Psychoanalysts as consultants have covered a wide range of activities. Some consulting is closely related to clinical work, like consulting to child guidance agencies. Other consulting may seem far afield, like advising governments on negotiation strategies by helping them better understand the psychology of foreign leaders. Though these activities are seldom the center of analysts' professional lives, a surprising number of our colleagues are involved in a wide array of consultation work. One area where an analyst's skills are particularly valuable is the world of business.
Executives increasingly recognize the limits of “scientific management.” They are aware that psychological factors are key to the success or failure of an organization. At a time when analysts are challenged on many fronts, business consultation is an arena where the analyst's bag of tricks can be put to pragmatic use in real-world situations.
Analysts may not think their training prepares them for this kind of work. This is because they have not thought through the strengths of analytic ideas in this context. They tend to overlook the advantages that an analytically informed approach can have over the formulaic programs of many business consultants.
What are these advantages? Our approach is particularly attentive to latent agendas. We know that the manifest problem usually covers something far more complicated, so we listen for both conscious and unconscious meanings. In particular, we can see how psychological issues affect business issues. When the psychological issues seem primary, we are able to work with and accept the client's resistance to acknowledging their importance. We know that a multiplicity of forces are at work. We are on the lookout for competitive and narcissistic injuries, issues of separation and loss, problems of individuation and autonomy. We appreciate the power of guilt and shame. Our approach is open-ended and nonprescriptive. We can use transference and countertransference information for diagnosis, decisionmaking, and prediction. Many consultants think in terms of linear programs that go from point A to B to C. We know that things can get messy, and we are comfortable with multiple agendas and complicated, imperfect outcomes.
Historically psychoanalytic interest in group process began with Freud's 1921 paper “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.” Freud hypothesized that the peculiar nature of large groups was due to the projection of the group's ego ideal onto the leader. This was followed by a regressive process where the group turns into a mob under the sway of primitive drives and affects mediated by the leader.
Many current practitioners of psychoanalytic group and business consultation find W.R. Bion's work on group process extremely useful. Bion described three kinds of situations that follow the breakup of the healthy working group. In a dependency group the leader is perceived as omnipotent; the members of the group feel inadequate and seek knowledge, power, and goodness from him. When the leader does not live up to this ideal, he is devalued and the group looks for a substitute. In a fight-flight group, the members unite against external enemies. The leader is expected to fight the group's enemies and protect the members from infighting. Intragroup tension is denied and projected onto outgroups. The third group assumption is pairing, where a couple symbolizes the expectation that the group will preserve itself and ensure its identity. The pairing group experiences intimacy and sexuality as protections against conflicts over the dependency and aggression that are characteristic of the two other groups. Important recent contributors to the literature on psychoanalysis, groups, and business consultation include Harry Levinson, Abraham Zaleznik, Manfred Ket de Vries, Larry Hirshhom, and Otto Kernberg.
Within the American Psychoanalytic Association, there has been an upsurge of interest in business consulting. For many years Zaleznik and Robert Michels have run a seminar on organizational psychoanalysis. In this seminar, analysts have presented cases ranging from family business succession issues to problems of institutions that need to reorganize in the face of overwhelming external threats and significant internal resistance to change. These fascinating and useful seminars have regularly had very full houses.
A new APsaA committee on Corporate and Organizational Consultation started meeting two years ago [see page 14]. It supports and provides a central clearing house for the many members involved in this kind of work. The committee, chaired by Ken Seltel of Boston and Ken Eisold of New York, is a national forum for sharing information. It has several surveys in progress to find out who is doing what throughout the country. It is also bringing together syllabi from existing didactic programs, such as the one at the William Alanson White Institute in New York. The Academy of Occupational and Organizational Psychiatry, a national non-analytic group composed of psychiatrists in a wide variety of consultation work, now has an analytic subsection where an analytically oriented business consultation is presented. Analysts who are members of the group have been surprised and pleased to see how much nonanalysts value the dynamic perspective.
Several years ago, in Chicago, four of us (Henry Evans, Robert Galatzer-Levy, Robert Gordon, and Mark Levey) started Analytic Consultants, a consulting group that addresses psychological factors that interfere with profitability and productivity in businesses. We all had consultation experience, including some in business situations. We noticed that business issues commonly came up in individual work with patients. These ranged from patients needing to better understand the psychology of their employees to children in family businesses who needed to sort out their complicated relationships with their business owner-employer parents. We also saw consulting as an important way to show that analytic ideas had tremendous practical applicability outside the consulting room.
Analytic Consultants provides a variety of services including organizational consultation, executive coaching, evaluation of problematic employees, leadership development, and educational services. We have a special interest in the unique problems of the family-owned business. We feel that our particular strength is that we use our analytic
Robert P. Gordon, M.D, is on the faculties of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis and Northwestern University's Department of Psychiatry.
orientation to provide a custom-tailored rather than a formulaic approach to each consultation.
Over the years we have dealt with a spectrum of business situations including family succession issues, squabbling partners in many kinds of businesses (law firms, money management firms, family trusts, and resorts, among others), problem employees (paranoid characters, agoraphobic employees who couldn't travel, overly aggressive supervisors, alcoholic executives), and lawyers needing coaching on dealing with clients or opponents in cases. We have provided consultation about the hiring of new employees and helped develop corporate training programs.
As in an analysis, the solution immediately sought by the client may be premature and a defense against dealing with a more complicated and threatening issue. Typically we have been called into family businesses to resolve escalating battles between entrepreneurial founding fathers and ambitious children champing at the bit to take over the company. In one such case a family member described our task simply: “We thought that you could give Bill a little shrinking and that would be it!” Unfortunately, things are never so simple. Often the first job is to help the family get out of a defensive stance where they would rather perpetuate the crisis than come to an unwelcome, though realistic solution. The family may have to accept that its anticipated smooth transition, with good feelings all around, is not to be.
In one such situation we used our analytic background in several crucial ways. We were able to show the father that he was using vagueness to avoid confrontation with his son and to keep from facing his own reluctance to hand over the business. We also became auxiliary egos to the father that better allowed him to set limits with the son. As the son developed a negative transference to us, we helped him understand a repetitive style of acting like a “bull in a china shop” that he had manifested with both the father and employees. As we became the object of his rage, it was diverted from the father, and he in turn could respond less defensively and more objectively to the situation. Obviously there were multiple transferences and countertransferences. Some we interpreted, some we did not. Without our analytic backgrounds, we could not have been able to participate in the fray and use those data to help solve the problem.
Business consultation clearly provides an opportunity for analysts to use their skills in a larger arena. The analytic point of view brings a dimension to the work that goes beyond those who stay at the surface. This kind of consultation activity offers analysis an opportunity to show the usefulness of our approach in the most pragmatic of arenas, the business world.