ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the subject of corruption from “Tavistock” systems psychodynamic standpoint reveals refreshing insights into the individual human mind and as it is manifest in collective enterprise. It describes the concept of internal object to explain individual and social behaviour and suggests that inter-nalised mental images of significant people, events, belief and value systems, and, in turn, lead to the construction of attitudes and behaviours. The chapter addresses how system psychodynamic concepts can be gathered and bound into a social theory of group-as-a-whole functioning around the subject of corruption. Turning away from internal objects involves the total subversion of one’s relation to internal sources of value and sources of goodness. Corruption has a biological inevitability about it that emerges from the human condition of dependency. Corruption removes thinking, acknowledgement, and indebtedness, and fosters a regression to primitive mental mechanisms. Corruption implicitly contains an attack on internal objects that are seen as being hypocritical.
