ABSTRACT
This chapter identifies the social conditions that engender psychotic thinking. It shows the patterning of forces, internal and external to the organization, that can elicit disturbances in such thinking under contemporary conditions and the challenges these pose for the exercise of leadership and management. The chapter summarizes the conditions for psychotic thinking in organizations. Psychotic thinking has clear links to W. R. Bion's formulation of basic assumptions in relation to the work group, when individuals in the group are moving between thinking that is in touch with realities and that which is out of touch with realities. Bion formulated his ideas on "catastrophic change" in ways that one believes can illumine organizational processes. Borrowing from Bion's formulation, one might suggest that role-holders in organizations are continually having to make finite what was hitherto safely in the realm of the infinite. One can see this as an inevitable consequence of the information society.
