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Elliott Jaques is known for his contributions across a wide range of areas but not generally by the same people. Those in the management area over the last three decades often know little about his psychoanalytic contributions. Those in the psychoanalytic field recall his still very influential article, “Social Systems as Defences against Persecutory and Depressive Anxiety,” which appeared just two years after his major rift with the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, the institution he helped to found a decade earlier together with a scion of other great figures, including Wilfred Bion, Jock Sutherland, John Rickman, Eric Trist, and John Bowlby. Members of the British Psychoanalytic Society may recall his presentation of his seminal paper, “Death and the Mid-Life Crisis,” which, of course, contributed the term “mid-life crisis” to our modern lexicon. (Another major term “culture” was first used in its organizational culture sense by Jaques in the title of his 1951 classic, The Changing Culture of a Factory.) He was close to Melanie Klein and edited her Narrative of a Child Analysis. He was scientific secretary of the British Psychoanalytic Society, instigated research there, and contributed psychoanalytic essays in Creativity, Work, and Justice. However, a myth developed among psychoanalysts that Jaques finally descended into the mires of “management” and sociology, and left psychoanalysis for good. A great mind was seemingly lost to psychoanalysis.
But nothing could be further from the truth. Jaques always maintained his interest and use of a psychoanalytic perspective, though not of an “applied” psychoanalytic perspective. Nor was psychoanalysis his exclusive standpoint. For Jaques, psychoanalysis always meshed with sociology and social structure and was never reducible to it. Ironically, those working in management were often unaware of Jaques' psychoanalytic work, nor the extent to which his constructs were involved with psychoanalytic ideas. Much of the in