ABSTRACT
‘Psychic retreats’ was first presented at the 1998 Symposium of ISPSO, in Jerusalem. The theme of the Symposium was: ‘Drawing Boundaries and Crossing Bridges—Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Alliances, Relationships and Relatedness between Groups, Organisations and Cultures’.
The paper was based on a reading of John Steiner’s psychoanalytic formulation of ‘psychic retreats’, as these may emerge in clinical work with patients. It traces the ways in which Steiner’s concept of the ‘internal organisation’ and its genesis can be echoed within experiences of organisational life and the conditions which inform this. A provisional distinction is drawn between the en actment and the in -actment of internal mental states, which I now see as central to the distinction between individual and social ‘pathology’.
In a postscript to the paper, written but not presented at the time, I speculate on the idea of a ‘psychic retreat in reverse’, in which organisational meaning is both denied and evaded through a ‘privileging of the self’.
