ABSTRACT
Work provides a sense of self-efficacy and self-worth, but it also entails anxiety. Organizations are designed to reduce uncertainty and anxiety and create predictability by structuring tasks, boundaries, authority, and relationships. A necessary psychological task for the entrant into any profession is the development of adequate professional detachment. An important aspect of the socially structured defence mechanisms is an attempt by individuals to externalize and give substance in objective reality to their characteristic psychic defence mechanisms. Isabel Menzies Lyth in her 1960 paper on social systems as a defence against anxiety writes that the need of the members of the organization to use it in the struggle against anxiety leads to the development of socially structured defence mechanisms, which appear as elements in the organization's structure, culture and mode of functioning. To understand better the culture of a legal firm, it is helpful to understand the unconscious influences on the social structure.
