Psychoanalytic Studies of Organizations: Contributions from the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations (ISPSO) by Burkard Sievers

Author:Burkard Sievers [Sievers, Burkard]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781855756076
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2018-04-18T16:00:00+00:00

Since World War II, many religious and ethnic groups have adapted the term Holocaust to depict the cataclysmal destruction visited upon them-selves as sacrificial victims in their histories as well. For one to live, another must die, is the magical formula through which a person or group offers another person or group up to a savagely demanding deity and conscience in order to purchase immortality, or at least some more time on this side of death’s divide.

A culturally clinical formula comes into play: “We are dying,” is the diagnosis; “sacrifice” is the treatment. If “we” feel we are dying, “infected” with death (as introject), then, under the pull of regression and the catastrophic dread of annihilation (Devereux, 1955), “we” initiate the sacrifice of “them” as a sacred ritual of purification to restore “us” to life, to enable “us” to be reborn as a group, by expelling and “killing” death. Through sacrifice, “we” bring order (life) out of the chaos (death). Sacrifice is the designated means toward this end. The identification, segregation, and elimination of metaphoric Jews from the workplace is the symbolic action by which organizations expect to be magically renewed, cleansed, and born again by the casting out of death (i.e., symbolically putting one’s own death into another, and then eliminating them, as in scapegoating).

What now invokes the archetypes (Jung) or unconscious fantasies (Freud) of sacrifice? What creates the need for metaphoric Nazis and Jews in the workplace and beyond?—the collapse of previously internally and intersubjectively stabilizing boundaries, the conflation of “good” (inside) with “evil” (outside), the regression in the face of overwhelming anxiety, and the desperate effort to reorganize the inner world by radically segre-gating “good” from “evil” to contain evil once again outside oneself and one’s social units ranging from workplace to nation (see Klein, 1946).

At least in part because of the end of the cold war, the clear-cut polarity of good and evil, of victim and aggressor as inner representations (Meissner, 1978), and of sacrificer and sacrificed has been denied not only to Americans but to the rest of the world as well. The boundary between oppressor and oppressed is unclear. It fluctuates from one moment to the next. Distinctions blur, and with it free-floating anxiety and the search for enemies erupts. Jews and Nazis, as conscious images of the oppressed and oppressor, boomerang to become uncomfortably a part of us (introjects or internal objects, that is, indigestible, unassimilatable, haunting presences, in psychoanalytic terms). If the sacrifice of Jews has been a historical solution to restore the purity of the social body, to restore magically the symbiotic fusion of infant with “good” mother (Koenigsberg, 1975), this same solution is fraught now with anxiety, shame, guilt, and even identification. In World War II, Americans waged “the good war” against the Nazis, and (together with other Allied armies) liberated the Jews from the death camps—only to have now internalized the war against the Jews and the fear of victimization within the boundaries of the United States. We want to sacrifice; we are the sacrifice.

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