E. Martin Walker suggest that "there is ample evidence that dreams are not solely the property of the dreamer but belong to the greater context of which the dreamer is a part – the place that the dreamer holds in her or his daily life and personal and work roles" (1998: 180). The first step in knowing this is an awakening from one’s organizationally and culturally obligatory dream and dreaming (La Barre 1972).
Second Vignette: The Phenomenology of the Emptied Office The following narrative comes from an early 1990s’ consultation with Betty, the Chief Financial Officer of a computer company. It is assembled from notes I made during and after the consultation. If one can "quantify" suffering, I would say that the client’s story line was as difficult for me to hear as it was for her to speak. I had to fight my own wish to flee, my own derealization ("This kind of thing does not happen even when it does."). My countertransference told me about the speaker’s experience via my inner experience of her (Devereux 1967). I intersperse here my own organizational poems within the narrative to offer the commentary of witness, not interpretation. I wish to preserve the closeness of presence, not rupture it with abstraction, defensively used. The poetry are a kind of Greek Chorus within the dramatic narrative. In a Winnicottian way (Winnicott 1958), the poems occupy "transitional" mental space between my client, myself, and the organizational world. They are – and are not – part of the data. They are countertransference and commentary – and they are not. My poetic associations to the data – this data and other organizational data -- are both the product of one poet’s imagination and of the consultation, and in turn, of the organization. The poems are at once "me" and "not me." They occupy the space of "play" (Winnicott 1971; Stein 1996) in organizational consultation and in study. The strangest thing happened last Monday, Howard. I was off sick Friday. I came in to work on Monday morning and the office next to me was cleared out. Desk, chair, computer, a couple of file cabinets and book cases, wastebasket. And that’s it. Empty. I still can’t believe it, and it’s already Friday. It’s like there’s a big hole in this place. I knew the guy ten years. He was one of our numbers crunchers. A quiet guy, just did his work. It seemed like he was always here, always working. He is a computer whiz anyone in the unit could go to for a computer glitch. We aren’t – maybe I should say weren’t since he’s gone -- weren’t exactly friends, but we worked together a lot on projects. He was kind of part of the furniture.
It’s so eerie, Howard. I’m numb over it. I keep going next door to look in his office expecting to see him. Maybe I’m imagining that he’s gone, and he’s not. But the place is so empty. I’ve heard of this kind of thing happening other places when people get RIFed. Here today, gone tomorrow. But I’ve not heard of this here. It’s like he disappeared. Like he never was here. I’m not being sentimental about him. He and I didn’t have something going -- if you’re thinking that. I just can’t believe they’d do it – and the way they did it. I asked around the firm, and everybody gave the same story. Because it wasn’t just him. It happened all over the place, Howard. About five hundred people RIFed in one day.
At 9:00 A.M, Friday, security guards showed up all over the plant to the offices and workstations of people who were going to be fired. They escorted them to the big auditorium over in the corporate conference center. They didn’t even tell them why they had to go, except that it was an important announcement. After they walked them in, they left and locked the doors behind them.
The way I heard it second-hand, the CEO then went in after everybody was there, delivered a little speech on how the company had to downsize radically in order to survive and be competitive. He told them not to take it personally, and thanked them for their service to the company.
The security police escorted them back to where they worked, helped them clear out their belongings, then took them down to administration to hand over all their keys and receive their last paycheck. The police walked them to their cars, and that’s the last they saw of this place. They weren’t to come back. Gone. Just like that. I suppose they couldn’t be trusted not to sabotage the computers, or to steal equipment. I don’t even want to think about the way it happened. It’s like a roundup, Howard.
I asked around, and nobody knows where he went. No forwarding address or telephone number. It’s weird. Like he just disappeared. You wonder if you’re next. You try not to think of it. Work harder, maybe they’ll keep you. It’s ridiculous, because you know it’s not true. But, Howard, you’ve got to believe that you’re valuable to them. Brief Discussion Although this organizational narrative is individual and distinct, it can also be read as an exemplar of a cultural class or genre of accounts. It is thematically representative and culturally typical. It commands, I believe, the conclusion that the widely used interpretive framework called "the social construction of reality" be substantially supplemented by one that I term the social destruction of meaning. Here, "social" is coercive, intrusive, mandatory. What Theodore Schwartz (1973) has termed a "paranoid ethos" abounds in the organizational culture of the United States in increases internationally with economic globalization, liberalization, privatization, and the elevation of shareholder value to the highest good (Sievers 1997). In a recent study of the problem of knowing in workplace organizations, Lawrence (1997) makes a distinction between two types of thinking: "thinking-to-be-in-touch-with reality … as R+," and "thinking-not-to-be-in-touch-with reality …as –R (1997: 9). The latter comes into being through what W. R. Bion called "catastrophic change," that is, change that induces deep regression to persecutory, psychotic anxiety (an argument similar to Devereux 1955). "-R" comes into being to avoid the disorganizing experience of psychotic anxiety. Lawrence’s argument helps us to understand how and why the creation of meaninglessness occurs: The process of evasion begins from a hatred of reality both internal and external. This is because reality is construed and felt as being a ‘catastrophic chaos of utter unpredictability’ (Rayner, 1995, p. 159) and to entertain this experientially would threaten to burst asunder the psychic limits between what is safely understood to be finite and the infinite. There is a hatred of the capacity to think so any mental processes that would facilitate the attainment of R+ have to be denied. Emotionally this arises from the anxiety that if R+ was to be engaged [,] the resultant experience of reality would be so overpowering that it would be persecuting. It is felt that it would overwhelm and even annihilate the thinker who dares to see reality in all its complexity. So it has to be destroyed or, more accurately, the human desire to make meaning has not just to be denied but sadistically obliterated. Meaning is to be expunged by concretisation and the evacuation of symbolism. (emphasis added, HFS) Reality is simplified. … (1997: 10) Inside and outside blur and confound one another. Social reality and internal representation intensify and mirror one another. Social space becomes persecutory space, heavily rationalized by the doctrine of "bottom line"-based good business. The world of work becomes a schizoid landscape replete with inanimate, exploitable, disposable things. The workplace becomes devoid of people. It is the task of the observer and consultant’s countertransference to recognize and contain the terror in the client’s transference. The work of the consultation begins at this place and often returns to it. It is a question of feeling that which is unbearable, but which is no less real. The semantic web of downsizing, RIFing, reengineering, restructuring, outsourcing, deskilling, and managed care (etc.) are the language of gesture and wish conducted and couched in the language of euphemistic word. The word disguises the deed it helps to implement. The word is a great lie about what the deed is in fact doing: viz., unfathomable destruction in the name of essential business. Business is a code-word for brutality, but the code must not be broken.
In the corporate break rooms and hallways, other – contradictory – words leak out to tell the tale of dread behind the warrior sham of official spreadsheets. Ours is a world split into metaphorical Nazis and Jews, Nazis and Slavs, Nazis and Gypsies, the temporarily superhuman and those condemned to be subhuman. It is a world of steep and rapid fall from triumphant, arrogant Nazi to debased, sacrificial Jew. All are ultimately disposable in this feverish marketplace. It is a world in which, on a given day, hundreds if not thousands of people are summarily escorted and herded into gigantic auditoriums, locked in by the security police, notified that they are all to be fired today for the health and survival of the company, and informed that they have until the end of the workday to gather their belongings, turn in all their keys, and be escorted to their motor vehicles. They are not to be trusted: yesterday’s loyalists are tomorrow’s saboteurs. The workplace is a world of endless lists and selections for continued, employment or unemployment, of waiting in queues for assignment to the same or a different job, of uncertainty over whether one’s permanent job will be redefined as temporary. It is a world of closed silos, fat ones, tall ones, and a world of fast-moving, densely packed trains. One had better get on this train lest one be left standing back at the station to wait for a later train that will embark for a grimmer destination. The economics-laden language of downsizing, reengineering, and managed care is saturated with Holocaust images and emotions: gigantic death chambers; sadistic Doctors Mengele, directing the naked to the left or to the right; the clattering suffocation of trains, the transport of the socially dead to the place of biological death-making. The work of atrocity assumes the dress of business.
Organizational Dread, Organizational Unreality, and Countertransference What does a student of organizations or a consultant "do" with a narrative such as the above? Listen. In organizational consultations such as the above situation, the first requirement for observer and consultant is to bear the unbearable, to bear witness with the speaker, to serve as a "holding environment" for the experience and to validate it. "It happened. This really happened," is the consultant and observer’s Kantian and Freudian imperative in the face of atrocity. The psychodynamically informed observer and consultant’s fundamental role is to affirm the inner experience that business-as-usual is in fact euphemized atrocity. It is to use one’s own countertransference to affirm the psychic reality of the client. It is, from a dynamic viewpoint, to do the opposite of the "slip" I described at the beginning of the paper. It is to integrate rather than to dis-integrate, to realize rather than to de-realize, to bring into rather than chase from memory. It is to claim one’s own authorship of even the most terrible-to-imagine feeling and fantasy. As student, theorist, and consultant, one can validate in others only what one can "own" in oneself. Permit me here to introduce a comparison that might fit under the rubric of what are called functional and psychodynamic equivalents. In The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi (1988) describes a particularly ghoulish scene at Auschwitz, based on an account by Miklos Nyiszli, a Hungarian physician and survivor of the last Special Squad (1988: 54-55). In between gassings, Nazi SS members and Jewish inmates who were members of the SK (Sonderkommando, or Special Squads) inmates would engage in soccer games, complete with side-betting and drinks. The ultimate destinies of the two groups were, of course, opposite. Members of the squads, the "crematorium ravens" (1988: 55), were nonetheless Jews and would suffer their Jewish destiny, to be killed. In Primo Levi’s words: in veterans of the squad, the SS recognized to some extent colleagues, by now as inhuman as themselves, hitched to the same cart, bound together by the foul link of imposed complicity. So, Nyiszli tells how during a "work" pause he attended a soccer game between the SS and the SK (Sonderkommando), that is to say, between a group representing the SS on guard at the crematorium and a group representing the Special Squad. Other men of the SS and the rest of the squad are present at the game; they take sides, bet, applaud, urge the players on as if, rather than at the gates of hell, the game were taking place on the village green. (1988: 54-55) While we in the United States and in the increasingly globalized economy do not have death camps, we have close symbolic parallels. We have an increasingly American cultural way of death-by-bottom-line-thinking. CEOs and other upper management say of expendable workers the equivalent of what Hans Frank, Nazi Governor General of Poland, said of the Jews: "All I wish for the Jews is that they should disappear." The above scenario transposes in spirit, in symbolism, to these corporate North American shores. At the national holidays of Thanksgiving and Christmas, workplace organizations put on lavish festivals of food and drink, and even gifts, for employees. Sometimes, the event is catered. Sometimes, corporate or hospital executives will even perform "role reversal" with subordinates on this occasion. They will be the ones -- this one time -- to serve rather than to be served. In this instance, the "main dish" to be served is turkey or ham, given to a procession of hundreds if not thousands of employees who wait in line. The CEO, CFO, chairman, or other high-level manager will often make a brief holiday speech, wishing everyone present well and infusing them with the up-beat spirit of the season. There might even be prizes or gifts. After the New Year and in the months ahead, these same executives will summarily fire hundreds or thousands of these same employees. The style of summary firing with no warning is prevalent. Those who are not fired during a specific "RIFing" (an acronym further euphemizing the euphemism, "Reduction in Force") are typically "restructured" and "reengineered" in their jobs, and await the next wave of RIFings. Managers and workers alike are expected to do "more with less," be productive, efficient, loyal, and up-beat, while their morale is assaulted by dread of the future and guilt from being a "survivor." Anything but the generosity of "The Christmas Spirit" prevails. The parallel I suggest between these two American scenarios and soccer on the greens of Auschwitz is not hyperbole. Americans are simply put out on the streets to fend for themselves, to disappear to who-cares-where. The widespread wish that unwanted peoples disappear further links the "ethnic cleansings" of recent years (Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo) with their equivalent corporate cleansings through downsizings, RIFs, and the like. Both these forms create mass refugee problems, and are byproducts of the wish to secure boundaries or borders, and thereby organismic-like survival, via expulsion of unwanted parts. Those who remain behind, though, are by no means free. De Facto Captivity and the American Workplace Psychiatrist Harold Bursztajn has gone so far as to describe many contemporary workers and patients as a "de facto captive population," tied by dependency on employment, often unable to choose health plan or physician (1997a, 1997b 1998; Bursztajn and Brodsky 1997; Bursztajn, Gutheil, and Brodsky 1998; Bursztajn and Sobel 1998). Bursztajn urges that the ethical standards of the 1947 Nuremberg Code be adopted to protect patients and workers placed in such highly vulnerable, de facto captive circumstances. Specifically, he draws attention to the need to protect patients-cum-workers through their voluntary, informed consent in health care (1998: 985). Patients-cum-workers become de facto economic prisoners. For all practical purposes, workers have little or no choice within the social experiment of downsizing, restructuring, managed care, outsourcing, deskilling and the like. "…[J]ust when the doctor-patient relationship had been moving toward a greater degree of shared responsibility, managed care has disturbed this evolution from paternalism to mutuality by circumscribing the decision-making authority of both parties" (Bursztajn and Brodsky 1997: 4, quoted with permission). Bursztajn urges that the ethical standards of the 1947 Nuremberg Code be adopted to protect patients and workers placed in such highly vulnerable, de facto captive circumstances. Specifically, he draws attention to the need to protect patients-cum-workers through their voluntary, informed consent in health care. However, Bursztajn also notes the division of labor between managed care organizations and employers who have been given "authority without responsibility," and physicians who have been assigned "responsibility without authority" (1997b: 4; 1998). At a time when many employers offer only one health care benefit package, many patients are de facto captive. … 50 years after the promulgation of the Nuremberg Code, … informed consent as a process is applicable to innovative, experimental managed care programs that are now doing "more with less." … [Further, physician] profiles [in managed care organizations] often penalize physicians for hospitalizing patients, or even for requesting approval to hospitalize patients when such approval is subsequently denied. There thus exist de facto physician gag clauses, which not only substantially control clinical judgment and practice but also compromise meaningful informed consent as a process. (quoted with permission, 1998: 985) What becomes of the physician’s historic fiduciary (that is, moral) responsibility, patient advocacy, and the sheer trust required for one person to place himself or herself in another’s care under the dependency- and regression-inducing conditions of sickness (Katz 1984, 1996)? Patients-cum-workers become de facto economic prisoners. Principle #9 of the 1947 Nuremberg Code stipulated a person’s right to withdraw from or terminate participation in an experiment, that is, to escape (in Shuster 1997). How might such a stipulation be now understood under the current experimental employment conditions? For all practical purposes, millions of people as workers have little or no choice within the social experiment of downsizing, restructuring, managed care, and the like. One may speak of "wage serfdom," where people (who often call themselves "survivors" of RIFings and restructurings) stay and hold on, or leave for the likely promise of tenuous employment and downward mobility. To be sure, they are "free" to leave. But, given such punitive social realities as "preexisting [medical] conditions, financial limitations," hectic workplace lives, and "simply being overwhelmed by barriers of time, effort, or understanding" (Bursztajn and Brodsky 1997), in what does this "freedom" to leave consist? Many employers, managers, insurance companies, and physicians’ offices alike are only too happy to be rid of people who suffer in any form – workers who are anything but perfectly tuned producers. Hans Frank, Nazi Governor General of Poland, said in contemptuous understatement: "My only wish of the Jews is that they should disappear." The freedom to disappear into the street and the night is evidently what many American administrators and clinicians have in mind as well. Bursztajn, Gutheil, and Brodsky, writing of the triage model in managed care psychiatry, observe that "Today there is cause for concern that the labeling of people as dead (or its equivalent) will leave them fit only for discard" (1998: 34). Death Anxiety, Sacrifice, and the Problem of Evil in the Workplace Death anxiety abounds. It is best visible in the manic defenses and rationalizations that fend it off. We feverishly try to forestall death through greater productivity and quicker profit. The disposal of any- and every-one who is not maximally productive is part of a ritual sacrifice to keep the corporate body alive, at least for a time. Business is not about "pure" business, but about death, the dread of death, the imminence of death, and "putting" one’s anxiety into another. Everyone is an embattled island in the tall, vertically and horizontally integrated bureaucratic "silos" of work. Money is the currency that mediates life and death. The accumulation of money, together with access to money, make the difference between life and death, between livelihood and decay. Money is the symbolic medium through which some persons or groups exert the power of life and death over others, the medium through which some may temporarily prove that they are alive by sacrificing others (Henry Ebel, personal communication, 10 January 1999). The workplace is a major cultural site in which that power is exercised. The exercise of that power is part of a culture-wide ritual to secure life magically through death. We literally try to purchase temporary life (and organizational revitalization) through perpetual death. At least in some respects, popular culture in the U.S. is ahead of scholarship in this realization. The popularity of cartoonist Scott Adams’ "Dilbert" newspaper cartoons, books (1996), and now (1998) television program is one measure (Stein 1998a, 1998b). Another is a widely syndicated "Rubes" cartoon by Leigh Rubin in the Sunday, 21 February 1999 newspaper (See Figure 1). It depicts a scantily clad, smiling tribal shaman holding his victim by the loincloth at the end of a stick atop the summit of a steep volcano. The shaman says: "On behalf of myself and the rest of the tribe, I’d like to thank you for appeasing the volcano god and ensuring us another year of good health." The victim looks bulge-eyed over the edge of the precipice. The caption at the bottom of the cartoon reads: "How certain tribes pay their annual health insurance premium." One is reminded how primitive managed care, downsizing, and reengineering are at their motivational core (at their implicate, in contrast with their explicate, order; see Bohm 1980). What contribution does this paper make to theory – psychoanalytic, organizational, cultural? To say that this paper has focused on the phenomenology or experience of massive organizational change merely begs and postpones the central issue that theory is only as valid as the experience upon which it is based: the observer or consultant’s as well as the analysand or client’s experience. It is, I believe, easy to recognize, for instance, Thomas Ogden’s "autistic-contiguous position" in the struggle over organizational shape and texture; Melanie Klein’s "paranoid-schizoid position" and Donald Winnicott’s "persecutory space" in the massive anxiety and mistrust; and Sigmund Freud’s "counter-oedipal" destruction of workplace offspring. But all these, and others, as partial explanations, can handily serve as defenses against the monumental anxiety and chaos the experiences unleash. Even to say, psychohistorically, that the hatred of and within organizations is a displacement of and acting out of early childhood familial ambivalences, while true, can also distract us from the real destruction that takes place at the symbolic level in the workplace. We require, I believe, both-and rather than either-or theories. I do not claim that the evil done in organizations in the name of business is beyond comprehension, just as I do not believe that the Holocaust is beyond comprehension (Adams and Balfour 1998). But comprehension requires the full intelligence of the heart. Anything less is a turning away from the disorganizing experience of psychotic anxiety – and from the possibility of recovery from trauma and its inner elaborations. We require the fullness of the experience behind the abstraction. To encompass the problem of evil in workplaces and in the cultures of vast social units, we must know what evil feels like, how it works (Alford 1990, 1997). We must sense the triumphant joy over someone else that, for the moment, divests the terror from oneself. To demystify "the office," "the workplace," the starting place is to allow the ordinary, the expectable, to become strange, even surprising. "The office" is often bizarre in the guise of the ordinary: its deceptiveness lies in the appearance, the dissimulation, of ordinariness. One may speak of "the everyday atrocities of the ‘workplace,’ where the most primitive human motivations are played out by people wearing shirts and ties" (Henry Ebel, personal communication, 22 March 1999). "The office," in fact, "is usually a very weird place, in which symbolic murder and mutilation are daily events. ‘Downsizing’ and the Nazi ‘special handling’ are euphemisms that cry out to be placed in the same folder" (Ibid.). Sometimes what we (mis-)take for the ordinary deserves to be regarded as extraordinary. Then, perhaps, we might be open to regarding it as a problem instead of as a – if not the only – solution. Who, then, is this "Howard Stein"? Its answer, via my countertransference, informs us about an institution, an organizational type, a culture, and an age. "Howard Stein" is a dream condensation in the guise of a person. "Stein" is an undreamt dream in search of a dreamer, an intolerable dream in search of a container. "Stein" cannot and must not be a person because he must be a personification. Stated differently, personification replaces personhood through its obliteration. As a metaphor, the purpose of "Stein" is to make the known both thought and unthought: a compromise formation, that is. It is to allow thoughts to exist without any thinker but "Stein." Projectively, "Stein" replaces thought. At a symbolic level, "Stein" is a personification of what the Nazis saw in "Der Jude" (the Jew as abstraction, a reification). In the cataclysmic world of downsizing and managed care, one where everyone is a potentially symbolic "Jew," everyone is likewise a potential symbolic "Stein." That dim realization is the point from which others in the workplace flee into dogmatic not-knowing. To share a common fate with "Stein" would be the ultimate insult and danger. It would place others squarely in the experience of psychotic anxiety. Conscious differentiation from "Stein" is a sustained emergency response that disavows the unconscious recognition of affective kinship. The recognition that "We all are Jews" is replaced with the dream of "Stein-the-Jew." Conclusions In this paper, I have addressed the 1999 ISPSO Symposium theme of "How and Why We Do What We Do" via the use of countertransference in organizational study and consultation. The concept of countertransference is at the center of organizational (and wider cultural) understanding precisely because it constitutes the methodological and theoretical core of all human comprehension. I began with a personal parapraxis and then presented a vignette together with associated poetry to illustrate how countertransference can translated into "knowing" – a knowing that remains nonetheless incomplete. In the process I hope to have contributed to the understanding of the phenomenology and psychodynamics of the contemporary workplace, where persecutory anxiety is heightened if not chronic, where threat, dread, and loss are part of the organizational landscape, and where imagery of death abound. I have, I believe, used my own creative processes not to replace more conventional data gathering approaches, but to supplement them. Although I wish that I could apologize for the grimness of the portrait, I cannot. I have come to trust my "subjectivity" as if my life and work depended on it. Starting from originally accepting the classical position of countertransference-as-distortion, I have come also to trust countertransference-as-grounding. We need room for both, and to know how – with one another’s loving guidance – to tell the difference. We also need to be able to accept that sometimes enactment is the only way we can come to know something organizationally, and that the process of this "acting out" tells us something vital about the process of the organization. In this paper I have taken the "totalistic" use of countertransference to an extreme: the "subjectivity" I draw upon includes my own madness (pathology), my enactments, my embodiments, as well as my more conventional and acceptable symbolizations. I have discovered that there is something worse than embarrassment, that self-exposure that comes with shame. That "something" is capitulation to comforting sham that lies about reality in the name of elucidating reality. It is my narcissistic conceit to wish to be "above" or "beyond" these, to contain them and never to let them slip out. I have come to believe that we not only learn from our mistakes, but also that we learn via our mistakes. Sometimes – in deed or word – they are the only way we may learn. They are way-stations, not diversions. Such learning, too, mostly comes not alone, but with another or others. As an aside, "otherness" is usually essential in securing, and even having access to, unknown parts of oneself (Bollas’s "unthought known," 1989). Perhaps intersubjective enactment can be seen, at least on occasion, as a stage or phase in coming-to-knowledge (cf. Hirsch 1996). It is our analytic ideal -- and the shame and guilt that come from "failing" it – that has removed action from a welcomed mode of knowing. If I may borrow from Freud, repeating is often prelude to remembering and working through. Even "prelude" may unfavorably, and prejudicially, distance deed from thought. Deed might be an essential part of the sequence of thinking and feeling: of coming into consciousness. One of the pillars of Judaism and Christianity alike is the commandment, "Thou shallt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, all thy soul, and all thy might (strength)" (Deuteronomy 6:5). As a Jew, I first learned it from my father at about the time I began to learn to speak. It is a pillar of most religious services, most liturgies. Little did I imagine fifty-some years ago how completely the admonition would also apply to knowledge and to the process of knowing. Far from being a pure skill, it is part of an attitude of being in one’s capacity as organizational researcher, consultant, and perhaps living. This attitude underlies the "totalistic" understanding and use of countertransference. Today, in our social science and psychoanalytic languages, we would speak of "disciplined subjectivity," of carefully examined "countertransference." But it is still a matter of knowing -- of comprehending -- with all one’s heart, with all one’s soul, and with all one’s might. Our study of organizations and our efforts to assist them deserve the same devotion. Perhaps we can serve the re-birth of authentic hope in workplaces if we first have the courage of facing the dread we now find rampant (see Mitchell 1993). Any effort at organizational enlightenment must begin by standing still long enough to see and feel and bear the overpowering darkness. A starting place is the experience of the darkness that is, and again is not entirely, our own. And sometimes en route to seeing the darkness we must enact it.
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