Downsizing, Managed Care, and the Potlatching of America: A Study in Cultural Brutality and Its Mystification1

Logic and sermons never convince, The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.

This paper is in a study in the psychological linkage between individual, workplace (group), culture, and history. It explores organizational change as a “window” on catastrophic change in larger social units such as ethnic group or nation. It examines the (1) general cultural forces in the United States through (2) the psychodynamics of downsizing and managed care, which is explored via (3) the process of projective identification.

Substantively, then, this paper is a study in downsizing, managed care, and the potlatching of American society—that is, an attempt to understand cultural self-destructiveness. It builds on a longitudinal study of a hospital downsizing (Allcorn, Baum, Diamond, and Stein), and on an exploration of the language of euphemism in the corporate construction of reality (Stein, “Euphemism” and “Organizational Euphemism”) in the United States. It is an inquiry into the shared delusion of cultural normality, one created, enforced, and perpetuated by the dialectic of projective and introjective identification. It interprets economic explanation as obligatory mystification of brutality.

Methodologically, it inquires into how one “knows” culture psychodynamically. It emphasizes the role of countertransference as the central organizing principle of all human knowing. Its net ranges from anthropology and astronomy, to organizational psychology and consulting, to zoology. The knower is part of the knowing, part of what is known and what must remain unknown. The knower is the best and worst and ultimately only instrument of knowing (see La Barre).

I shall (1) explore how the general culture enacts projective identification (as is specifically manifest in downsizing and managed care), and (2) through two case examples, describe how culture a