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BOOK REVIEW
ON THE PSYCHOANALYSIS OF AUTHENTICITY
Manfred Kets de Vries (2009). Sex, Money, Happiness, and Death: The Quest for
Authenticity (London: Palgrave Macmillan), INSEAD Business Press Series, pp. 239,
(h/b), ISBN 978-0-230-57792-3.
INTRODUCTION
What are the four main tenets of life? And how are they related to each other? What
furthermore do these tenets have to do with the quest for existential authenticity?
These then are three existential questions that Manfred Kets de Vries sets out to
address in this book from a psychoanalytic point of view. Kets de Vries is one of the
world’s leading authorities on the relationship between psychoanalysis and
management. His work was, and continues to be, instrumental in re-vitalizing a host
of areas in the behavioral sciences. He was trained in both the languages that
business schools use to think through the problems of managers, i.e. economics and
psychology. Kets de Vries has also trained as a psychoanalyst at Canada, and
continues to practice psychoanalysis in addition to the number of administrative and
intellectual responsibilities that he discharges effortlessly as the Raoul de Vitry
d’Avancourt Chaired Clinical Professor of Leadership Development and as the
Director of the INSEAD Global Leadership Centre with branches at Fontainebleau,
Singapore, and Abu Dhabi.

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PSYCHOANALYSIS AT INSEAD
Kets de Vries is also at the centre of a school of psychoanalysis that has rethought the
disciplinary confines of areas like organizational behavior, organizational design,
and human resources management. This school of organizational psychology at
INSEAD has been eclectic in borrowing both ‘methods of analysis’ and ‘methods of
research’ from a range of theoretical approaches in psychoanalysis, psychiatry, and
the behavioral sciences. It is often referred to as the ‘clinical paradigm’ in the
behavioral sciences albeit within the context of business schools since it is interested
in keeping the theoretical relationship between different psychological approaches
‘open’ rather than accept a particular approach to the exclusion of the range of
theoretical approaches that are available in organizational psychology. Kets de
Vries’s academic and theoretical achievements are however not reducible to any of
these areas in particular since his main goal has been to ask existential questions
within the domain of instrumental reason; which, for better or worse, constitutes the
cognitive pattern in business schools throughout the world. Since the main goal of
instrumental reason is the maximization of material goals to the exclusion of the
existential domain, we often find that business men lose their sense of proportion in
pursuing material forms of success as an end in itself.
PSYCHOANALYSIS OF MANAGMENT
This is the problem that afflicts business leaders as well since they are under
continual pressure to produce short term results without asking or being able to
commit to long term goals for themselves and their organizations. There are also a
number of cases of underperformance where employees go about their work in a
mechanical way without being able to find any sense of meaning that goes beyond
earning a livelihood. What ever happened then to the promise of ‘self-actualization’?
What, if anything, can a psychoanalytically informed approach to management
make possible in the domain of managerial psychology? Can such an approach help
to reinvent the theory and practice of management? What are the learnings from
such approaches in the domain of leadership training? These then are some of the
questions that follow from using an existential approach to life in organizations.

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And, above all, the theoretical work of Kets de Vries has helped organizational
theorists to diagnose and cure the forms of psychopathology that is prevalent in
organizations.
EGO-LIBIDO & OBJECT LIBIDO
While it may not be possible to summarize the entire scope of Kets de Vries’ work in
this review, it should at least be possible to address the four main tenets that are
listed above, which, to reiterate, are: ‘sex, money, happiness, and death’. It is
possible then, as Kets de Vries argues, to situate people in organizations (be they
leaders or followers, employers or employees) by asking how they respond to the
challenges posed by these four dimensions of human existence and work-through
the existential co-ordinates that they represent. Or, to put it in the language of
psychoanalysis, there is an important difference between ‘ego-libido’ and ‘object-
libido’. The former refers to that which is invested in professional activities and the
latter pertains to an individual’s personal life. The whole wager in the recent
literature on ‘work-life balance’ in the behavioral sciences and organizational theory
revolves around asking a simple question: What is the proportion of the libido that is
invested in the ‘ego’ and what is the proportion of the libido that is invested in the
‘object’? What furthermore are the sublimatory transformations that result when the
affects attached to one form of libido are channelized into the other since in
narcissistic states, the ego becomes an object for itself. So, for instance, an individual
may try to derive a competitive advantage at work or at home by taking up only one
of these libidinal channels. This is often the case when stress builds up beyond the
capacity of employees to work-through effectively.
WORK AND LOVE
But the Freudian challenge has always been existential: it demands the ability to
both work and play, to work and love, and not a make a reductive choice between
one or the other. What psychoanalysts like Kets de Vries do then is to return us to
the Freudian challenge and help us to re-wire if necessary the sublimatory channels
so that we can experience a sense of existential ‘flow’ in our lives whether we are at
work or at play. And, above all, learn to make existential transitions between these

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realms without letting the unconscious flip open. The importance of the four
existential tenets mentioned in the title of this book relates to the fact that libidinal
blockages in the form of ‘inhibitions, symptoms, and anxiety’ are most likely to
emerge in these areas. These are the areas where it is most difficult to think-through
with existential clarity since they are rooted in the unconscious value systems of
individuals and organizations. It is therefore not enough to situate these tenets only
on the plane of the symbolic, but inquire into what its libidinal economy might be,
and why they are difficult to change.
INSEAD WORKSHOPS
A management development workshop or a leadership training workshop for Kets
de Vries is an opportunity to ask executives to come to terms with their value system
(of which they may or not be fully ‘conscious’), and then ‘situate’ that value system
both in terms of a symbolic economy and its underlying libidinal economy. What
each of these 28 essays tries to do then is to set out the intellectual background
necessary to do so from a range of disciplines – especially the history of ideas – in
order to prepare the existential ground for an executive, a manager, a leader, or an
employee to learn to lead with a greater degree of consciousness of ‘who’ or ‘what’
are unconsciously motivating him to lead or to follow. These INSEAD workshops
provide a safety net where it becomes possible to work through transferentially the
existential co-ordinates that structure the psyche of participants so that they come
away with a greater sense of authenticity about who they are and what they would
like to be in the future. This is an existential prerequisite for leading a life without
symptomatic impediments or symptomatic self-disruptions. Kets de Vries is haunted
by the idea that executives do not stop to think through their own motivational or
volitional structures and let their professional drive be determined completely by the
forces of competition rather than by a value system of their own choosing that will
help them to attain and maintain a sense of authenticity. This is the typical and oft-
discussed problem of ‘life and death in the executive fast lane’, where hectic activity,
chronic busyness, and an endless sense of physical movement are conflated with
progress for the organization, and the sense of having a career for executives. These

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false beliefs – if they remain unexamined (which is often the case) last until such a
point that an executive falls seriously ill. So it is only with the advent of a serious
health problem that there arises any need to think-through and work-through the
meaning of life for most executives.
WHEN EXECUTIVES FALL ILL
But, when crisis strikes and executives fall ill, it is often too late to make an effective
re-start. We have all heard of executives who will not slow down even after a
coronary since they have not taken the trouble to develop the spiritual resources
necessary to navigate the ‘dark night of the soul.’ These four tenets then, if examined
at depth, in the context of both managerial and leadership development programs,
will give executives a better understanding of how, and in what proportion, they
allocate their libido to the forms of existential satisfactions afforded by these
fundamental tenets. And, furthermore, a set of psychic equations can be developed
on a case-by-case basis in order to situate executives in terms of their ego defences.
Who uses what as a mask of death? What is the extent to which the quest for sex or
money is effective? At what point, if any, will executives yearn for happiness? What
if anything can be done to prepare for the inevitability of death? These then are the
sort of questions – which we are more likely to find in the writings of French
existentialist philosophers – that have now moved centre-stage (given the enormous
responsibility that society has located in business men and business faculty as the
engines of progress in the contemporary economy).
CONCLUSION
The challenge that Kets de Vries and his colleagues in the psychoanalytically-
informed section of the behavioral sciences have taken up at INSEAD and elsewhere
then is precisely this challenge to rethink the basics of human striving. The human
quest for authenticity then is both a form of idealism and a form of existential pragmatism.
It stems from the Shakesperian injunction: ‘Above all to thine own self be true…’ The
executive is not doing anybody a favour by doing so since if he fails to do so, he will
fall ill. Those who are cynical and remind us that we live in a corrupt world often
forget this simple truth. The subject falls ill because he is attempting to do things

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beyond what his psyche will permit him to work-through (in terms of the affects that
emerge when he attempts to do so). Having clarity about a value system then and
living according to its promptings can be compared to the safety provided by the
Freudian pleasure (i.e. homeostatic) principle; what is beyond this domain of safety
is the repetition compulsion which partakes of the death instinct. Not only will the
approach that Kets de Vries advocates in this book prevent the acting-out of
unconscious conflicts in decision-making situations, it also reduce the possibility that
executives will suffer an irreversible reduction in their energy and motivational
levels that emerges as cynicism and ‘learned helplessness’. For those who are willing
to think existentially, then, authenticity (i.e. living and ‘leading consciously’ in
relation to a value system) is a necessary condition to remaining alive and well and
not an option that can be exercised if it is politically expedient to do so. This is one of
the most important lessons that we can learn from the psychoanalysis of
management. This is a book that every educated executive, leader, and manager
should read. It will not only make it possible for them to lead, as Adrian Carr put it
elsewhere, ‘in a psychoanalytically informed way’; it will also make their lives and
careers a lot more meaningful.
SHIVA KUMAR SRINIVASAN