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APCS was founded on the proposition that psychoanalytic understanding can be used outside the clinical setting to benefit not only individuals but also groups—organized and unorganized, large and small. One way it can do so is by helping members of groups understand the psychological forces that gratify them and bind them together and those that, at times, frustrate them and drive them apart, as well as the psychological needs that push them to pursue and accomplish their collective tasks or, alternatively, to avoid or fail at their tasks. Given our assumption that psychoanalysis can help groups sustain themselves, accomplish their tasks, and provide gratification for their members, it is only logical that we attempt to make use of psychoanalytic understanding to improve the various organizations of which we are members—including academic organizations in general and APCS in particular. Thus in what follows, I want to sketch out some basic principles concerning the psychodynamics of organizations, identify a number of the more significant psychodynamic problems and resources that often characterize academic organizations, and, finally, explore some ways in which we might develop APCS to help it achieve its aims more fully.
We might begin by considering the general question: what are the characteristics of a successful organization, and what dispositions of psychological forces are most conducive to such success? By successful, I mean an organization that 1) has a significant mission and that 2) accomplishes this mission through mobilizing and directing the energies of the requisite numbers and types of people in a way that 3) produces a maximum of gratification and a minimum of suffering and frustration for these people and for those outside the organization.
For academic organizations—and since the great majority of APCS members are academicians, I will consider APCS to be, at present, at least, primarily an academic organization—the primary mission is threefo