ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to bring together insights from psychoanalysis, group relations, and open systems theory and addresses organizational dilemmas, challenges, and discontents, as presented by individual role-holders, teams, or whole organizations. It describes a means of framing a practice of organizational consultancy, informed by the insights and methods of psychoanalysis and group relations but that had its own distinctive integrity as a field of observation. As Edward Shapiro and Wesley Carr were later to expand the point: Any organization is composed of the diverse fantasies and projections of its members. Everyone who is aware of an organization, whether a member of it or not, has a mental image of how it works. Though these diverse ideas are not often consciously negotiated or agreed upon among the participants, they exist. In this sense, all institutions exist in the mind, and it is in interaction with these in-the-mind entities that we live.
