A Survey of Psychoanalysis

In Organizational Consulting the influence of Psychoanalysis is profound and therefore it is relevant to generally contextualize what Psychoanalysis is and how it touches organizations and consulting.

We should be mindful that psychology as a modern discipline began only at the end of the 19th century, and that from the start until today the experimental psychologists are critical of Psychoanalysis as a discipline. We should also be mindful that it is hard to deny the enormous impact of Psychoanalysis on clinical psychology, therapy, and common understandings of human behavior.

Pioneers of Depth Psychology

Sigmund Freud is widely known as the father of Psychoanalysis, also known as Depth Psychology. His intention and adamant approach was not to create a subjective science, but a strictly hard science, as a Darwinian ‘reductionist’. The other two towering figures of early Psychoanalysis are Alfred Adler and Carl Jung, who both took Psychoanalysis into progressive directions, accepting a more artistic approach, though they were also medical doctors.

Freud experimented by treating psychiatric patients with humane methods, most famously the ‘talking-cure’. He discovered that neuroses could be treated by hours and hours of talking, so that in doing so the patient would release some of the psychological tensions, as well as point to their sources, and become aware of the neuroses and their causes. Freud was able to perceive how there is an entire unconscious realm of the mind, which reveals itself through dreams and other ways. The unconscious is impacted by old roots, and these may affect various neuroses. Deep instinctual drives or desires, which he called sexuality in a broad sense, are intertwined with the unconscious at large and as to neurotic symptoms. Sexuality, or pleasure, is embedded in the psyche of an individual from the earliest age by gratification from oral and sexual organs. When one inhibits such sexuality, or overindulges, this leads to problems in psychological development and neurotic behavior, for example anxiety or aggression.

Freud pioneered humane treatment of psychiatric and neurotic patients, the concept and significance of the unconscious, the clinical and therapeutic method, and sexuality. His two most famous associates who diverged from his Psychoanalytic Movement in the early 20th century. Both criticized Freud’s overemphasis on sexuality, his dogmatism, and the focus on negative and neurotic instead of holistic positive psychotherapy.

Adler is known to have influenced many despite lack of crediting his namesake. His approach was the forerunner of contemporary psychotherapy and Humanistic Psychology. Adler grew up with physical infirmities causing him to feel inferior to his siblings and superiors. He later made the theory of compensation, and the role of birth order. This means, on the level of the human mind, biologically as well as socially, the individual compensates for inferiorities, often leading to greater strength and advantage, but most importantly to a style of life, with life goals and ideals to achieve. People are socially interactive and pragmatic, and the major thing driving us is not sexuality but life goals and ideals.

Jung developed a deeper approach, claiming that the major drive besides sexuality and social interaction is meaning. The insights and principles of Jung deal with philosophy and religion, and are widely used in these academic fields. He observed that many patients are either younger and deal with anxiety to strive for more in life, while others are older and struggle with the value of what they did or did not do, and how they lived. He experimented with art therapy and studied religious expressions and symbols. Jung spent years traveling among primitive tribes to understand the primal mode of mankind. His theories speak of archetypes, which are symbols, patterns, and instincts in the ‘DNA’ of human consciousness, thus shared. He believed that we must all engage in a mature psychological stance with these deeply embedded notions in order to find real meaning, using the term participation mystique to describe the process of attaching or projecting spiritual meaning.

From Vienna to London

An interim period historically for the psychoanalysis movement is reflected through the years of the second world war. After his daughter Anna was interrogated by the Gestapo in 1938, Freud escaped to London and died the following year. In London, during the war years, the movement was split between Anna Freud and Melanie Klein, both of whom analysed children, both without medical qualifications unlike their predecessors, the former adhering strictly to her father’s theories, while the latter established a developing approach.

Anna Freud, the school teacher turned psychoanalyst (after being treated) and secretary of the International Psychoanalytic Association, published her most famous book in 1936 named ‘The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense’. Based on her vast observations of children, the work lays out different ways the ego will resist or avoid its instincts and engaging with matters too difficult to process at the time and stage of its own development, causing neuroses. By therapy these will come to light and the ego will become more aware and mature to rise above. Such defenses, all too common among adults as well as children, include for example denial (often through fantasy), aggression (also identification with an aggressor), projection (attributing anxiety or anger perhaps, to an external factor), rationalization or intellectualizing, regression to immature behavior, and more.

Melanie Klein, born in Vienna but raised in Budapest, wanted to be a doctor but married early and became very depressed, which led her to psychoanalytic treatment and then training, without an academic degree at all. She worked in Berlin before moving to London in 1926, having innovated child psychoanalysis technique observing playing as a form of free association, and criticizing Freud’s theories.

Klein’s approach incorporated but de-emphasized the centrality of ego and sexuality. Her theory is that infants first experience factors and not objects. A baby knows only the positive gratifying experience of a nursing breast versus the anxiety persecutory absence of breasts. Its immature psyche splits its consciousness between good breast and bad breast. This original anxious binary consciousness is the paranoid-schizoid position. Later, a baby perceives objects only partially, including itself, and will mix associations with internal and external factors, projecting or introjecting good or bad things. If it matures properly, the psyche will advance to a depressive position, recognizing realistically external objects and self, coping with ambivalence. If its overall experience was more persecutory than good, the psyche is stuck in a cycle of envy, which is self-destructive. Klein’s theoretical approach is relevant generally to adults considering the struggle to cope with ambivalence as well as the nature of ‘unconscious phantasies’, which are immature and unrealistic projections towards others.

Prominent Latter Analysts

Three names stick out in the scene of psychoanalysis after the second world war, all of whom in one way or another dealt with synthesizing the ideas of Freud and Klein: Donald Winnicott, WR Bion, and Jacques Lacan.

Donald Winnicott was an English paediatrician-turned psychoanalysis. He spent years working in hospitals with children, and in analysis and training with analysts analyzed by Freud himself. Twice Winnicott served as president of the British Psychoanalytical Society (1956-1959, 1965-1968), as somewhat of a moderator following the split between Kleinians and Freudians. He is particularly famous for his pioneer talks broadcast on the BBC since the second world war on basic ‘good enough’ parenting, which he believed was the root of the world’s problems. Though Winnicott had no children of his own, he helped thousands of child patients.

His focus on the mother-baby relationship seems to place Winnicott closer to Klein, though he considered his methods closer to Freud. Before the child is born, the pre-conceived concepts by the parents are already there, and the baby will correspond to them. The baby feels everything, and is impacted by the environment, which is traumatic and confusing. The mother must by holding provide a safe space for the infant. The dependent baby gradually learns of external objects, with the help of guidance by caretakers, by transitional objects, often a blanket or a toy that the baby is deeply attached to, and by playing, which constitutes interaction between imagination and reality. Babies need holding environments in order to express themselves, and develop towards independence and mental health. The therapist, according to Winnicott, would create a similar safe place for patients to regress in, to revisit and experience early stages of ego development properly.

Wilfred Ruprecht Bion was a British military captain with experience in battle in the first world war, afterwards becoming a psychiatrist. In the second world war he oversaw military hospitals and began experimenting with management and group therapy. Later, as a psychoanalyst, he would combine his experiences from the battlefield and the hospitals as groups, with experimental group sessions, typically of a team of staff members, to observe and theorize behavior of groups, explained in his classic book ‘Experiences in Groups’.

It is important to distinguish between psychoanalysis or therapy to individuals inside a group, which is still an individual approach, as opposed to therapy to the group as a group. Freud did not separate individuals from social perceptions of others, and therefore did not quite distinguish between isolated and group individual, whereas Bion thought that within a group the individuals interact with group views, comparable to neurotic behavior.

When individuals join the group setting, they do not lose their individuality, nor do they act out ‘herd’ behavior, but rather introject and project views of the group. In other words, individuals in a group do not distinguish between self and group experience, like the early infant experience described by Klein, to the effect that phantasies are rampant.

During Bion’s experimental group sessions, they would meet him in a room, in a circle, as if for some vague sort of treatment or training, and as they would expect him to lead, he would then purposely avoid that role, and then watch as the people automatically, without planning, behaved according to three patterns, manifestations which he called ‘basic assumptions’: dependence, fight-flight, and pairing.

Dependence is when members lean on a leader, and this can be associated with guilt and depression, like the paranoid-schizoid position. A fight-flight group can be associated with anxiety and anger, this is when factions manage opposition by provocation or evasion. The pairing phenomenon is a form of hope as well as denial, focused on an idea in the future, and this may be associated with Freudian sexuality.

While the objective of a work group is to function rationally towards a common goal by exerting mental and physical effort towards development and operations, the tendency of groups is to regress to immature irrational behavior, expressed by the basic assumptions. The therapist would identify the inclination of the group, bring awareness, release anxieties, and encourage the turning of the basic assumption into a working group pattern by attention to reality, rational and sophisticated cooperation.

Jacques Lacan was a French psychiatrist before becoming a psychoanalyst. His early and most famous concept was published already in 1936, though developed in the 1950’s and on, called the Mirror stage. Reminiscent of Klein and object relations, this meant that the primary human psychological experience, like that of an infant, begins when it sees itself, in the mirror objectively, after knowing only subjectively. This ‘alienation’ is disappointing and confusing, forming an existential dilemma between what man first felt he was, and what he otherwise seems to be, and one will then go along with and live up to such ‘objective’ external standards of being. The quest is to become aware of the subjective and objective factors, and that the subject would emerge as an authentic self, despite the objective otherness.

Lacan treated many rich and famous patients during the decades to come, and was identified with Parisian intellectuals and other cultural celebrities. His clinical style was unorthodox in relation to classic psychoanalysis, in that he would do short or long sessions, and play with the timing, and this was in part to provoke the analysand to speak, without trying to control the session and when and how to say what. This enabled release of speech, of the unconscious, which according to Lacan and as a development of Freud, is the subjective, is language. Language and the unconscious are similar structures, that represent truthful things but are not truth itself, and must be observed, analyzed, and interpreted. Thus Lacan’s psychoanalysis focus on language led him to the fields of philosophy of language and literary theory, where he is studied until today, less so in psychoanalysis or psychology. Instead of the classic ego and id as separated elements, causing further confusion, the authentic self is one, including but refining the subjective thoughts and various desires.

Lacan claimed to represent a return to Freud but was actually removed from psychoanalytic institutions and so established a new one, named the Freudian School of Paris. Though adored by followers and enjoyed much popularity in his life, Lacan was and is widely criticized as to the originality of his thinking, in general and by Freud, his writing methods, the scientific value of his treatment, and the validity of his ideas.

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In summary, the three phases above, eight famous psychoanalysts, represent the development of Psychoanalysis. The famous concepts are often referenced in Organizational Consulting, and they are valuable as to understanding dynamics of human behavior and therapy.

We could apply from Freud that individual behavior is highly directed by unconscious baggage, and that the role of the consultant is therapeutic in a sense, not to analyze the childhood and personal issues of the people in the organization, but to at least identify that these dynamics are present and influential, and perhaps serve as a listener, and by listening alone much is achieved. A listening consultant will also pick up cues through random words and gestures, while the relationship of transference in one way or another is hard to avoid.

Adler shows us that people are motivated by a perpetual need to compensate, whether consciously or subconsciously, and by identifying these self ideals and goals, we can understand behavior, and genuinely motivate behavior, for the sake of organization and individual.

Jung teaches us that people need meaning, and will often derive meaning from working in organizations, and meaning can be identified for their own sake in the organization and for the purposes of the organization. Also from Jung we are aware of the balance and dynamism between order and chaos so we do not deny this dynamic balance and might even utilize it to conserve the system but also be open to change, which is chaotic.

The ego defense mechanisms emphasized and elaborated by Anna Freud are rampant in every organization with all sorts of individuals.

Melanie Klein’s emphasis on object relations might explain patterns of individuals in organizations immaturely introjecting (internalizing) or projecting (externalizing) group feelings, without realizing what they are doing so and thinking so.

Winnicott may lead us to realize that we need at the very least good-enough managers and employees, as the organization and the people involved contain enough energy and creativity to produce and do well in the environment, if managers do not get in the way.

Bion experiments directly on group behavior, showing manifestations of neurotic group behavior, and he does so by observing and maybe provoking so that the neurotic aspects rise to the surface and then confronted.

Finally, Lacan leads us to doubt the way we normally behave and speak, and analyze the words, language and thoughts, to see a deeper authenticity beyond ‘normal’ structural behavior.

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