I and we: individuality, unconscious bonds and teamwork — contributions of the psychoanalysis of groups to management in organisations

Abstract

This article examines the tension between subjective singularity and group belonging in teamwork, and asks what psychoanalysis can and cannot offer to people management in organisations. The argument reconstitutes three successive elaborations: Freud's description of the group bond as an effect of placing a common object in the position of the ego ideal and of the reciprocal identification that follows; Bion's distinction between the work group and the basic assumptions that disturb it; and Kaës's formulation of the unconscious alliances that sustain the bond while demanding a renunciation from each subject. To these is added the psychodynamics of work, which shifts occupational suffering from the register of individual fragility to that of the real organisation of work. It is argued that individuality is not an attribute to be preserved against the group, but something the bond itself constitutes and delimits; and that a psychoanalytic reading, by refusing both the homogenisation of the team and the psychologisation of conflict, restores to management a responsibility that is not clinical. Finally, the limits of this transposition are specified: the manager does not listen as an analyst, does not interpret and does not conduct treatment.