Is it necessary to be masochistic to work in a company?
If we trust Freud and other eminent theorists of the groups and the organizations, the answer is yes. From a symbolic and imaginary point of view, the company is, for the subject, a family, a mother, a father, a sibship. According to his personal history, he invests him with love or with hatred, he is dependent on it or is afraid of it. He replays there ceaselessly the most painful themes of his past, by beginning with the Oedipus...
Professionals at work
Drive of life against death drive confront for better or for worse in the ordinary of the professional life. Fantasy of the excellence, the strategies of failure and autopunishment, addictions in the work and the hyperactivity, the myth of the transparency, the suffering of the boredom, the desire and the motivation, the stress.
The conference contains main 6 segments:
1-How to integrate psychoanalysis in your organization
Nevertheless Sigmund Freud, while going out thereby of analyst's position, which will try in its essay collective Psychology and analysis of the me to develop a first theory of the organization based on emotional phenomena.
Freud still moves forward the hypothesis according to which the emotional relations are at the heart of the life of organizations. He underlines that the identification is the main link, the size of the emotional life having been technically sublimated, it is to be said transformed in a professional, scientific, technical, artistic or literary activity. Besides, he emphasizes the psychological function of the leader this one being generally raised to the rank of ideal by each of the members of the organization. He so underlines the existence of two fundamental axes: a vertical axis on which gets organized the relation of the members with the leader, a horizontal axis representing the relation of the members between them.
All this brings us finally to consider that every individual is going to behave towards his organization in a differentiated way, and it is true according to his personal psychic structure (neurotic, narcissistic, perverse or psychotic). And it is very here that lives the riddle of the organization, in the getting in touch of subjects in the varied psychic strategies, to realize their desires, run away from the organization or reach the fancy of a common objective
2-The Eldorado
To choose, and you feel it well, it also is to give up. The difficulty, when we choose, is not so much in what we take but in what we give up. You cannot be winning on all the time. Besides, that represents this president for you? Do you recognize his skills? Have you of the sympathy for him? Does he offer you an interesting professional adventure? And then what do you represent for him? Is it ready to put back let in you in its clan? Because you begin to understand that, from a certain level, we are not any more a member of a company but a clan of a big boss. The advantage, it is to participate in the successes; the inconvenience, to suffer its possible setbacks and more emotional and less formalized relationships. Finally, the degree of submission and dependence to this person that this clientelist strategy involves for you did not escape you. It may be necessary then to question you about this aspect of your personality. You live alone. If you are without family tie, why not try a strategy of professional adventure? All this brings you to wonder what represents this work in your identity. Is it a way of personal realization or has it an essentially food function? In every case of figure, it would be good to have a discussion gone deeper into with your president to know more about it: which projects he has for you, if it is ready to take you in its luggage in case of departure, etc. Do not forget however that they will be only words. Finally, to end, you make the hypothesis which a strategy more adventuress, more fun, would worry you. You touch here of the finger the fact that any enjoyment has a price.
3-Love your job!
It is necessary to dare to assert it, there are foolish jobs. There are foolish jobs, not that those who exercise them are foolish. That we dispense us of enumerating them, because a large part of the economic activity would be putting in blacklist. It is necessary to make its living … Here begin the painful ditch which exists enter the desire to do something ( the sublimation) and the principle of reality. It is maybe Charles Fourier who was the first one to seize that the work could be source of pleasure, when it was exercised in certain conditions: short working sequences, with the possibility of passing from a task to the other one (la "papillonne"). This idea of a work as a source of pleasure will be resumed by Sigmund Freud in another prospect, when he will develop the concept of sublimation (A childhood memory of Léonard de Vinci). For Freud, if the work is good near the principle of reality (opposing so formally the principle of pleasure), it can be also source of pleasure when he allows to channel and to transform this part of the sex drive the expression of which is forbidden by the moral authority, the superego. We could so summarize the thought of Freud, by saying that nobody wants to work, but that everybody wants to work.
4-Anguish of the worker
But it is not the stress which is a disease strictly speaking, it is the way the subject is going to answer it who can be pathogenic. Now, the answer is always individual. Why, subjected to the same stress, Pierre will stand without damage, Paul will make a stomach ulcer, Jean an infarct and Jacques a depression? Because their stories, physical and psychic, are different. And to complicate things, it is necessary to underline that good news, such as holidays, promotion, marriage, arrived from a child, etc., are stressful too. Finally, paradox, certain individuals threatened by the boredom look for a masochistic enjoyment in the stress: professional hyperactivity, sport with high dose, adventurer, practical ordaliques, sadomasochistic sexuality, etc.
So the rules of the company or the orders of a perverse leader inevitably come to feed the internal conflicts and, there, the anxiety. But, by another facet, the company allows the individual to defend itself against the anxiety by offering him the possibility of sublimating it in its work and in the relations of good-companionship or friendship with his colleagues. The anxiety shows of the fact that the individual is capable of judging his desires and his acts. It is the privilege of the "normal" individual. It is the imprint of an alive, desirous subject and in the grip of the necessary contradiction between the enjoyment and the Law.
5-Manager: A very complex job
Sigmund Freud thought that there were three impossible jobs: teach, steer and psychoanalysis. Three relational jobs. To govern? That is manager! Manager, an impossible job? It is nevertheless with this challenge that is daily confronted the manager. But, first of all, what manager in an organization? How to administer the people and the things? How manager without being sadistic or inequitable? How to command and how to obey, because the manager is accountable?
How to serve without being slavish? In brief, how go out of the dialectic of master and of the slave? The functions of the management are multiple and maintaining "classics", as it would be said according to textbooks: inquire, inform, to plan, to facilitate, to define objectives, to decide, to estimate, to reward and to punish sometimes also. What a manager? It is a subject battling against the reality of the organization, battling against the men and the women to manage and to liven up. It is a subject battling against his own life, this life that brought him to take responsibility. How can he claim to know what is good for him, for his organization and his collaborators, without having done a work on itself?
6-The ethical role of the manager
The superego establishes the ethical authority, the moral authority, the watchful censor. It has for function to indicate the forbidden desires. The superego, it is the "big internal voice". Too severe, wild and tyrannical, he is at the origin of neurotic pathologies. He was understood, the I is pulled between the contradictory orders of the that and the superego. "Enjoy!" Order the that to the Me. "No, it, you do not have the right to do it!" Answers to him the superego. The I is so summoned to obey two masters who hate each other: Dr Jekyll against Mr Hyde ... Blaise Pascal already said, in this connection, that there are two natures in us. Thus it is to the ceaseless fight between the that and the superego that is invited the subject. He can well have there an armistice or a momentary cease-fire between the parties, but the peace, never! As a conclusion, let us quote Freud: " by taking place in the point of view of the limitation of the instincts, we can say: the That is completely amoral, the Me tries hard to be moral, the Superego can become hypermoral and, at the same time, so cruel as the That " (the I and the That). The conflict between that and superego is source of anxiety. This anxiety is going to be more or less mastered by mechanisms of defense. Among these mechanisms, the main thing is the expulsion. The expulsion in the service of the superego is going to make "forget" in the unconscious desires and forbidden acts. Finally, it is the superego which is going to confront the subject with the right, with the laws in the company and the organizations. Are the laws good or bad? Are the laws justifiable or illegitimate? What laws is it necessary to respect? What laws is it necessary to break for ethical reasons?
**Tickets are refundable on demand before the conference only**
