ABSTRACT

This chapter introduces a condensed and necessarily simplified description of some of the central themes of the psychoanalytic perspective on human mind and development with the immediate caveat that there are many different psychoanalytic schools of thought. A psychoanalytic perspective on the ubiquity of emotionally motivated irrationality in organisational and group life, particularly during periods of change and dislocation, is an essential component of such an understanding. As development occurs, the growth of the ego is through a process of identification, and this becomes, in the orthodox psychoanalytic account, a way of representing the link between the individual and the social, between biology and culture. In historical terms, though, psychoanalysis emerged out of late bourgeois culture and what has been termed "high modernism", and it is perhaps in modernist literature that the psychoanalytic perspective on human subjectivity is most fully expressed.