Prologue: The Mind of the Executive

Psychoanalysis has much to offer the exciting and developing field of organizational and leadership psychodynamics. Helping executives understand and make more productive use of their academic training, business experience, abilities, and strengths—while being able to harness and appropriately channel their aggressive and creative impulses—is a formidable task. Much is at stake here because we know that successful leadership shapes organizational strategic direction, enhances market edge and profitability. It also vastly improves employee morale, job satisfaction, creativity, and accountability. The opposite is also true: Entire organizations have failed when their executives make capricious, malignant, or moribund decisions. Executive leaders tend to be prone to and rewarded for action versus reflection. However, here is where the psychoanalytically informed consultant is ideally suited to be of help to executives and organizations.

We are not alone in this endeavor: Many business schools and executive development programs now focus on topics such as emotional intelligence, group dynamics, leadership style assessment, and the impact of the executive's personality on an organization's culture. However, exposure to these subjects is frequently limited to an intellectual knowledge-based approach. As analysts and psychoanalytically informed consultants, we can help business and organizational executives better understand their singular roles and how leadership styles and behaviors greatly impact the entire organizational system—in terms of strategic growth, productivity, efficiency, and employee morale and culture.

As I read through our contributors' papers and their clinical vignettes about executives, I was reminded of the following early career experience that left a deep impression on me, as the incident underscored the need for psychoanalytic understanding and intervention in the workplace. Many years ago, while working as a human resource manager, I witnessed the d