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Murray Stein, analyst and author, sets the stage for the entire volume in the first chapter, ‘Organization life as spiritual practice’. He states that, ‘Organizations can be murder’, and that, ‘One of the essential functions of a good organization is to contain the spirit of the organization's unconscious and to keep it from devouring its members’. Organizations can and do kill psyches, spirits and bodies as well as make persons whole, further the individuation process and create products and wealth in unprecedented amounts, although distributed unevenly. Having dealt with the organization as a feeding and devouring ‘Great Mother’, Stein takes us through Jung's use of alchemy as a metaphor for individuation, with individuation continuing throughout the readings as a connecting theme. A discussion of the shadow, scapegoating, and priestly role is particularly helpful and practical in terms of employees staying alive and attaining increased consciousness in organizations, including the corporations. Stein observes that, ‘the greatest individuation often appears in the toughest and least tolerant organizations. He adds that, ‘Without an archetypal connection, work is sheer labor … there must be “participation mystique”.’
Arthur Colman, a gifted Jungian thinker and consultant, suggests in his paper ‘Depth consultation’ a marriage between Jungian analysis and organizational consultations. It may not be a ‘marriage’, but they are now, at least, living together. Until recently, organizations have not tended to see themselves as individual and collective ‘psyche’ in any analytic or aesthetic sense. Colman, who is a clinician as well as organizational consultant, points to how clinical skills and organizational consultancy inform, enrich and energize one another and do so, obviously, because the person-intreatment and organization-in-treatment reflect the existential person/group identity, which Colman calls a ‘collective’. Persons with individual psyches clump together into