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.
It is a great pleasure and formidable task, in equal measure, to read and review these three exquisite volumes. They represent the state-of-the-art in current psychoanalytic thinking on organisations and society. This trilogy combines a breadth of scope and diversity of topics with an incisive and sophisticated analysis that I cannot do justice to, even in the space of a lengthy book review. It is also a true testimony to Halina Brunning's vision, her considerable editorial skill, and her standing in the field of psychodynamic thinking and practice. She is able to bring together influential voices from academia and consultancy to muster meaningful conversations surrounding the vital issues that concern us all.
The titles of the edited collections indicate the nature of contemporary challenges that well-established authors explore side by side with their junior colleagues. These are problems that the turbulent and ever-changing world throws at us where power is often intertwined with vulnerability. The approaches presented in all volumes are inspired by object relations theory and the Tavistock School's use of psychoanalytic ideas to study group dynamics and behaviours in organisation, together with socio-analysis bringing action research methods and insights from social systems thinking and social dreaming. All are deployed to uncover the unconscious processes influencing culture, politics and, even, finance. The core premise of these approaches belongs firmly to the Organisation for Promoting Understanding of Society (OPUS) that considers society as a large group and whose unconscious dynamics can be explored (Khaleelee & Miller, 1985). Concepts of defences developed by Melanie Klein and Wilfred Bion (such as splitting, projection, projective identification, introjection, and transference), are drawn upon for a better understanding of how a group, an organisation, a society, or a global systems works.