ABSTRACT
Observing the financial industry and its component firms introduces psychodynamic consultants to a difficulty in spanning two unique experiential worlds of training and practice. On one side are the dangers of our own observational transference distortions from within psychoanalytic conventions of certainty and ambivalence. On the other side are the dangers of overvaluing the rationality of profit making from within the systemically bounded and self-assured contexts of firm, business socialization and training. Conceptually, the relation between psychoanalysis and business appears as a contrast of opposites. Psychoanalysis is anchored in the study of irrational conflict and anxiety. It is identified with the value of reflection upon the fluidity and ambivalence that characterize individuals and organizations in the passionate clash of experience, motivations and values. Finance, however, is identified with the value of decisive action under the appearance of certainty and rationality in the drive for specifiable deliverables profitable to the firm and its agents. The values of each discipline may be understood by considering the contexts and roles of the other (Mead 1972).
