ABSTRACT
The experience of psychic reality is the experience of one's internal world, including the experience of impulses and the internal objects. Emotional connectedness is a key element of one's internal world at individual and group levels. This chapter describes emotional connectedness through the frame of certain psychoanalytic theories. It discusses the application of these theories to experiences in groups and how the psychic reality in groups may be discerned through the emotional connectedness between and within individual members. The relevance of intersubjectivity to emotional connectedness would appear to lie in the possibility of discerning the quality of connectedness between people. The chapter also describes the development of studying organizations as psychodynamic social systems in which individual psychoanalytic processes express social anxieties or emotional responses. It explores the concept of "Organizations as social systems”. Social defence theory provides a perspective on how emotional responses to paranoid and depressive anxieties invoked by actual task performance become systemized within work organizations.
