Psychoanalytic Theory

Through the years there has been considerable debate among industrial and organizational psychologists about whether psychoanalytic theory has a role in understanding the dynamics of the workplace. The Tavistock approach to leadership and institutional thought (so named because it was first developed at the Tavistock Institute in London) seeks to use psychoanalytic theory to identify and resolve issues in organizations. The work of Melanie Klein on child and family psychology forms an important foundation for the Tavistock approach. Indeed, the basis of the approach comes fundamentally from theorists in the Kleinian tradition—Armstrong (1997), Bion (1952, 1959, 1961), Gosling (1978, 1981; Gosling and Turquet 1967), Jaques (1970, 1996), Lawrence (1999, 2000), Menzies Lyth (1988, 1989), Miller (1993), Obholzer and Roberts (1994), Rice (1969), Turquet (1975), and others—who stress that leadership is being in touch with external reality and with unconscious processes. That relationship between external reality and unconscious processes is summed up by Ehrenzweig (1967): “Unconscious vision has proven capable of gathering more information than a conscious scrutiny lasting a hundred times longer … the undifferentiated structure of unconscious vision … displays scanning powers that are superior to conscious vision.”

Generally, conscious leadership works rationally and linearly with cause-and-effect relationships, focusing on targeted visions and behavior, undeterred by anything unconscious. Cause-and-effect relationships are designed to get rid of their complexities. However, Wilfred Bion (1961), in his work with groups, showed the group mind (the collective mindset in an organization) as working at two levels and having two perspectives at the same time: being consciously aware of what is being talked about and also listening to what is unconsciously being represented in subtexts.

Listening to and thinking about subtexts define the idea of leadership as container. Put simply, leadership has to contain the task and other people, and in doing so, it also contains the unconscious. Containment implies notions of inside and outside, and leadership is always on the boundary between the two. Organizational leadership has to be aware of the environment on the outside and simultaneously present environment conditions to the people inside. In this way leadership serves to bring disparate parts together in order to deal with challenges of forging relationships between parts.

Leadership means the ability of leaders to “read” their own experiences of feeling, thinking, and imaging within the organization. Those experiences within the role of leadership are a source of information and intelligence about the dynamics of the organization in relation to its task, its structure, and its context, and to use that information is a way of informing decision and action at every level. The Tavistock approach moves from focusing solely on the inner world of the leader to focusing on the inner world of the leader insofar as it reflects, picks up, elaborates, and conveys information about the world of the organization within which the leader is implicated and the external environment of the organization that is influencing all the things that are happening within it in order that the leader may arrive at decisions and identify challenges that need to be managed. It is not good enough to enable leadership to interpret its situations. Leadership also must work through the implications of its interpretations in terms of decisions about vision, strategy, structure, and operations.

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