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It was in 1968 that Harry Levinson established The Levinson Institute during his years on faculty at the Harvard Business School. The Institute emerged from 14 years of work at The Menninger Foundation of Topeka, Kansas where he was director of the Division of Industrial Mental Health. His goal with The Levinson Institute was twofold. First, he wanted to develop and apply psychoanalytic theory to managerial practice and organizations and second, he wanted to develop ‘a more sophisticated understanding of the psychology of leadership and organizational processes’ (personal correspondence, 1985). This understanding ‘would simultaneously inform and enrich the activities of management and leadership, and by so doing also contribute to the mental health of people who worked in organizations’ (personal correspondence, 1985). This article is a retrospective of the work of Harry Levinson and his contributions to our understanding of organizations.
In the following, I present readers with an overview of Levinson's contributions to psychoanalytic organization psychology. Then, I share excerpts from an interview conducted with Harry Levinson in August 2002 during the American Psychological Association meetings in Chicago, Illinois. Finally, I provide a listing of his books and articles, which include published works not reviewed here. My intent is to offer readers a perspective on his impact on the psychoanalytic study of organizations.
Harry Levinson, the son of a Polish, Jewish tailor from Lodz, was born in Port Jervis, New York more than 80 years ago. Considered by many as the founder of psychoanalytic organization psychology, he was