ABSTRACT
The predominant public discourse on the financial crisis and its aftermath appears to be broadly limited to a political and economic one. The financial industry as a whole seems to a large extent based on magic thinking and manic defences. Corporate decay is related to, if not an outcome of, narcissistic processes on the side of organizational role holders. Susan Long, in her book on the "perverse organization", illustrates how corruption may be a bedfellow of perversion: "Perverse dynamics eventually lead to corrupt behaviours within the system". Participation in the pension fund system encourages a psychotic dynamic; the expected pension after retirement is seen to protect one from a "miserable" way of life, from deprivation, from annihilation and feelings of dependency, gratitude, love, and guilt. It seems that socio-analytic contributions explicitly dealing with the unconscious dynamics of capitalism are scarce, if not non-existent, in the field of psychoanalytic study of organizations.
