One of the most pressing needs of modern society is to understand and construct organizations that are not only effective in terms of carrying out work but that also allow and encourage people to develop their full human potential. Psychoanalytic theory describes those primary processes that lie at the heart of human activity and provides new insights for understanding group and organizational behaviour. With a new introduction written by Vega Roberts, this Classic Edition of The Psychoanalysis of Organizations presents the theories of Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Wilfred Bion, Elizabeth Lewin and Eric Menzies in plain language and shows their relevance to normal working life. First published in 1978, Robert De Board takes a wide-ranging overview of the major psychoanalytic theorists and organizational researchers, and analyses how the two groups can work together. Written in a very accessible style, it makes sophisticated psychoanalytic and management concepts comprehensible and usable for anyone.

`The book is a good read. Gabriel has an engaging writing style, liberally interspersed with vignettes, cases, and quotes.... While the reader may not agree with some of what Gabriel is espousing, the author presents his material in a non-judgemental manner.... And who knows ? Maybe Gabriel is foreshadowing some new directions in organizational theory and even new research methodology′ - Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology This book is a comprehensive and systematic examination of the insights psychoanalysis can offer to the study of organizations and organizational behaviour. Richly illustrated with examples, Yiannis Gabriel′s exhaustive study provides fresh understandings of the role of creativity, control mechanisms, leadership, culture, and emotions in organizations. Core theories are explained at length and there is a chapter on research strategies. Extensive reference is made to practical cases, and there is a review of the key debates.

This book samples the groundbreaking work that has been developed over the last twenty-five years by psychoanalysts, writers and practitioners associated with the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations (ISPSO). What characterises this collection of original papers is an attempt to look at organizations, groups, teams and organizational role holders using psychoanalytic, systemic and psychodynamic perspectives that collectively eschew superficial, linear, prescriptive and mechanistic views of both the system and the individual within. These papers, delivered as presentations to the Society during the Annual Symposia of the ISPSO from its inception in 1983 to date, collectively form an important commentary on the changing societal dynamics and current preoccupations facing contemporary organizations, their leaders and their workforce. As such, these papers are representative of many that have contributed to, and documented, the development of the thought and praxis from a psychoanalytic perspective and systems thinking over the last quarter of century. Whilst most of these papers have already been published elsewhere, the ISPSO as an organization wished to include them in this volume, recognising their lasting influence and legacy as well as their ongoing impact upon the thinking and the practice of its membership and beyond.

An Experience-based Vision of Psychoanalytic Theory and Practice looks at each individual as a motivated doer doing, seeking, feeling, and intending, and relates development, sense of self, and identity to changes that are brought about in analytic psychotherapy. Based on conceptualizing experience as it is lived from infancy throughout life, this book identifies three major pathways to development and applies Lichtenberg, Lachmann, and Fosshage’s experience-based vision to psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Using detailed clinical narratives and vignettes, as well as organizational studies, the book takes up the distinction between a person’s responding to a failure in achieving a goal with disappointment and seeking an alternative path, or with disillusion and a collapse in motivation. From the variety of topics covered, the reader will get a broad overview of an experience-based analytic conception of motivation begun with Lichtenberg’s seven motivational systems. This title will be of great interest to established psychoanalysts, as well as those training in psychoanalysis and clinical counselling psychology programs.

Psychoanalysis has been applied to the understanding of social groups, organizations and cultures for a very long time, and there have been many different approaches. This volume brings together the contributions to a field which could be called psychoanalytic social psychology, from a very wide-ranging group of contributors. The substantial introductory chapters by the editors describe a conceptual map of psychoanalytic ideas on social groups that have been formed around the world. These introduce eight chapters from eminent authors on the topic, writing in Europe, the Americas and Britain.

This is the most thorough, revealing, and illuminating account of the inner workings of psychoanalytic institutions that has ever been written. It comprises ground-breaking, in depth, recent political histories of the four leading psychoanalytic institutes in the United States--New York, Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles--based on the author's extensive field work. Kirsner also provides dramatic insights into what psychoanalysts and their institutions have contributed to what has gone wrong with psychoanalysis. The result is a fascinating series of portraits of these institutes--their organizations, their cultures, their ways of mediating conflict, and how they have survived. In addition to archival research, the book is built on scores of interviews with prominent psychoanalysts who were often protagonists in the stories of their institutes. Many themes emerge in Kirsner's gripping yet scholarly accounts. Most importantly, he demonstrates that issues surrounding the right to train are central to psychoanalytic disputes. Unfree Associations examines the problems of psychoanalysis, a humanistic discipline that has been touted as a science on the model of the natural sciences but has been organized institutionally as a religion. Interest in this book should not be confined to psychoanalysts. It is a rich set of case studies in the vicissitudes of group relations, with the ironic twist that the members of these organizations profess to have special insight into human nature and how people get along with one another.

This book explores organizations as not simply rational, technological structures and networks for organizing people around tasks and services; it defines organizations as relational, experiential, and perceptual systems.

Winner of th 2023 American Board and Academy of Psychoanalytic and Psychodynamic Psychology (ABAPPP) Annual Award! This book aims to integrate different psychoanalytic schools and relevant research findings into an integrated psychoanalytic theory of the mind. A main claim explored here, is that a revised and expanded ego psychology constitutes the strongest foundation not only for a unified psychoanalytic theory, but also for the integration of relevant research findings from other disciplines. Sophisticated yet accessible, the book includes a description of the basic tenets of ego psychology and necessary correctives and revisions. It also discusses research and theory on interpersonal understanding, capacity for inhibition, defense, delay of gratification, autonomous ego aims and motives, affect regulation, the nature of psychopathology; and the implications of a revised and expanded ego psychology for approaches to treatment. The book will appeal to readers who are interested in psychoanalysis, the nature of the mind, the nature of psychopathology, and the implications of theoretical formulations and research findings for approaches to treatment. As such, it will also be of great value on graduate and training courses for psychoanalysis.

This book deals with psychotherapeutic life and work at the interface between psychoanalytic theory and institutional reality. It focuses on the set of constraints and pressures which arise as a result of working in institution, and how to deal with them.

Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory provides a masterful overview of the central issue concerning psychoanalysts today: finding a way to deal in theoretical terms with the importance of the patient's relationships with other people. Just as disturbed and distorted relationships lie at the core of the patient's distress, so too does the relation between analyst and patient play a key role in the analytic process. All psychoanalytic theories recognize the clinical centrality of “object relations,” but much else about the concept is in dispute. In their ground-breaking exercise in comparative psychoanalysis, the authors offer a new way to understand the dramatic and confusing proliferation of approaches to object relations. The result is major clarification of the history of psychoanalysis and a reliable guide to the fundamental issues that unite and divide the field. Greenberg and Mitchell, both psychoanalysts in private practice in New York, locate much of the variation in the concept of object relations between two deeply divergent models of psychoanalysis: Freud's model, in which relations with others are determined by the individual's need to satisfy primary instinctual drives, and an alternative model, in which relationships are taken as primary. The authors then diagnose the history of disagreement about object relations as a product of competition between these disparate paradigms. Within this framework, Sullivan's interpersonal psychiatry and the British tradition of object relations theory, led by Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott, and Guntrip, are shown to be united by their rejection of significant aspects of Freud's drive theory. In contrast, the American ego psychology of Hartmann, Jacobson, and Kernberg appears as an effort to enlarge the classical drive theory to accommodate information derived from the study of object relations. Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory offers a conceptual map of the most difficult terrain in psychoanalysis and a history of its most complex disputes. In exploring the counterpoint between different psychoanalytic schools and traditions, it provides a synthetic perspective that is a major contribution to the advance of psychoanalytic thought.