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Claudia Nagel is a recent President of ISPSO and proudly dedicates her new book to that organisation, which is now forty years old. Consultants drawing on psychoanalytic theory and concepts in their work with organisations may sometimes be cautious with their clients about acknowledging fully these sources of their ideas and aspects of their practice for fear of putting off the very people they are wanting to work with, but Nagel is more courageous. (Courage is quite a theme in her approach.) First, she is uncompromising about who she is talking to. Not, in fact, other leadership consultants and coaches, though we have a lot to learn from her. In this volume, you, the reader, is someone who already thinks of oneself as an organisational leader. The reader/leader is then taken—always politely and with good humour, and also at times with very complex material—on a journey through the psychology of the human mind to explore why we need leaders and what we expect of them and how a lot of the time they are not as good as they are cracked up to be, or they think themselves to be.
Nagel is not afraid to take a moral stance and refers approvingly to ancient virtues like courage. She talks of a nobleness in the heart, “a certain attitude of kindness, empathy, friendliness, moral education, dignity, elegance, and the capacity to open up to another human being”. In fact, these qualities come through in her writing.
At the book launch, held appropriately enough in the Freud Museum in London, she spoke of preferring to write in English than German, as it allowed her to write more concisely, and, sometimes she does indeed write very concisely. This encyclopaedic style is hard work at times but immediately it is leavened by her humour, her personality showing through. She has a powerful ability to be very practical and very theoretical on the same page. I liked her occasional simplicity of approach: “Drawing is best done with colour pens; my favourites are colourful wax or gel crayo