Psychoanalysis and Management

The Transformation

David Gutmann, Oscar Iarussi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429917714
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The author is a highly successful consultant to leading institutions and organisations. In this enriching and challenging dialogue with the Italian journalist Oscar Iarussi, he brings his passion for life and unceasing search for true awareness for all to focus on the innovative principle of transformation. This book talks about transformation in a two-voice encounter resulting in a thought-provoking and rewarding read for laymen and academics alike. The tone of the account is philosophical, whilst being light and dense.

Chapter One

The generating leader

Professor Gutmann, what is your profession?

I am a consultant in synthesis. This profession was created after the war by Dr Gros.

Can we categorize “synthesis” under leadership?

Let’s take two intersecting axes: synthesis is situated on the x axis, leadership on the y axis. Synthesis combines several different elements, like systemic analysis, whilst I work on the leadership axis, according to the dynamics of Reparation and Revelation. In effect, I’ve moved on from Institutional Analysis to Institutional Transformation.

What is the essential feature of Institutional Transformation?

As its name indicates, it has a dynamic element. It’s an original way of working with a client: basically, I take on a group in the same way as a psychoanalyst deals with a patient.

And the objective is the revelation of the group’s dynamics or those of the institution?

There can be no revelation if there is no transformation. An analysis is, in truth, a transformation. I’ll explain what I mean: the explicit objective, even in psychoanalysis, is not transformation for its own sake. What is important is the voyage, the passage. It is like a patient establishing the objective of the change process; that would constitute a block.

Does that also apply to society?

Without a doubt. Let’s take Italy, for example. I believe that the social regression in this country, which emerged through Silvio Berlusconi’s victory, was a determining factor in the accession of Romano Prodi’s government.

Why do you think of Berlusconi as a regression?

With him, the head of the society of the spectacle, of the television, became the head of Italy. But as I said, this regression was necessary. The same dynamic is being born out today in the Middle East. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu represents a very strong regression: the destruction and deconstruction of the peace process, brought forth by the disappearance of Rabin. I have become a lot less pessimistic since I worked on a mixed seminar of Israelis and Palestinians in Jerusalem. For these two peoples, the peace process is inevitable. Before, with Arafat, Peres, and Assad, fear of the awareness and of the advent of something new were predominant. Today, in this new era, the necessity for peaceful coexistence is an established concept.

In the Middle East, however, peace seems to be under constant threat.

To me, the main problem the Israelis have is their mental ghetto, a psychic ghetto, not a psychological one. The feeling of living permanently in a ghetto, which is a very old feeling, but one which was reinforced by the Second World War and by the state of being surrounded, which Israel experienced after 1948. The Palestinians have a different kind of concept: the mental prison. The Palestinian people always carry within themselves a sense of imprisonment within physical walls, and also mental ones.

So basically, we are talking about two peoples, each a prisoner on their own side?

That’s it. Rabin and Peres on the Israeli side and Arafat on the Palestinian side are striving to unite these two peoples. Political resistance towards this will is absolutely understandable. Nevertheless mental resistance has to be worked on, since one side has to come out of its mental ghetto and the other out of its mental prison.

That’s a new way of approaching the Middle East question. In Italy we have some excellent commentators on current developments in Israel, but they are often Jewish and are therefore probably themselves unconsciously prisoners of the “mental ghetto”.

A pause is needed in the Middle East peace process, in the form of a political regression—this is quite essential from a mental point of view. I’ll give you an example. Peres said to the Palestinians and the Syrians: “the territories for peace”. On the other hand Netanyahu says: “Peace for peace”. And it’s Netanyahu who’s right! Peace is above all a mental concept. So Netanyahu’s victory in the elections represents a regression in the political plan, but this regression will allow for progression later on.

[Time stretches …]

The time for the internalization of peace has to be privileged. The ghetto and the prison are two very close concepts. To live in a ghetto is to live in a closed community. However, all the community’s activities are sustained through its young and its old, its men and its women, it producers and its consumers. This is a universal and whole society, but it is stationary, closed, with only a small degree of highly codified exchange with the outside.

Now let’s think about the prison: it is a partial, totalitarian, simplistic institution, as Michel Foucault wrote with extraordinary energy in Surveiller et Punir. There is one prison for men, one for women, and another for minors. Within a prison, very little exchange goes on exclusively within its own confines. In the ghetto, a culture is established, sexual relationships are possible, art is produced and businesses are set up; in prison, exchange is limited to cigarettes and homosexuality. The historic consciousness of the ghetto is far older than that of the prison. In addition, the ghetto is a concept which can be applied to an entire people, while prison is a concept that is limited by time and reserved for particular individuals: one goes to prison for a certain period of time, the only exception being for those who are sentenced to life imprisonment. That is why it is harder to get out of a ghetto than to leave prison. The fundamental objective for the Palestinians is to prevent them moving from prison to a ghetto. The second objective is for the Israelis to leave the ghetto without moving into a prison.

Is there anyone who has succeeded in freeing themselves from a “mental prison” or a “mental ghetto”?

President Nelson Mandela left prison after twenty-seven years of incarceration and is now in the process of leading South Africa in a process of liberation, freedom, and democracy. Personally, I consider Mandela to be one of the greatest statesmen of the century because of his ability to have not remained a prisoner in his mental prison after his incarceration. It is obvious today that Mandela’s objective is to lead the whites and the blacks out of their respective ghettos.

Would you say that Yasser Arafat could succeed in rivalling Mandela?

Arafat is faced with a lot of difficulties. Politically his leadership is recognized, but mentally he is not legitimate: he is a Palestinian from the outside, who no longer lives in Palestine. It is important to know that power in Palestine is to a great extent the prerogative of the large aristocratic families. I worked for a time at the Arab university in Jerusalem, Al Quds, on the invitation of the president, Saari Nussebeh, with the support of a large public enterprise in France, Electricité de France, within the context of a UN programme. It was clear to me that, despite being Jewish, no Palestinian would ever turn on me, as I was an invited guest of Nussebeh, a descendant of the Palestinian aristocracy, whose power is legitimized by the fact that he is a Palestinian on the inside, who lives in Palestine.

And as far as the Israelis are concerned, where does the path to leaving their “mental ghetto” begin? Has the assassination of Rabin by a Jew hindered this?

Y. Rabin had the ability to lead the Israelis out of the “mental ghetto”. He was a Sabra, the name of the cactus fruit, used by Israelis born in Israel to define themselves. In addition, Rabin had won the six-day war and he inspired confidence. Even his name, Rabin, was a guarantee for his people. On the other hand Shimon Peres, Rabin’s ally, is a very intelligent man with a great strategic vision, but he is a Jew from the ghettos of Eastern Europe. The Rabin–Peres partnership was truly extraordinary. If it was Rabin who was killed it was because, even without Peres, he could have won the elections, but not the other way around. Rabin’s death, as absurd as it may seem, has restored a positive normality to the Israelis. It was a death at the hand of a Jew. It’s terrible to say this, but the fact is that the assassination of Rabin was a very regressive event that nevertheless facilitates progression. Now we’re faced with a taboo: no one really talks about it in Israel.

Could we conceive a hypothesis by which institutions are established through a trauma? After all, Rome was born of a fratricide, and every civilization is founded on a tragic myth, often a violent death.

It’s possible that Rabin’s death could be the founding act for a new Israel. Just as it’s possible that, in order to gain a new Palestinian state, we will have to wait for the death of Arafat: but bear in mind, with regard to this murder hypothesis, I don’t believe that he will be killed at the hands of an Israeli. It’s more likely to be a Palestinian.

In Italy, the founding act for a new society can be associated with the assassination of Aldo Moro, the leader of the Christian Democrats, killed by the Red Brigades in 1978. This was a genuine “sacrifice”, desired by almost all the political parties of the time, who refused to negotiate with terrorists for reasons of State. The sacrifice has never been recognized as such, but that’s what it was for Aldo Moro, if one looked at the letters that he sent to his family and to his party’s leaders and other groups.

I agree. Moro, just like Rabin, was an innovator who came to be sacrificed. Transformation inevitably undergoes sacrifice or mourning. More to the point, I would even say that mourning, as the transformation of guilt, is one of the lessons of transformation. Even De Gaulle sacrificed himself in the 1969 referendum, which coincides with the creation of contemporary France, leading to the dawn of the Mitterrand era eleven years later.

I still haven’t asked you how you “discovered” the concept of “transformation”.

There is a link to Italy. In 1990 I was invited to Milan by ISMO, a training and consultancy institute, which is the Italian equivalent of the International Forum for Social Innovation. The subject of the seminar was training. I was supposed to leave on an Alitalia flight from Paris, but because of a strike the aeroplane hadn’t arrived at Charles de Gaulle airport. It was late and I was forced to go home for the night, with the intention of eventually leaving very early the next morning with the first Air France flight. It was then that I started to forge the concept that training¹ is really a Transformation. This was a significant time in my life. My father died in 1987; I completed my own analysis, which had taken seven years, in 1988. In 1989 I left my former company to found Praxis International and in 1990 I was asked to come and teach at the “Institut d’Etudes Politiques”, “Sciences Po” as it’s called in Paris.

As you mentioned the death of your father, perhaps you could tell us a little about your family?

My parents are Polish, from Lodz and Kazimiecz, although my family probably originates in the Alsace, from where a lot of Jews have migrated to Poland over the past centuries. My father lost all of his first family, his wife and three children, during the Shoa. He managed to save himself by hiding. My mother was born in 1922 and was also in the Nazi concentration camps, Auschwitz amongst others. All this is far from being expiated, because until the age of thirty-one I never knew about my family’s history. I began my analysis in September 1981. In February 1982 I went to Israel with my wife, Annie, to meet survivors who had known my father. And there I encountered an old teacher called Sonia. She had conceived and produced a book of several chapters, each of which had been written by one of the old surviving residents of Kazimiecz. One of these chapters was by my father.

And you had never had a notion about your father’s past? How is that possible?

My father didn’t talk about it, in order to protect us. In fact this did us a lot of harm. I have an older sister and a younger brother: the three of us children came in exactly the same order as those my father had with his first wife, the family killed during the war. My whole life has been dominated by life and death: I would not have been born if it hadn’t been for the death of the first family. You asked me if I ever suspected anything. Unconsciously I knew something, I guessed, otherwise I would never have hurt myself so much. At the age of ten, I was crazy; I used to do things like walking on rooftops … And my brother, at a certain point in his life, practically sacrificed himself for the sake of having the past revealed. My father never mourned his first family, and this absence of mourning has remained. It is not by chance that our family was obsessed with the need to care and to cure. My sister is a pharmacist, my brother a cardiologist, and as for me, at the age of thirty, with a political sciences diploma under my belt, my father offered me an income to start medical studies …

A lot of Jews favour medicine. This is clear if you look through the Nobel Prize yearbook.

That’s true. For a Jew there are three favourite professional choices: medicine, which of course maintains a link to death and suffering, because, as an old Jew once said: “it’s better to be the doctor than the patient”; law, because “it’s better to be a lawyer than to be in prison”; and music. For this last one there isn’t a proverb, but music is also associated with the transformation of suffering. Do you know this Jewish riddle: “What is the difference between a shopkeeper and psychoanalyst? One generation!” After the Shoa, Jews “could” only choose professions which were extremely mobile, which permitted escape, exile: hence psychoanalysis, medicine, law, and music.

Let’s go back to the mourning that your father didn’t go through.

Mourning is the archetype of transformation, the matrix of transformation, for individuals as well as for a community. It’s rather strange that in my lifetime I had never mourned until my father died. I had had no previous experience of bereavement, since I didn’t have any grandparents or uncles: they all died during the war. It’s good to have lost your grandparents first, it’s a kind of lesson in mourning …

We talked about the trauma that often forms the origin of an institutional transformation, and we bore out this hypothesis in certain historico-political situations. But are these dynamics also applicable to companies? Could you give us some examples?

SNCF—the French national railway company—was created in 1937. In May 1994, the government appointed a new SNCF chairman, who embarked on a renewed policy aimed at transforming the enterprise. The chairman called upon me straight away to be his advisor and I started work in June 1994. During the months of September and October 1995, Juppeé’s government, with the support of President Chirac, carried out three measures, which caused quite a commotion. Two of these were a reform of the Social Security system, in force since 1947, and a new definition for special pension schemes, including that of the SNCF. The third measure was the renewal of the contract between the SNCF and the government. This provoked a strike, which literally blocked France from November to December 1995. For its part, Juppeé’s government chose to use the chairman of the SNCF as a scapegoat, and he was “resigned”. This is a good example of a trauma that is contrary to the concept of the founding trauma. To carry on the story: the government chose a new chairman for the SNCF, who asked me to continue my work together with him, even though I was still to go on advising the former chairman during this difficult period. Six months later the new SNCF chairman was placed in custody and accused of corruption prior to his current post. The railways now have a new chairman, the third to be appointed in two years. (If this one asks me to work with him, I’ll refuse. Why? Because French Society has decided to blow up the SNCF, rather than to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• WARNING
• PREFACE
• FOREWORD
• ABSTRACT
• CONTRIBUTORS
• Introduction
• CHAPTER ONE The generating leader
• CHAPTER TWO Living, not surviving
• CHAPTER THREE The journey rather than the project
• CHAPTER FOUR From envy to desire
• CHAPTER FIVE Manager of oneself
• CHAPTER SIX Murderous projections
• CHAPTER SEVEN With Moses in the company
• CHAPTER EIGHT Here and now, or the flavour of experience
• CHAPTER NINE Black box and glass box
• CHAPTER TEN The zigzags of passion
• Glossary of transformation
• Selected reading