ABSTRACT
The ways in which we live and interact with each other in social groups is an important component of culture. Our interactional styles can be thought of as constituting the external forms of culture. Cultures and organizations have particular ways of structuring interactions, which from an analytical perspective give us information about underlying modes of interchange which are often unconscious. In this chapter I would like to explore organizational culture from a post-Jungian analytic perspective. I would like to propose the concept of organizational individuation, a process that occurs at a social level and which involves the integration of the “other,” as viewed in terms of ethnicity, gender, and cultural/social background. The “other” in this context are those individuals who are perceived as being outside the predominant social group and are often excluded or marginalized. For Jung (1959), individuation is a naturally occurring process within the psyche that promotes the integration and awareness of the “other” within, the previously unknown parts of the personality. Jung’s initial formulations about the impact of culture upon the development of the individual and the group have been expanded upon by Henderson (1990), Singer (2002), and Kimbles (2000). These authors have developed the concepts of the cultural unconscious and the cultural complex to help understand the structuring of emotional experience at both the personal and group levels. Kimbles focuses particularly on how a group identity can develop out of the shared experience of a cultural complex. According to Kimbles, the cultural complex organizes and generates in-group feelings of belonging and identity, and is a product of the conscious and unconscious accumulation of negative and positive group feelings and experiences. Within an organization the particular culture that evolves and develops is a product of the accumulation of shared experiences that can be looked at from both an individual and group viewpoint. Individuation within an organization would then involve the integration of disavowed experiences at both the group and individual levels of experience. Organizational individuation would then involve the integration of the other, as well as those aspects of group experience that are related to the impact of marginalization, power dynamics, and ideological differences (Kimbles 2000: 166).
