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Can the psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic models be scaled up to work effectively at an institutional level? Does the process that works well in the consulting room between patient and therapist, or between group and
facilitator, translate into the language of business or other large enterprises like government or nationalized industry (health, education, transport and so on)? A lot of people hope it can be so. Their voices are heard particularly from the directions of academia, where social psychologists seek paid testing grounds for their theories; and from the consulting room too, where the sometimes lonely, sometimes underpaid practitioner may feel convinced that analytic insight and vision must surely apply on a broader stage.
Thus we have the analyst turned management consultant and, more recently, the therapist-cum-executive-coach or mentor. Related permutations have flourished around the world and nowhere has the ground proven more fertile than continental Europe. When the Continent's giant national corporate champions fall on hard times, simple capitalist remedies are seldom an option. They are too ‘Anglo-Saxon’ in philosophy, too Darwinian in tooth and claw. So some organizational therapy, couched in language of academic psychology, frequently finds a welcoming audience.
Two recent books by David Gutmann and Erik de Haan exemplify the tendency.
Professor Gutmann combines board membership of the International Association of Group Psychotherapy with the role of vice-president of the International Forum for Social Innovation. His book Psychoanalysis and Management: The Transformation is based on interviews with Oscar Iarussi, an Italian journalist, and is translated here from the French edition. A typical Gutmann patient/client was Bruno Lescoeur, of Electricité de France, but also from 1999 to 2002 chairman of its subsidiary, London Electricity Group. He contributes a glowing preface.
The Gutmann philosophy or spiritual standpoint or psychotherapeutic stanc