Disclosing Affect: A Freudian Inquiry into Organizational Storytelling

Abstract

Psychoanalysis addresses the psychosocial from a variety of angles. In the first instance, it addresses the subject as it takes shape through different networks of relations without which human life would be impossible. Leadership, group dynamics, the dynamics of gender, age and race as well as a wide range of political phenomena come under its scrutiny and display qualities that are invisible to other critical traditions. Related to this is an exploration of how individual and social pathologies feed off each other — how, in other words, individual anxieties, symptoms and suffering feed off and reinforce the neurotic qualities. of social groups, organizations, and indeed society at large. This is the prism that yielded Freud’s (Freud, 1927) powerful critique of religion and subsequent critiques of other cultural phenomena such as authoritarianism (Fromm, 1966 [1941]; Reich, 1970), consumerism (Marcuse, 1955, 1964) and narcissism (Lasch, 1980).