Organizations as Defective Containers

Joining, merging with, and submission to a group or organization, while to some degree a part of life in modern society, may be viewed from an object relational perspective as having its emotional roots in infancy and as including the potential for threat and loss of self. The surface of organizational experience may be filled with feelings of constriction, confinement, engulfment, and abandonment. We conjecture that these oppressive feelings often arise in organizations where leaders do not provide effective containment of workers’ emotions. Containment here refers to the capacity of one individual to act as a container of emotions of another individual, where bad feelings are evacuated and projected outside the self onto an object outside. We will elaborate on the psychodynamics of containment later in the chapter. For our purposes here, it is important to point out that when leaders cannot provide this containment for followers, workers become distressed and anxious. Consequently, they become reliant on primitive and frequently destructive psychological defenses such as regression, splitting, and projection. This chapter focuses on psychological regression in groups and organizations. It is particularly concerned with the potentially destructive and oppressive forms of collapse into states of collective merger and symbiosis in which absolutist and what might be called fascistic ideologies take root.