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We start with the premise that organizations are processes of human behavior that are experienced as experiential and perceptual systems governed by unconscious processes. This starting point leads us to discuss psychoanalytically informed organizational perspectives as a means of understanding how psychological reality shapes organizational dynamics. In particular, we argue that psychoanalytic organizational diagnosis requires a central role for transference and counter-transference. That is, interpreting data through the lens of transference and counter-transference assists in unpacking organizational identity and culture by relying upon an `experience near' stance for examining the narratives of organizational life. This introspective and empathic stance makes transference and counter-transference one of the core elements of a psychoanalytically informed organizational consultation. We provide a case illustration and conclude with some thoughts on how leaders and members of organizations can improve organizational performance by attending to the complex nature of psychological reality in the workplace.

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.

Organizational life contains many influences. Among these are its many divisions, sections, departments, professions and groups. The presence of these constituent parts of an organization directs attention to the points at which they connect to each other. Contemporary discussion of the relationship of these parts is confined to exploring organizational boundaries that contain a conceptual concreteness that belies their ultimate experiential significance. We suggest that the notion of boundary may be extended to explore their sensate surfaces that contain primitive, pre-verbal, pre-symbolic, and pre-subjective characteristics. Human beings experience the world as surface-to-surface contact where tactile sensation reveals hardness or softness, warmth or cold, pattern and shape, and most of all a sense at the point of surface-to-surface contact of containment. We suggest that it is within the autistic–contiguous mode of experience that the sensation of organizational boundaries is located and with it the ultimate psychological meaning of organizational structure.