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This informative book is mistitled. It does not tell one how to psychoanalyze organizations (if, indeed, one could), nor does it report on organizations that have been analyzed. Rather, the author traces the origins of many group-process activities in organizations to their psychoanalytic heritage. His intention is to illustrate the influence psychoanalytic theory has had on understanding the way people behave in groups and organizations. The author, who has spent more than 20 years working in a variety of organizations, is on the faculty of the Henley Staff College in England and apparently has had significant relationships with the Organizational Studies Group of the Tavistock Institute.
He begins with the works of sociologist Max Weber, social psychologist Kurt Lewin, Freud, industrial engineer F. W. Taylor, and executive Henri Fayol through four major social experiments in organizations from 1920 to 1939. This introductory chapter establishes the frame of reference which is the background for his psychoanalytic focus.
His base is Freud's Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, followed by a discussion of S. Ferenczi's contributions on introjection and transference. These set the stage for understanding group and organizational behavior in terms of a Kleinian orientation to intrapsychic processes.
He describes Melanie Klein's emphasis on the twin psychological mechanisms of projective and introjective identification, and splitting and denial. He traces her influence on W. R. Bion, a fundamental theorist of group processes; on Trist, Bamforth, Rice, and Miller, of the Tavistock Institute's Organizational Studies Group, whose research comprises the basis for what is now called socio-technical systems; on the work of Jaques, Menzies, and Miller and Gwynne who see organizations as a defense against psychotic anxiety. Inbetween these chapters he traces the life and work of Kurt Lewin, the fundamental theorist of contemporary social psychology whose early wo