The Unconscious at Work: Individual and Organizational Stress in the Human Services edited by Anton Obholzer and Vega Zagier Roberts. Published by  Routledge, London, 1994;  224 pages.

This impressive volume offers a series of short, accessible accounts of work carried out by members of the Tavistock Clinic Consulting to Institutions Workshop. Unlike most edited collections, the book reads like a truly collective enterprise. The sense of shared goals and analytic approaches owes much to the shared institutional background of the authors. The chapters are skilfully woven together by the linking work of the editors.

Rooted in Kleinian and systems theory and following the ground-breaking work of Menzies Lyth, Trist, Jaques and Rice, the central proposition of the book is that institutions are not governed by conscious and purely rational ways of organising. The authors describe anxieties generated by work in the human services and the attendant social relationships which may be managed by instituting a series of defence mechanisms which serve to keep psychic pain and conflict at bay. These defences are unconscious, to the extent that they appear as taken for granted and unquestionable aspects of institutional practices. The effect of these defences may be to undermine the capacity of the institution to deal with the pragmatic realities of work.

Part one of the book offers an exceptionally clear introductory exposition of the contribution from psychoanalysis (primarily Kleinian in orientation), the work of Bion and a review of the contribution from open systems theory. Part two addresses