Trauma and Organizations

This collection of new contributions from psychoanalysts, group analysts and organizational consultants from Europe, Australia and the United States examines the patterns of conscious and unconscious life of those organizations in which traumatic experience is ubiquitous. Among the organizations studied are hospitals and clinics for the care and treatment of the mentally ill and the intellectually disabled; prisons; international industrial and financial firms; trade unions; universities and institutes for training mental health professionals; and churches.

Drawing from Freudian, Kleinian, Independent and Lacanian perspectives in psychoanalysis and from Foulkesian and Bionian perspectives in group analysis, the authors illustrate the fourth basic assumption of Incohesion: Aggregation/Massification, and elucidate the painful personifications of it. Of special interest are the transmission of psychotic anxieties and the traumatic enactments of them, especially when people are insensitive to the rights and obligations of organizational citizenship.