On Psychoanalysing Organisations: Why We Need a Third Epoch

Psychoanalytic understanding has approached the organisation as being like the ego in its pursuit of sovereign autonomy, its inter-subjective discursive practices organising its work in relation to its markets. The corporate entity has been approached as an a priori. Psychoanalytic understanding has addressed the ways in which individuals take up roles within the life of an organisation, but not the ways in which an organisation may support a multiplicity of roles one-by-one in the lives of its citizen-clients.

The a priori status of the sovereign corporate entity leads to the unconscious being referred to as descriptively unconscious, “below the surface” of the inter-subjective practices it supports. The implication is that what lies “below the surface” can in principle be made conscious. This repressed unconscious is distinct from the wider compass of the radically unconscious. Distinguishing the repressed from this radically unconscious enables us to establish a “beyond” of the libidinally-invested-in identifications supported by the organisation. Defences against anxiety may thus become defences against a “beyond” of innovation, through which a posteriori organisation might support innovative roles in the lives of its citizen-clients.

We need to understand how a radically unconscious valency for innovation becomes realised. This would enable us to address how individuals might support identifications with an organisation when it was itself having to innovate continuously “under their feet”. Without such an understanding, we can only expect an organisation to betray its citizen-clients through serving its a priori interests to the exclusion of “others”.