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In order to develop my thinking on psychic imprisonment and its release within organizations and work relationships, I have chosen to start by referring to the intersubjective approach of Dorey, who stated nearly thirty years ago:
In the psychic imprisonment relationship, there is always an attack on a chosen individual … because of his or her specific qualities. It is always the desire of the other that is targeted, given that it is essentially foreign and by its very nature escapes all understanding. Psychic imprisonment is thereby a fundamental tendency to neutralise the other's desire, that is to reduce all otherness, all difference, to abolish all specific characteristics, the aim being to reduce the other to the function and status of an object that can be completely assimilated.
The tendency to create psychic imprisonment is present in every one of us and can be observed in any interpersonal relationship, although it is particularly common in perverse and obsessive problematics, perverse psychic imprisonment tending to be seductive in nature and the obsessive being essentially destructive (Dorey, 1992). Dorey speaks of the genesis of the psychic imprisonment as being related to situations in which ‘control seems impossible or too costly for the psychic economy of the subject’ (1981, 1992, p. 139).
The difficulty in controlling and neutralizing the desire of others, the reduction of otherness, reification, perversion, and obsessiveness