ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on what psychoanalyst have learned about why it can be so difficult to work together among differences and how they might respond from an organizational point of view to the challenge to support cross-disciplinary and multi-modal work. It considers what would help people to function with more generosity and curiosity towards their colleagues from different modalities. A more thoroughgoing cross-disciplinary form of collaboration aims to illuminate the subject of one discipline from the perspective of another. It rejects the old multidisciplinary paradigm of highly boundaried traditions and half-hearted collaboration and makes a bolder attempt to negotiate meaning, with encouragement for the expression of differences and the articulation and open questioning of assumptions. Interdisciplinary collaborators adopt a perspective unique to the collaborative effort and distinct from those of the cooperating disciplines, creating a new hybrid field. The chapter explores the dangers of ossification, the fear of losing creative energy, and the obstacles to renewal.
