The Unconscious at Work

A Tavistock Approach to Making Sense of Organizational Life

Anton Obholzer, Vega Zagier Roberts, Anton Obholzer, Vega Zagier Roberts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351104142
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

Why do our organizations so often seem to be less than the sum of their parts? What undermines effectiveness and morale, and gets in the way of achieving what we set out to do?

The Unconscious at Work, Second Edition draws on a body of thinking and practice which has developed over the past 70 years, often referred to as 'the Tavistock approach' or 'systems-psychodynamics'. All the contributors are practising consultants who draw on this framework, bringing it alive and making it useful to any reader – manager, leader or consultant, regardless of whether they have any prior familiarity with the underlying concepts – who is curious about what might be driving the puzzling or stressful situations they find in their workplace.

The First Edition was addressed to people working in 'the human services': health, social care and education. Since it was published in 1994, there has been growing interest in the business world, andin understanding more about the 'irrational' side of organizational life. Therefore, this Second Edition includes an entirely new section where the key ideas are revisited and illustrated with case studies from a wide range of business organizations, from large corporations to start-ups and family businesses.

The aim, however remains the same: to enlarge readers' existing sense-making 'tool-kits' so that they can look at themselves and their organizations with fresh eyes, deepening the emotional intelligence they bring to bear on the challenges they face and providing new possibilities for action. The Unconscious at Work, Second Edition is for managers, leaders, consultants, and anyone working in organizations who has been puzzled, disturbed or challenged by their experiences at work.

Part I
Conceptual framework

1
Some Unconscious Aspects of Organizational Life

Contributions from psychoanalysis

William Halton

‘None of your jokes today,’ said an eight-year-old coming into the consulting room. Interpretations about the process of the unconscious may often seem like bad jokes to the recipient, if not frankly offensive. Although some elements of psychoanalysis have become part of everyday life, psychoanalysis as a treatment for individual emotional problems remains a minority experience. As a system of ideas it has adherents, sceptics and a multitude of indifferent passers-by.

Despite the fact that there is no exact parallel between individuals and institutions, psychoanalysis has contributed one way to approach thinking about what goes on in institutions. This approach does not claim to provide a comprehensive explanation or even a complete description. But looking at an institution through the spectrum of psychoanalytical concepts is a potentially creative activity which may help in understanding and dealing with certain issues. The psychoanalytical approach to consultation is not easy to describe. It involves understanding ideas developed in the context of individual therapy, as well as looking at institutions in terms of unconscious emotional processes. This may seem like a combination of the implausible with the even more implausible or it may become an illuminating juxtaposition.

The unconscious

As Freud and others discovered, there are hidden aspects of human mental life which, while remaining hidden, nevertheless influence conscious processes. In treating individuals, Freud found that there was often resistance to accepting the existence of the unconscious. However, he believed he could demonstrate its existence by drawing attention to dreams, slips of tongue, mistakes and so forth as evidence of meaningful mental life of which we are not aware. What was then required was interpretation of these symbolic expressions from the unconscious.

Ideas which have a valid meaning at the conscious level may at the same time carry an unconscious hidden meaning. For example, a staff group talking about their problems with the breakdown of the switchboard may at the same time be making an unconscious reference to a breakdown in interdepartmental communication. Or complaints about the distribution of car-park spaces may also be a symbolic communication about managers who have no room for staff concerns. The psychoanalytically oriented consultant takes up a listening position on the boundary between conscious and unconscious meanings, and works simultaneously with problems at both levels. It may be some time before the consultant can pick up and make sense of these hidden references to issues of which the group itself is not aware.

The avoidance of pain

Like individuals, institutions develop defences against difficult emotions which are too threatening or too painful to acknowledge. These emotions may be a response to external threats such as government policy or social change. They may arise from internal conflicts between management and employees or between groups and departments in competition for resources. They may also arise from the nature of the work and the particular client group, as described in detail in Part II of this book. Some institutional defences are healthy, in the sense that they enable the staff to cope with stress and develop through their work in the organization. But some institutional defences, like some individual defences, can obstruct contact with reality and in this way damage the staff and hinder the organization in fulfilling its task and in adapting to changing circumstances. Central among these defences is denial, which involves pushing certain thoughts, feelings and experiences out of conscious awareness because they have become too anxiety-provoking.

Institutions call in consultants when they can no longer solve problems. The consultant who undertakes to explore the nature of the underlying difficulty is likely to be seen as an object of both hope and fear. The conscious hope is that the problem will be brought to the surface, but at the same time, unconsciously, this is the very thing which institutions fear. As a result, the consultant’s interpretations of the underlying unconscious processes may well meet with resistance, that is, an emotionally charged refusal to accept or even to hear what he or she says. The consultant may only gradually be able to evaluate the nature of the defences, reserving interpretation until the group is ready to face what it has been avoiding and to make use of the interpretation.

A symbolic communication may occur just at a point where the consultant’s understanding of the hidden meaning coincides with the group’s readiness to receive it. The following example illustrates a symbolic communication occurring in a group unable to accept the reality of a threat from an external source:

The Manfred Eating Disorders Unit at Storsey Hospital was conducting a last-ditch campaign against closure, and had engaged the help of a consultant. The campaign had been running for several months, with the staff working late and over weekends organizing a local petition and lobbying professional colleagues, local councillors and MPs. Public opinion was on the side of keeping the unit open; closure seemed unthinkable. New patients were still being admitted and no preparation had been made for transferring existing patients. Only the consultant did not share the excited mood and felt depressed after each meeting.

At one meeting the discussion strayed to the apparently irrelevant topic of the merits of euthanasia. The consultant heard this as an indirect expression of the anticipated relief which the completion of closure would bring, and said this to the group. Their first reaction was one of shock. However, over time the interpretation led to a more realistic attitude to the possibility of closure, which made it possible for the staff to begin to think and plan for the patients.

In this example, the staff had been responding to the threat of closure with angry and excited activity aimed at saving the unit. By relating only to the possibility of winning their fight for survival, they resisted and denied the possibility of closure, ignoring the reality of financial cuts which had already closed other local units. The motivation behind this resistance was not only the wish to save the unit for the benefit of patients; closure would also hurt their pride, cast doubts on the value of their work, and cause other emotional pain. But insofar as they had lost touch with reality, they had also failed in their responsibility to prepare patients for the possibility of closure. As an outsider, the consultant felt the depression which was so strikingly absent in the group; this was an important clue to what was being avoided. The euthanasia discussion indicated that previously denied feelings were moving towards the surface as a symbolic communication, and that the group was ready to acknowledge them.

The contribution of Melanie Klein

In play, children represent their different feelings through characters and animals either invented or derived from children’s stories: the good fairy, the wicked witch, the jealous sister, the sly fox and so on. This process of dividing feelings into differentiated elements is called splitting. By splitting emotions, children gain relief from internal conflicts. The painful conflict between love and hate for the mother, for instance, can be relieved by splitting the mother-image into a good fairy and a bad witch. Projection often accompanies splitting, and involves locating feelings in others rather than in oneself. Thus the child attributes slyness to the fox or jealousy to the bad sister. Through play, these contradictory feelings and figures can be explored and resolved.

Through her psychoanalytic work with children in the early 1920s, Melanie Klein developed a conceptualisation of an unconscious inner world, present in everyone, peopled by different characters personifying differentiated parts of self or aspects of the external world. Early in childhood, splitting and projection are the predominant defences for avoiding pain; Klein referred to this as the paranoid-schizoid position (‘paranoid’ referring to badness being experienced as coming from outside oneself, and ‘schizoid’ referring to splitting). This is a normal stage of development; it occurs in early childhood and as a state of mind it can recur throughout life. Through play, normal maturation or psychoanalytic treatment, previously separated feelings such as love and hate, hope and despair, sadness and joy, acceptance and rejection can eventually be brought together into a more integrated whole. This stage of integration Klein called the depressive position, because giving up the comforting simplicity of self-idealisation, and facing the complexity of internal and external reality, inevitably stirs up painful feelings of guilt, concern and sadness. These feelings give rise to a desire to make reparation for injuries caused through previous hatred and aggression. This desire stimulates work and creativity, and is often one of the factors which leads to becoming a ‘helping’ professional (see also Chapter 13).

The paranoid-schizoid position

The discovery from child analysis that the different and possibly conflicting emotional aspects of an experience may be represented by different people or different ‘characters’ is used in institutional consultancy as a guide for understanding group processes. In play, the child is the originator of the projections and the play-figures are the recipients. In an institution, the client group can be regarded as the originator of projections with the staff group as the recipients. The staff members may come to represent different, and possibly conflicting, emotional aspects of the psychological state of the client group. For example, in an adolescent unit the different and possibly conflicting needs of the adolescent may be projected into different staff members. One member may come to represent the adolescent’s need for independence while another may represent the need for limits. In an abortion clinic, one nurse may be in touch only with a mother’s mourning for her lost baby, while another may be in touch only with the mother’s relief. These projective processes serve the same purpose for the client as play does for the child: relief from the anxieties which can arise from trying to contain conflicting needs and conflicting emotions. It is hard to contain mourning and relief simultaneously, or to experience the wish for independence and the need for limits at the same time. The splitting and projection of these conflicting emotions into different members of the staff group is an inevitable part of institutional process.

Schizoid splitting is normally associated with the splitting off and projecting outwards of parts of the self perceived as bad, thereby creating external figures who are both hated and feared. In the helping professions, there is a tendency to deny feelings of hatred or rejection towards clients. These feelings may be more easily dealt with by projecting them onto other groups or outside agencies, who can then be criticised. The projection of feelings of badness outside the self helps to produce a state of illusory goodness and self-idealisation. This black-and-white mentality simplifies complex issues and may produce a rigid culture in which growth is inhibited.

A student occupation protesting against the effects of government cuts was condemned by the college authorities as a ludicrous and irrational waste of resources. They were quoted in the press as saying: ‘The question remains as to who was leading this disruption. We have had complaints from students suggesting that outsiders and non-students took active parts in proceedings in meetings and occupation action . . . there was no apparent agenda other than disruption.’

The implication was that inside the college there were good students and good managers. Outside there were bad people who contaminated and disrupted the institution, manipulating its members for destructive purposes. Splitting and projection exploits the natural boundary between insiders and outsiders which every institution has. In this example it led to a state of fragmentation because contact was lost between parts of the institution which belonged together inside its boundary. There was no dialogue possible between the conflicting points of view within the college, and so change and development were frustrated.

Sometimes the splitting process occurs between groups within the institution. Structural divisions into sections, departments, professions, disciplines and so forth are necessary for organizations to function effectively. However, these divisions become fertile ground for the splitting and projection of negative images. The gaps between departments or professions are available to be filled with many different emotions – denigration, competition, hatred, prejudice, paranoia. Each group feels that it represents something good and that other groups represent something inferior. Doctors are authoritarian, social workers talk too much, psychotherapists are precious, managers only think about money. Individual members of these groups are stereotyped like the characters playing these roles in children’s games and stories. The less contact there is with other sections, the greater the scope for projection of this kind. Contact and meetings may be avoided in order unconsciously to preserve self-idealisation based on these projections. This results in the institution becoming stuck in a paranoid-schizoid projective system. Emotional disorder interferes with the functioning of an organization, particularly in relation to tasks which require cooperation or collective change (for further examples of these processes, see Chapters 9, 11, 17 and 18).

Envy

On occasion, difficulties in collaboration arise not so much from the desire to be an ideal carer or a more potent worker, but from a sense of being an inevitable loser in a competitive struggle. In the current climate of market values and shrinking budgets, the success of one part of the organization can be felt to be at the expense of another. The survival-anxiety of the less successful section stimulates an envious desire to spoil the other’s success. This spoiling envy operates like a hidden spanner-in-the-works, either by withholding necessary cooperation or by active sabotage.

A group of lecturers at Branston Polytechnic were organizing a money-raising short course out of term-time. They found it impossible to gain the cooperation of the catering department, who refused to provide tea and coffee for course participants. Then, on the first day of the course, despite the lecturers’ having requested a delay, maintenance work was started on the toilet facilities, putting them out of action. Both the catering and maintenance departments were about to be closed down, their services to be taken over by private organizations following tendering. Their uncooperativeness led to considerable inconvenience for the participants, who blamed the course organizers and left the course very critical of the polytechnic as a whole.

Catering and maintenance staff felt devalued by the decision to ‘sell off’ their services, and envious of the academic staff’s protected status. This kind of spoiling envy often gives rise to hostile splits between parts of an organization such that the enterprise as a whole is damaged.

Projective identification and countertransference

Although psychoanalysis is based on the idea that the behaviour of an individual is influenced by unconscious factors, the psychoanalytic view of institutional functioning regards an individual’s personal unconscious as playing only a subsidiary role. Within organizations, it is often easier to ascribe a staff member’s behaviour to personal problems than it is to discover the link with institutional dynamics. This link can be made using the psychoanalytic concept of projective identification. This term refers to an unconscious inter-personal interaction in which the recipients of a projection react to it in such a way that their own feelings are affected: they unconsciously identify with the projected feelings. For example, when the staff of the Manfred Eating Disorders Unit projected their depression about closure into the consultant, he felt this depression as if it were his own. The state of mind in which other people’s feelings are experienced as one’s own is called the countertransference.

Projective identification frequently leads to the recipient’s acting out the countertransference deriving from the projected feelings. For example, the staff of an adolescent unit may begin to relate to each other as if they were adolescents themselves, or may act in adolescent ways such as breaking the rules and otherwise challenging authority figures. Such behaviour indicates that projective identification is at work, but the true source of their feelings and behaviour is likely to remain obscure until staff achieve a conscious realisation that they have become trapped in a countertransference response to a projective process (this is discussed in more detail in Chapter 2, and further illustrated in Chapter 8).

It is also through the mechanism of projective identificatio...