ABSTRACT
According to Freud, anxiety is a signal that something to be feared is about to happen. Psychoanalysis demonstrates the power of anxiety by showing how to create ways to dispel, fight, or avoid it. Elliot Jaques and Menzies Lyth showed how to create social defences against anxiety—ways of organizing our social structures and cultural activities to dispel, fight, or avoid anxiety. Menzies Lyth especially showed how such defences are against the anxieties created by the work done in workplaces. Scholars following Menzies Lyth have demonstrated how groups, organizations, and even countries unconsciously create structures and cultures to defend against anxieties (both depressive and paranoid). In this chapter, the authors move beyond an identification of the basic anxieties and defences in an organizational culture towards a process of "people whispering", which leads to the move from leaders as predators to leaders as good authorities. It also leads to "working through".
