ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis in general, and the psychoanalytical perspective on leadership in particular, belong to the approaches challenging the long-standing dominance of the rationality of human behavior. It does this by highlighting the unconscious processes framing organizations, leadership, leaders, and subordinates. In leadership studies, psychoanalytical approaches not only point to the unconsciousness as an integral part of the leadership work, but also highlight the importance of early childhood experience for the behavior of leaders and subordinates. Having its seeds in the work of Sigmund Freud, dating back more than one hundred years, the psychoanalytical perspective on leadership has a barely visible but long-lasting tradition. Instead of considering man as a rational agent, position holder or a wheel of the organizational machinery, psychoanalytical perspectives share the understanding of organizational actors as psychic subjects endowed with individual subjectivity, consisting of their private emotional pasts, fantasies, and idiosyncratic identities (Gabriel and Carr 2002).
