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Psychoanalysis begins with our wishes and fantasies and recounts the drama of how each of us, initially frustrated by reality, comes to recognize its inevitability. As a result, we do not relinquish our desires, but instead, using what resources reality offers us, devise roundabout ways to fulfill our wishes. We learn with difficulty to satisfy our needs, though there is always a margin of need—Lacan calls it desire—which remains unsatisfied. Psychoanalysts, however, are less interested in the dynamics or mechanics of how we go about bending reality to our wishes. This is the working of the adaptive ego, which uses the ‘secondary process’, one of the two principles of mental functioning. When under the sway of the secondary process, thinking takes the form of trial actions. An individual reasons out how a particular action may or may not lead to a desired result. In this sense, the mechanics of secondary thinking are based on the logic of cause and effect, or instrumental thinking, and are the work of consciousness. Psychoanalysis, by contrast, describes the unconscious. This distinction parallels the difference between cognitive-behavioral and psychoanalytic therapies. Working in the former tradition, the therapist helps the patient solve problems by honing her reasoning skills. Working in the latter tradition, the therapist helps the patient loosen the hold of the primary process and the pleasure principle just enough to allow for problem solving in a real world. When that happens, the patient is on her own, because, from a psychoanalytic point of view, reason is inhibited only when the primary process dominates. Analysis restores the person's autonomy by enabling the patient to access her conflict-free reasoning abilities.
In this book, Jaques, begins just where psychoanalysis ends. He wants to understand the mechanics of the secondary process. A fertile and creative management theorist, Jaques began his career as a physician and psychoanalyst. He was analyzed by