From "What Makes Consultancy Work -

Understanding the Dynamics". International

Consulting Conference, South Bank University 1994.

WHAT IS UNCONSCIOUS IN
ORGANISATIONS?___________
Jon Stokes, Tavistock Clinic, London

INTRODUCTION

The term 'unconscious' is often used in a variety of ways; of which

Sigmund Freud uses it thus:

(a) as an adjective, to describe the state of an idea or feeling

(b) as a hypothetical system, that is a place in the mind of the

individual with certain repressed contents. He also
distinguishes between the descriptive sense of the
unconscious (that which is presently not in consciousness but
potentially available) and the dynamic sense (referring to
feelings or ideas that are actively repressed or denied but
which are constantly pressuring to becoming conscious, hence
dynamic). He further distinguished consciousness from the
pre-conscious (that which is potentially available but currently
not accessed by consciousness, ie those memories, facts and
ideas which are not repressed, merely out of current
awareness).

These distinctions were later subsumed within a more complex

topographical model of id, ego and super-ego with both ego and
super-ego having unconscious areas. The contents of the id are the
mental derivatives of the drives, an idea which is later elaborated by
Melanie Klein and others in the concept of unconscious phantasy.
These provide the deeper and thus generally unconscious emotional
meanings to events both at the infantile and oedipal levels of
psychological development.

Psychoanalysis provides a means of understanding and mastering

these unconscious infantile and oedipal elements in our personalities
so that we are aware of their ever-present effects through out lives,
rather than being unconsciously determined by them. A
psychoanalytic view is one that sees organisations and work as being
influenced by what Wilfred Bion calls innate pre-conceptions - of a
feeding breast, of a mother, of a father, a parental couple and their
modification by early experiences of relationships in the family. Hence
our most basic attitudes to the organisations and groups of which we
are members are heavily influenced by our relations, both real and
phantasised, with our parents, our siblings and the dynamics of the
oedipus complex.

Example

WHAT IS WORK?

For Freud, to be able to work realistically was one of the two

greatest human achievements, the other being to be able to love. He
called these achievements because they each require facing rather
than denying a reality beyond the self, they require the achievement
of a capacity for relationship with separate others (object
relationships) as opposed to forms of relationship where the other is
there primarily to provide for the needs of the self (narcissistic
relationships). Work involves both pain and pleasure. It requires a
renunciation of wishful thinking and unrealistic fantasies and an
acknowledgement of time, space and gender differences. In other
words facing a reality which necessarily also involves at times a
degree of frustration, limitation and non-satisfaction, as opposed to
the use of delusion and hallucination in order to evade reality. The
compensation is a sense of real achievement, of real satisfaction
which bring more substantial though less immediate gratifications.
This is important because an organisation's attitude to work, the
collective 'work-culture', and especially the unconscious elements
inevitably involve a similar struggle at an organisational level. Indeed,
the very act of taking up group membership poses this conflict for
each member.

THE UNCONSCIOUS IN ORGANISATIONS

It is important to understand both the conscious and the unconscious

in organisations, trying to keep in mind at all times what this part of
the organisation might be representing and carrying for others.
'Working with the unconscious' in an organisational sense always
involves making decisions about at what level, with whom and how to
intervene.
Unconscious processes in organisations can be distinguished at a
number of levels:

(a) The individual level

Work provides not only a means of interacting with external

reality with its concomitant pleasures and frustrations but also a
potential for reparation (Klein 1959). By this I mean that it
provides a medium through which the individual can build and
repair which helps modify unconscious anxieties about
destructive elements in the personality in internal reality.
Losing one's job is therefore a considerable blow not only at the
 external world level but also in the internal world as the redundant
employee suffers a double sense of impotence and depression at
the obvious level of losing one's job but also at the unconscious
level of losing a medium for reparative opportunities which help
sustain a sense of internal worth and goodness. This loss of the
means of psychological reparation may be even more catastrophic
than the original external loss of job and colleagues.

Turning to the effect of certain individuals on others, it is a common

experience that the personality of the head of an organisation has a
great impact on the organisation as a whole. For example, in a
business setting the 'nice' manager often needs to have a second-in-
command who is forced into the role of being the 'nasty' one. He has
become through unconscious projection the embodiment of the
denied aspects of the leader.

Working Hypothesis 1

(b) The group level

The basic assumptions identified by Wilfred Bion (1959)
underpin the main emotional dilemmas in the helping
professions - medicine (dependency), therapy (pairing)) and
social work (fight-flight). In this way unconscious group dynamics
can become the foundation for the patient-professional
relationship. Tim Dartington (personal communication) has used
the same basic assumptions in distinguishing types of voluntary
organisations:

(i) mutual support (pairing dynamics)

(ii) campaigning (fight-flight dynamics)
(iii) expert service provision (dependency dynamics)
In this way group dynamics come to influence the state of mind of the
whole organisation and thus its relation to the environment.

Working Hypothesis 2

c)At the level of task

Gordon Lawrence (1977) has distinguished between the various
levels of awareness of tasks at work as follows:

(i) what we say we do

(ii) what we believe we do but don't always say
(iii) what we do unconsciously
For example as Anton Obholzer (1987) argues the NHS says its
task is to provide for the health of the nation but implicitly those
 who work in it do so also because of their belief that it will provide a
more equal society whilst unconsciously it is viewed by us all as
the 'save us from death' service. This unconscious task leads to
some of the more extreme reactions to efforts to change the NHS -
in whatever way, since they are felt to threaten the loss of access
to a service with deeply unconscious meanings.

Working Hypothesis 3

Pushing the fragile character

d) At the level of the whole organisation

Within an organisation there can be an unconscious structuring

along the lines of "immaturity" and "maturity". With "immaturity"
located only in the junior members and "maturity" in the seniors,
leading to an inevitable breakdown in communication between
these two groups and an artificial stultifying split inside each
individual leading to a false-self atmosphere in the staff in the
organisation. Whilst there may be conscious wishes to change
there may be unconscious investments in keeping things as they
are.

Working Hypothesis 4
Unconscious obsessional bureaucracy

Unconscious processes can also operate at the boundary of an

organisation with the outside world and the management of this
boundary.

Working Hypothesis 5
Department store

(e) At the level of the social

Finally whole sections of society can come to represent areas of

unconscious feelings for society as a whole. So that all madness is
felt to reside only in those who are currently psychiatric patients, all
criminality only in those in prisons and so forth. These large group
processes are extremely powerful and play a central role in
determining many individual lives and careers. Essentially, however,
the processes are similar to those in smaller groups -a splitting off of
unwanted aspects and a projection of these into others who are felt to
be identified with these split-off parts.
In organisational terms these social processes may be expressed
in the relations between different groups who are viewed
stereotypically such as men and women or between the young and
the old or between different social classes. Whilst these are social
phenomena they also involve unconscious psychological dynamics
such as those concerning envy, rivalry or idealisation.
 Working Hypothesis 5
British fear of losing their island defence leads to "unconsciously"
motivated delays and mistakes in the construction of the Channel
Tunnel.

IMPLICATIONS FOR CONSULTANTS AND TRAINING

Knowing about the unconscious is very different from knowledge
obtained from a book or a teacher. It is a knowing through
acquaintance, through being in a particular state of mind. It also
requires a willingness to be affected and not to move into action
immediately, by painful as well as pleasurable emotions, to stay with
the experience of not knowing, without a restless seeking after
certainty (cf Keats' negative capability). As a consultant one is often
used as a repository for emotions and states of mind that the client
organisation is denying or simply cannot cope with, much as the
parent of a child has to tolerate and contain fears and concerns that
the child cannot. Thus working in this way with organisations and
managers requires some degree of personal awareness and the
capacity for self-reflection that can best be obtained from the
experience of personal psychoanalytic therapy. But, as important too
is the understanding of group process that can be obtained from
group relations training workshops and conferences. Intellectual
insight about psychological processes is easily and often used as a
defence against experiencing the emotional dilemmas of an
organisation. The experience of a personal psychoanalysis and group
relations conference work provide essential means of staying in
contact with the deeper levels of the emotional life of organisations.
However, a concentration on the emotional life of an organisation at
the expense of attention to its structures and environmental context is
also misguided. An understanding and attention to unconscious
processes in organisations is a powerful contribution to diagnosis and
understanding but should never be to the exclusion of an analysis of
both systems and structure.

REFERENCES
Bion, W.R. (1959) 'Experience in Groups'. Tavistock, London.

Guntrip, H.J.S. (1964) 'Healing the Sick Mind', Alien & Unwin,
London.

Klein, M. (1959) 'Our Adult World and its Roots in Infancy* in Klein,
M. Envy and Gratitude, Hogart, London 1987.

Lawrence, W.G., (1977) 'Management Development... Some

Ideals, Images and Realities', in Colman, A.D. and Geller, M.H.,
Group Relations Readers 2 (1985), A.K. Rice Institute, Washington
DC.

Menzies-Lyth, I. (1959)' The Functioning of Social Systems as a

Defence against Anxiety* in Menzies-Lyth, I., Containing Anxiety in
Institutions, Free Associations, London 1988.
 Obholzer, A. (1987) 'Institutional dynamics and resistance to
Change'. Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy., Vol 2 pp 201-5

Obholzer, A. and Roberts, V.Z., 1994, The Unconscious at Work',

Routledge, London.

Stokes, J.H. (1994) The Unconscious at Work in Groups and

Teams' in Obholzer, A and Roberts, V.Z.