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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.

doi:10.1057/palgrave.pcs.2100064 ; In this paper, we explore the psychodynamics of democracy in the workplace with a particular focus on unconscious and collusive forms of perverting democratic processes at work. We suggest that interpersonally and collectively the dialectical interplay between (1) autistic-contiguous, (2) paranoid-schizoid, and (3) depressive modes of experience and organized perceptions, which are necessary to the containment of divisions and conflicts in democratic organizations, is vulnerable to stress, anxiety, and psychological defenses that foster regression and collapse into more oppressive, authoritarian, and sadistic political cultures. With the objective of understanding perversions to democracy in the workplace, we find that a contemporary psychoanalytic view of organizations is more instructive than mainstream organization theory or that found in Foucault's writings on power and institutions. ; Includes bibliographical references