ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the nature of the anxiety that is aroused by a corporate merger, its sources in external and psychic realities, the defence mechanisms which are built against anxiety, and the importance of containment for ensuring a healthy development of the new organization. A corporate merger, on the scale of a global order, is a catastrophic change and depends on killing off parts of the former organizations for its success. There is also the fantasy that a merger brings together the best parts of the organization, that is., only the good objects will merge. A corporate merger involves destruction of the organizational object of the respective merging parties; the psychic experience for employees is of the merger annihilating loved objects. This can arouse phantasies of murder and persecution. According to Krantz, denial of the human consequences and impact of the merger characterize organizational change processes functioning at a primitive level.
