ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces an implied distinction, which was to be important in a good deal of later work, between the primary task and the "primary process" of the organization. It also describes something of both the functioning and the significance of transference and countertransference processes in the consultant-client pair. Organizational analytic work is sui generis, because in some sense the object of attention and formulation is itself sui generis. The managers' feelings of being isolated and vulnerable could be understood as a registration in themselves of an emotional experience that was part and parcel of the life of the whole organization, an experience that arose out of and in turn illuminated the very nature of the task on which all the members of the organization were engaged. The reason that patients, or most patients, are there is precisely that their behaviour has in turn exposed or exploited the vulnerability of others.
