You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Perhaps I was under an illusion when I agreed to review this book. I responded to the invitation with my usual alacrity given the topic area. ‘Yes sure, I'd love to!’ But now, my suspicions about myself are growing as I approach the task. Others have done a more than creditable job. The two essays are sandwiched between prefaces by Guy Dolle, CEO of a world-leading French steel producer and Earl Hopper, renowned psychoanalyst and organisational commentator, and a postscript by Faith Gablenick, a luminary of the Group Relations field. Sadly, this is her last written work, which in itself made me recognise the lack I have in never having met or worked with her. She puts much more than a review into words. She applies the ideas in the essays to her own life; more poignant in the reading (as noted in the introduction by David Gutmann) because of her recent death.
I am quickly becoming disillusioned. Am I up to the task? The essays approach the abstract ideas of illusionment, disillusionment, lack, desire, and human existence. These are ideas approached by philosophy, psychoanalysis, science, literature, and the great religions. This is because they are ideas that approach the essence of human experience beyond the drudge of everyday habit. Or, more precisely, they come from within the experience of everyday, but transcend it, being the product of study, observation, meditation, and reflection. The authors see the idea of disillusionment as lying behind the Socratic method of learning as well as within the psychoanalytic endeavour. I became more heartened, perhaps between illusion and disillusion.
The psychoanalytic method gives access to human subjective experience. The authors, grounded in psychoanalytic theory applied through a systemic lens (perhaps most strongly, but not exclusively showing the influence of Lacan's reading of Freud), provide examples at the personal and organisational level. We are presented with a theory of development and the human condition, argued