American Behavioral Scientist

This article explores the psychic meaning of change. Modernity is often conceived as a system of change. Indeed, the business mentality that dominates organizational life in modern societies insists that the central problem organizations face is adapting to change. The celebration of change we associate with modernity does not take into account the hidden or psychic meaning of change. The psychic meaning of change is expressed in the manic state we often observe in those who imagine themselves the agents of change. The manic state is linked to a hidden objective of change, which is control and domination. In this article, a distinction is drawn between the psychic meaning of that change linked to manic states and the psychic meaning of change linked to the expression of human creativity. The distinction between types of change is used to suggest an important distinction between modern and traditional society.

There are many aspects of organizational life—ethics prominent among them—in which things, and particularly behavior, are not what they seem. A psychodynamic approach to these apparent paradoxes helps greatly in shedding light on these areas. Much as a psycho-dynamic approach to organizational analysis has helped us see many aspects of organizational life that were less visible, so too can this approach aid us in understanding what fosters ethical behavior in organizations—and also what does not. Thus, in this article, the authors seek to develop a psychodynamic understanding of ethical behavior in organizations.

Based on intensive interviews with several dozen whistle-blowers, this article asks what they have to teach about the organizations in which they worked. The most important thing they have to teach is that organizations are deeply threatened by what Kant called ethical autonomy (Mündigkeit). Organizational life is dedicated to the destruction of ethical autonomy for much the same reason that Freud saw social life as dedicated to the suppression of sex and aggression. Ethical autonomy threatens to explode the organization. This may not in fact be the case, but most organizations act as if they believe it. The purpose of sacrificing the whistle-blower is to prevent the outbreak of an epidemic of ethical and moral responsibility that threatens to engulf the organization in a competitive world.

This article explores some of the psychological and material conditions motivating Jewish resistance during the Holocaust. The author looks at the underground movement in Vilna and the partisan movements in the Russian forests, with specific attention to Tuvia Bielski's family camp of more than 1,200 Jews and the reasons behind its very high survivor rate (95%). The article also examines the relationship between identity and violence, the resurrection of self through violent encounter with the enemy, and the psychological dynamics motivating both resistance and the accommodation policies of the Vilna Judenrat. The political theory of Frantz Fanon is used to draw some group psychological inferences concerning the resistance's use of violence.

This article examines the stresses experienced by women and men and organizations in response to the emergence of a powerful female workforce. Observations and interpretations focus primarily on two traditionally male organizations in the fields of finance and technology that are experiencing a significant increase in senior-level female employees. The author proposes that the understanding of internal and external conflicts women experience in the workplace as well as the dynamics between men and women are greatly enhanced when psychoanalysis is integrated with organizational and management theory, sociological and educational theories, and contributions from other psychological disciplines. It is further suggested that psychoanalytic consultation be applied to the problem of gender integration and the assimilation of a strong female workforce into organizational identity.

Western thought is imbued with thinking based on dichotomy and binary opposition. Embedded in this thinking, however, are not only oppositions but hierarchy. The existence of binaries suggests a struggle for predominance. One proposition must prevail, and the other must be vanquished. The fields of organization behavior and administrative theory reflect this form of rationality. The terms self and other have been cast as constituent elements of the human condition, but the presumption is that self must necessarily be privileged more than other. The authors disagree that such a privileging must occur. Instead, they contend that self and other are mutually constituted. The central focus of this article is an exploration of the self-other relationship that highlights its dialectic nature and, in so doing, provides a deeper appreciation of how these dynamics are manifested in work organizations as elements of trust, ethics, and mourning.