ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the main contributions to applying psychoanalytic ideas to organisations and highlights key “love and hate” dynamics within organisational life using psychoanalytic theory to describe the power of these processes. It focuses on the analysis of psychotic processes as psychologist appear in all organisations. The group analytic approach to understanding organisations has relied mainly on the application of S. H. Foulkes’s model of group analysis. The work of Melanie Klein clearly points to the dysfunctional and pathological function of idealisation in human relationships as a way of dealing with feelings of inadequacy and emotional fragility. For the manager, the traditional organisational tasks of planning, organising, monitoring, and controlling are inevitably contaminated by the intrapsychic histories of individuals. The relationship to the organisational mother will depend both on part-object intrapsychic history and on whole object experiences. The envied organisational mother does indeed present a real problem for the impoverished members of any organisation.
