Psychic Prison Metaphor. Images of Organization Gareth Morgan

1. Psychic Prison Metaphor
Mona Mostafa El-Ashry
DBA at Cairo University

2. Agenda
1. Introduction to the science
2. Psychic Prison Metaphor “Trapped
Areas”
3. Conclusion
4. Discussion

3. Introduction to Psychology

4. Psychology Science
• .The word “Psychology" comes
from the Greek word psyche
meaning "breath, spirit, soul", and
the Greek word logia meaning the
study of something.
• Psychology is the science of the
mind and behavior
• The science dealing with the mind
and mental processes especially in
relation to behavior.

5. Psychology Branches
• Analytic psychology (analytical psychology) the
system of psychology founded by Carl Gustav Jung,
based on the concepts of the collective unconscious
and the complex.
• Clinical psychology the use of psychologic
knowledge and techniques in the treatment of persons
with emotional difficulties.
• Community psychology the application of
psychological principles to the study and support of
the mental health of individuals in their social sphere.
• Criminal psychology the study of the mentality, the
motivation, and the social behavior of criminals.

6. Psychology Branches
• Depth psychology the study of unconscious mental
processes.
• developmental psychology the study of changes in
behavior that occur with age.
• Dynamic psychology stressing the causes and
motivations for behavior.
• Environmental psychology study of the effects of
the physical and social environment on behavior.
• Social psychology that focuses on social interaction,
on the ways in which actions of others influence the
behavior of an individual.

7. Psychology Characteristics
1. Introversion or extroversion - Are they loners or
social butterflies?
2. Openness - Are they likely to listen and think or are
their ways hardened into unchangeable ruts?
3. Honesty - Are they true to their inner motivations or
do they put on a facade?
4. Intelligence - What level of education do they have?
What vocabulary do they possess?
5. Compassion - Will they empathize (or at least
sympathize) with others or are they can only think of
their own agenda?

8. The big 5 personality traits

9. 1. Neuroticism
• Tendency to experience negative
emotions, such as anger, anxiety, or
depression
• Low levels of neuroticism indicate
emotional stability
• High levels of neuroticism increase the
likelihood of experiencing negative
emotions
• Contrasts emotional stability and even-
temperedness with negative emotionality,
such as feeling anxious, nervous, sad,
and tense

10. 2. Extraversion
• Characterized by positive
emotions, and the tendency
to seek out stimulation and
the company of others
• Extroverts tend to be more
physically and verbally
active whereas introverts
are independent, reserved,
steady and like being alone

11. 3. Openness to experience
• General appreciation for art,
emotion, adventure, unusual
ideas, imagination, and variety
of experience
• Relates to intellect, openness
to new ideas,
• Describes the breadth, depth,
originality, and complexity of
an individual’s mental and
experiential life

12. 4. Agreeableness
• A tendency to be
compassionate and
cooperative rather than
suspicious and antagonistic
• Includes traits such as
altruism, tender-mindedness,
trust, and modesty
• Agreeable people can be
described as altruistic, gentle,
kind, sympathetic and warm.

13. 5. Conscientiousness
• Tendency to show self-discipline,
and aim for achievement against
measures or outside
expectations.
• The focused person concentrates
on a limited number of goals but
strives hard to reach them,
• Flexible person is more impulsive
and easier to persuade from one
task to another

14. Sigmund Freud Theory
• Freud believed that personality
had three components, all of which
must work together to produce our
complex behaviors.
• These three components or
aspects were the Id, Ego, and the
Superego. It was Freud’s belief
that these three components
needed to be well-balanced to
produce reasonable mental health
and stability in an individual.

15. Psychic Prison Metaphor

16. Prison
• A place for the confinement
and punishment of persons
convicted of crimes
• A building in which people are
legally held as a punishment
for a crime they have
committed

17. Psychic Prison Metaphor
• Human beings have a knack for getting
trapped in webs of their own creation.”
(Morgan p. 207)
• Gareth Morgan Intended to depict human
condition of being trapped in:
1. Modes of Thinking
2. Constructions of Perceived Reality
• People may become “imprisoned”,
“confined” or “controlled” by, or within
organizations

18. Psychic Prison Metaphor
• View organizations as systems that get trapped in
their own thoughts and actions
• This metaphor joins the idea that organization are
psychic phenomena, in the sense that they are
ultimately created and sustained by conscious and
unconscious processes, with the notion that people
can actually become imprisoned or confined by the
images, ideas, thoughts and actions to which these
processes give rise

19. Plato’s ‘Cave’ Allegory
• How does Morgan relate Plato’s
allegory of the cave to
constructions of reality within
organizations?
• How does he relate it to change
resistance within organizations?

20. Plato’s ‘Cave’ Allegory
• First exploration of Psychic Prison
metaphor by Greek Philosopher Plato
in his work ‘The Republic’ (c. 380 BC)
• Prisoners were chained to an
underground cave wall
• They could not move, or view the
outside world
• Interpretation of shadows comprised
their entire reality

21. Plato’s ‘Cave’ Allegory
• A liberated prisoner discovered that the world beyond the
shadows was richer, more complex & rewarding
• Upon return to cave,
• His experiences terrified compatriots
• He could not remain & stagnate
• They could not change or move forward
• They perceived him as “dangerous”

22. Plato’s ‘Cave’ Allegory

23. Plato’s ‘Cave’ Allegory
• Only by recognizing
that your reality may
not be that of others is
when you start to exit
the cave.

24. • Gareth Morgan use this image of a
psychic prison to explore some of the
ways in which organizations and their
members become trapped by
constructions of reality that, at best,
give an imperfect grasp on the world.
We will start by examining how people
in organizations can become trapped
by different ways.

26. 1. The trap of favored ways of
thinking (The myopia)
• The Icarus Paradox: Icarus was the
figure in Greek mythology who,
flying with his artificial wax wings,
soared so close to the sun that the
wings melted, plunging him to his
death.
• The power created through the
wings ultimately led to his downfall.
In a similar way, strong corporate
cultures can become pathological.

27. 1. The trap of favored ways of
thinking (The myopia)
• Powerful visions of the future can
lead to blind spots.
• Ways of seeing become ways of
not seeing.
• All the forces that help people and
their organizations create the
shared systems of meaning, can
become constraints that prevent
them from acting in other ways.

28. 1. The trap of favored ways of
thinking (The myopia)
• In times of change it is possible to look at
almost any industry and find once
successful firms struggling to survive.
• In 1982, Tom Peters and Robert Waterman
wrote about Excellent Companies such as
IBM.
• Their particular style of excellence had
become a trap that prevented them from
thinking in new ways and from transforming
themselves to meet new challenges.

29. 1. The trap of favored ways of
thinking (The myopia)
• In Automobile industry
• The OPEC oil crisis of 1973 the Japanese
automobile industry began to make massive
inroads on the North American market.
Caught up in the mind-set of the American
way of producing cars, the large U.S.
• The large firms ignored the potential of small,
fuel-efficient cars
• The myopia allowed the Japanese to
capture a stronghold on their traditional

30. 1. The trap of favored ways of
thinking (The myopia)
• In the computer industry
• where IBM established a dominant position in
the 1970s and early 1980s. The IBM view of
the world was dominated by "hardware" and
the development of large powerful computer
systems. It was a view that blocked out the
possibility of a computer industry driven by
software and networks of "PCs."
• The myopia created the opportunity for Bill
Gates's Microsoft and other organizations to
create a world completely at odds with the one
in which IBM wanted to live

31. 1. The trap of favored ways of
thinking (Groupthink)
What is Groupthink?
 Is a psychological
phenomenon that occurs
within a group of people in
which the desire for
harmony or conformity in the
group results in an irrational
or dysfunctional decision-
making outcome.

32. 1. The trap of favored ways of
thinking (Groupthink)
• Defined by Psychologist, Irving Janis in
1952, Organizational, social & cultural
traps that retard problem solving by
preventing recognition of alternate
avenues of thought, discussion &
action
• Group illusions of invulnerability,
morality & unanimity foster “assumed
consensus” which inhibit expressions of
doubt & engender misguided decision-
making

33. 2. Organization and the
unconscious
• Much of the rational and taken-for-granted
reality of everyday life expresses preoccupations
and concerns that lie beneath the level of
conscious awareness

34. 2. Organization and the
unconscious
• Sigmund Freud, who argued that the
unconscious is created as humans repress their
innermost desires and private thoughts.
• He believed that in order to live in harmony with
one another, humans must moderate and
control their impulses,
• And that the unconscious and culture are really
two sides of the same coin.

35. 2. Organization and the
unconscious
• He saw culture as the visible surface of the
"repression“ Coin that accompanied the
development of human sociability.
• It was in this sense that he talked about the
essence of society being the repression of the
individual Culture, and about the essence of the
individual as being the repression of himself or
herself Unconscious.

36. 2. Organization and the
unconscious
• Since Freud's early work, the whole field of
psychoanalysis has become a battleground
between rival theories of the origin and nature of the
unconscious.
• While Freud placed importance on its links with
various forms of repressed sexuality, others have
stressed its links with the structure of the
patriarchal family, with fear of death, with anxieties
associated with early infancy, with the collective
unconscious, and so on.

37. 2. Organization and the
unconscious
• Common to all these different interpretations is
the idea that humans live their lives as prisoners
or products of their individual and collective
psychic history.
• The past is seen as living in the present through
the unconscious, often in ways that create
distorted and uncomfortable relations with the
external world

39. Repressed Sexuality
• When leaders and workers have strong desires
to control and become disciplined in every
aspect of life.
• Dysfunctional story: social order to maintained
through discipline and control
• Freud's theory of human personality emphasizes
that character traits in adult life emerge from
childhood experience
• F. Taylor (Taylorism) exemplified by this Psychic
Prison

40. Repressed Sexuality
• F. Taylor (Taylorism) exemplified by
this Psychic Prison
• Frederick Taylor, the creator of "scientific
management," was a man totally preoccupied
with control
• He was an obsessive, compulsive character.
• His activities at home, in the garden, and on the
golf course, as well as at work, were dominated
by programs and schedules, planned in detail
and rigidly followed

41. F. Taylor (Taylorism) exemplified by this
Psychic Prison
• These traits were evident in Taylor's personality
from an early age.
• Living in a well-to-do household dominated by
strong puritan values (emphasizing work,
discipline, and the ability to keep one's emotions
decently in check), Taylor quickly learned how to
regiment himself.
• Childhood friends described the meticulous
"scientific" approach that he brought to their
games

42. Repressed Sexuality
• Defense mechanisms:
1. Repression: ”pushing down "unwanted
impulses and ideas
2. Denial: refusal to acknowledge an
impulse-evoking fact, feeling or memory
3. Displacement: shifting impulses
aroused by one person or situation to a
safer target
4. Fixation: rigid commitment to a
particular attitude or behavior

43. Repressed Sexuality
• Defense mechanisms “cont.,”:
5. Projection: attribution of one’s own
feelings and impulses to others
6. Rationalization: creation of elaborate
schemes of justification that disguise
underlying motives and intentions
7. Idealization: playing up the good aspects
of a situation to protect oneself from the
bad
8. Splitting: isolating different elements of
experience, often to protect the good from
the bad.

44. Organization and The Patriarchal
Family
• On the relationship between
gender and organization, the
dominant influence of the male is
rooted in the hierarchical
relations found in the patriarchal
family
• Key organizational members
also often cultivate fatherly roles
by acting as monitors

45. Organization and The Patriarchal
Family
• The psychic structure of the male
dominated family tends to create a
feeling impotence accompanied by fear
of and dependency of authority
• So long as organizations are dominated
by patriarchal values, the role of women
in organization will always be played out
on male terms.

46. Organization and Death &
Immortality
• Ernest Becker in his book The Denial of
Death views, humans spend much of their
life attempting to deny the oncoming reality
of death by pushing their morbid fears deep
into the recesses of their unconscious.
• He in effect reinterprets the Freudian theory
of repressed sexuality, linking childhood
fears associated with birth and the
development of sexuality with fears relating
to our own inadequacies, vulnerability, and
mortality.

47. Organization and Death &
Immortality
• In creating organization we create structures of activity
that are larger than life and that often survive for
generations.
• We ourselves find meaning and permanence. As we
invest ourselves in our work, our roles become our
realities
• Many of our most basic conceptions of organization
hinge on the idea of making the complex simple.
• In much of science and in everyday life we manage
our world by simplifying it, because in making it simple
we make it amenable to control

48. Organization and Anxiety
• Melanie Klein who have spent a great deal of time
tracing the impact of childhood defenses against
anxiety on the adult personality
• Klein`s approach to the analysis of object relations
suggests that adult experience reproduces defenses
against anxiety originally formed in early childhood
• From this perspective, it is possible to understand the
structure, process, culture, and even the environment
of an organization in terms of the unconscious
defense mechanisms developed by its members to
cope with individual and collective anxiety

49. Organization and Anxiety
• To cope with anxiety:
a) We depend on leader to control us
b) God will save us
c) We make enemies even when there
aren’t any.

50. Organization and Anxiety
• Bion has shown different kinds of defense against
anxiety:
1. Dependency
2. Pairing
3. Fight or flight

51. Organization and Anxiety
1. Dependency
• It is assumed that the group needs some form of leadership to
resolve its predicament.
• The group's attention is split from the problems at hand and
projected onto a particular individual.
• Group members often proclaim helplessness in coping with the
situation and idealize the characteristics of the chosen leader.
• The leader often fails to live up to expectations and is soon
replaced by another person, often one of the least able
members of the group.
• He or she in turn usually fails, and so the problems continue,
perhaps leading to fragmentation and in-fighting within the
group

52. Organization and Anxiety
2. Pairing
• This involves that members of the group come to
believe that Figure will emerge to deliver the
group from its fear and anxiety.
• The group's dependence on the emergence of
such a figure again paralyzes its ability to take
effective action.

53. 3. Fight or Flight

54. Organization and Anxiety
3. Fight or Flight
• In which the group tends to project its fears on an
enemy of some kind.
• The enemy may take the form of a competitor in the
environment, a government regulation, a public
attitude, or a particular person or organization that
appears to be "out to get us."
• Time and energy tend to be devoted to fighting or
protecting the group from the perceived danger rather
than taking a more balanced look at the problems that
are evident in the situation.

55. Organization, Dolls & Teddy
Bears

56. Organization, Dolls & Teddy
Bears
• “Transitional objects” or known as
“Transitional Phenomena” in the sense
that adults, like children, can become
overly committed to the comfort and
security provided by their new teddy
bears
• Psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott has
developed the Kleinian theory of object
relations in a way that emphasizes the
key role of such "transitional objects" in
human development.

57. Organization, Dolls & Teddy
Bears
• He suggests that they are critical in developing
distinctions between the "me" and the "not me,"
creating what he calls an "area of illusion" that
helps the child develop relations with the outside
world.
• In effect, these objects provide a bridge between
the child's internal and external worlds.
• These objects and experiences may also
acquire the status of a fixation that we are
unable to relinquish.

58. Organization, Dolls & Teddy
Bears
• In such cases, adult development
becomes stuck and distorted, a rigid
commitment to a particular aspect of our
world making it difficult for us to move on
and deal with the changing nature of our
surroundings.
• The theories of transitional phenomena
and associated areas of illusion add to
our understanding of how we engage
and construct organizational reality

59. Organization, Dolls & Teddy
Bears

60. Organization, Dolls & Teddy
Bears
• Change Agent
• Consultants and other change agents often
become transitional objects for their client firms:
The client becomes crucially dependent on the
change agent's advice in relation to every move
• Father or mother may have to help his or her child
find a substitute for Teddy, a change agent—
whether a social revolutionary or a paid
consultant—must usually help his or her target
group to relinquish what is held dear before they
can move on

61. Organization, Shadow and Archetype
“Jung Theory”
• Freud was preoccupied with the demands that the
body, as carrier of the psyche, placed on the
unconscious, Jung cut loose from this constraint,
viewing the psyche as part of a universal and
transcendental reality.
• As his thinking developed, he came to place
increasing emphasis on the idea that the human
psyche is part of a "collective unconscious" that
transcends the limits of space and time

62. Organization, Shadow and Archetype
“Jung Theory”
• Jung dematerialized our
understanding of the psyche just as
Einstein, whom Jung knew well,
dematerialized our understanding of
the physical world.
• Jung came to see matter and psyche
as two different aspects of one and the
same thing.

63. Organization, Shadow and Archetype
“Jung Theory”
• The physical energy that Einstein
saw as underlying all matter came
to be paralleled in Jung's work by a
conception of psychic energy,
which, like physical energy, was
open to many kinds of
transformation through conscious
and unconscious activity

64. Organization, Shadow and Archetype
“Jung Theory
• One of the most distinctive features of Jung's analysis
is his emphasis on the role of Archetypes which
literally means “Original pattern,"
• Archetypes are structures of thought and experience,
perhaps embodied in the structure of the psyche or
inherited experience, that lead us to mold our
understanding of our world in a patterned way.
• Jung encourages us to understand the general
relations between internal and external life and the
role that archetypes play in shaping our understanding
of the external world.

65. Organization, Shadow and Archetype
“Jung Theory
Shadow of Organization
• He invites us to examine the repressed
human side of organization lying beneath
the surface of formal rationality.
• Jung used the term shadow to refer to
unrecognized or unwanted drives and
desires, the other side of the conscious ego,
standing in relation to the ego as a kind of
submerged opposite that at the same time
strives for completeness with the ego.

66. Organization, Shadow and Archetype
“Jung Theory

67. Organization, Shadow and Archetype
“Jung Theory

68. Organization, Shadow and Archetype
“Jung Theory
• Jungian theory explains that we make
decisions based on the combination on
how we perceive reality (Sensation and
Intuition).
• How we judge reality ( Thinking and
Feeling)

69. Organization, Shadow and Archetype
“Jung Theory
• Jung suggests that people tend to process data about
the world in terms of sense or intuition, and to make
judgments in terms of thought or feeling.
• According to which functions are dominant (or in the
shadow), we can identify four ways of dealing with the
world and of shaping one's reality:
1. ST
2. IT
3. SF
4. IF

70. Organization, Shadow and Archetype
“Jung Theory

71. The unconscious: A creative and
destructive force
• Delahanty and Gary Gemmill, who
suggest that we should understand the
role of the unconscious in organizational
life as a kind of "black hole.“
• In a similar way, the invisible dimension
of organization that we have described
as the unconscious can swallow and trap
the rich energies of people involved in
the organizing process.

72. The unconscious: A creative and
destructive force
• The challenge of understanding the significance of the
unconscious in organization also carries a promise:
that it is possible to release trapped energy in ways
that may promote creative transformation and change
and create more integrated relations among
individuals, groups, organizations, and their
environments.

73. The unconscious: A creative and
destructive force
• For Plato, this freedom rests in the pursuit of
knowledge about the world.
• For the psychoanalysts, it has rested in
knowledge of the unconscious and in the
capacity of humans to create a better world
through an improved understanding of how we
construct and interpret our realities.

74. Discussion

75. Psychic Prison Metaphor
• The metaphor Science
Psychology Science
• The Organization Definition
• A systems that are trapped in their own thoughts
and actions

76. Psychic Prison Metaphor
Characteristics
1. Resistance to change
2. Constraints
3. Ways of seeing become ways of not seeing Transitional
objects
4. Change agent
5. Escaping from reality
6. Anxiety
7. Unconscious level of mind
8. Kind of “black hole” invisible dimension that can trap the rich
energies of people
9. What happens at surface level must take into account the
hidden structure and dynamics of the human psyche

77. Psychic Prison Metaphor
Concepts & Overlapping Area
Concepts
1. Unconscious
2. Organization & anxiety
3. Organization & male-controlled family.
4. Organization Shadow refers to unwanted drives
and desires
5. Organization Archetypes are repeated themes of
thought and experience that seem to have
universal significance

78. Psychic Prison Metaphor
Concepts & Overlapping Area
Overlapping Area
• Groupthink
• The trap of favored ways of thinking
• The Myopia

79. Psychic Prison Metaphor
Principles
• Denial
• Displacement
• Fixation
• Projection
• Introjection
• Rationalization
• Reaction formation
• Regression
• Sublimation
• Idealization
• Splitting

80. Psychic Prison Metaphor
Theorists &Theories
• Freudian Theory: A new kind of a contingency theory,
Organizations are shaped not only by their environments, they
are also shaped by their unconscious concerns of their
members and the unconscious forces shaping the societies in
which they exist
• Winnicott has developed the Kleinian theory : Transitional
objects is essential to create the area of illusion that helps the
child develop its relation with the outside world These objects
represent a bridge between the child's internal and external
worlds
• Jung Theory “Archetype & Shadow”
• Bion has shown different kinds of defense against anxiety

81. Strengths & Limitations