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To properly recognize the value of this collection of papers, it needs to be placed in its historical context. Located in a psychoanalytic tradition which applies the
understanding of unconscious phenomena to organizational settings, the book reconsiders the thinking of Isobel Menzies Lyth in her report on the nursing service of a large general hospital. She belongs to the group of social scientists and analysts who drew strongly on Melanie Klein's developmental theory of defences against primitive anxieties as a protection of the self and applied it to organizational settings. This new way of recognizing the impact of the unconscious life in organizations extends back to the social science experiments originally conducted in Northfield Hospital in Birmingham to facilitate leadership selection processes in the military. From 1939, Wilfred Bion, along with other talented psychiatrists, social scientists and military officers, through the War Office Selection Board, developed a new way of thinking about and working with groups. They developed a learning community in which the men had to collaborate on common tasks without the intervention of the social scientists running the programme. Their task was to observe, take notes and learn from these here-and-now experiences. Among these was Isabel Menzies Lyth. Their methods profoundly changed the way that organizational life was understood, and the way these consultants began to work.
In 1953 Elliott Jaques proposed a theory of recognition of social defences, which he developed in 1955 into a proposition that organizations find cohesion and meaning through the projection of psychotic anxieties of the individuals who comprise the organization, into the organization itself. He maintained that this freed them to function effectively and created cohesion but also resulted in systemic problems for the organization. He too was influenced by Bion's research into the dynamics of small groups carried out at the Tavistock Institute