The Collective Unconscious in the Organization An existential, contextual and symbolic reading

 

MIDORI INSIGHTS

The Collective Unconscious in the Organization

An existential, contextual and symbolic reading

By Matthieu Poirot, social psychologist, Doctor in Management Sciences

We still too often picture the organization as a rational mechanism in which decisions would obey calculation alone. Field experience tells another story. Beneath the surface of organization charts and processes flows a collective psychic life that quietly shapes behaviors, loyalties and conflicts, all the more so in times of transformation. I propose to call this life the collective unconscious of the organization, and to take it seriously not as a convenient metaphor but as an object of work. We must first agree on what it is. In my view, it is neither a reservoir of free-floating archetypes nor merely the theater of archaic anxieties. It is a relational, narrative and symbolic fabric whose primary function is to protect us from existential insecurity.

1. An unconscious in the service of ontological security

We are the only living beings to become aware, early on, of our own finitude. From this awareness arises a particular, non-specific anxiety that has no precise object and therefore cannot be resolved directly: the anxiety of death, of solitude and of meaninglessness. To avoid being overwhelmed by it, we dilute it in social belonging. This is where the primary function of the organizational collective unconscious resides: to provide ontological validation, that feeling of being useful and desirable within a relational context, which strengthens the sense of Self.

Laing’s work on ontological insecurity, its sociological extension in Giddens, and terror management theory shed light on this mechanism: a major share of collective behavior aims to maintain a worldview that confers order, meaning and value. The organization, in this sense, is a device for existential transcendence. It answers a metaphysical question with a relational answer.

To the question “why do I live”, the organization answers “whom I live for”.

2. A narrative and symbolic substance

What is this unconscious made of? Of narratives, above all. The collective imaginary, to borrow from Florence Giust-Desprairies, is the set of memory traces contained in the narratives that circulate within the organization and organize themselves, unbeknownst to the group, into a meaningful whole. It works through images, analogies, stories and rituals. It cannot be decreed; it is told.

At the heart of this substance lies the founding myth. The most frequent is that of the golden age: the age of the pioneers who brought the organization into being, guardians of the values of a collective experienced as egalitarian. The myth legitimizes the raison d’être, selects those who adhere to it, sets the implicit relational rules and inscribes the collective in a shared duration. This is why no founding myth can be removed without threatening the very identity of the collective. The leader who seeks to shake up the organization without being aware of this is aiming, unknowingly, at a symbolic destruction.

3. The great ledger of justice

This unconscious is not only narrative; it also keeps accounts. I call the great ledger of justice the implicit knowledge of each person’s merits and debts, which structures the sense of justice within the collective and the degree of legitimation of its members. The organization keeps track, without always being able to say so, of invisible contributions, unkept promises, loyalties and secrets. Debts of recognition accumulate there silently, like financial debts, until the day the system can no longer honor them.

The collective unconscious keeps the accounts.

This dimension, borrowed from Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy’s contextual therapy and transposed to the organization, is decisive: it makes justice, and not anxiety alone, the driving force of collective dynamics. A manager who ignores this great ledger risks being cast as a scapegoat; one who tends to it builds legitimacy.

4. When the collective unconscious becomes contaminated

When the three pillars of a healthy relational system, time, justice and place, are durably violated, psychological debts accumulate and are shared through everyday exchanges. Excessive social sharing of negative experience becomes collective rumination. Step by step, an implicit conspiracy theory takes shape, built on a triptych I regularly encounter: they think we are insignificant, someone is doing it on purpose, the organization is inherently unhealthy.

The group dynamic no longer seeks solutions; it seeks a culprit. This is what I call the paranoid group dynamic. It reactivates the scapegoat logic described by René Girard: a single target onto which violence is deflected in order to appease the collective, to the point of denying that target its membership in common humanity. When collective paranoia contaminates an organization, the first casualty is dialogue. Influential leaders, resonating with these projections, live off them and amplify them, casting themselves as saviors in order to legitimize themselves.

5. The leader, coupling point with the Shadow

The collective unconscious meets the individual unconscious at the precise point of leadership. A person placed in a leadership position by a collective stands a very high chance of being manipulated by this collective unconscious into becoming its hero, appropriating as their own qualities that come from outside. The collective unconscious then allies itself with the person’s Shadow, in Jung’s sense, that part of ourselves we do not recognize as our own. The position becomes a mask, the ego inflates at the expense of the Self, and the capacity to step back disappears.

To this is added the question of the ghost. When a past could neither be celebrated nor its grief expressed, its emotional charge remains and unconsciously structures the present, fixating the collective on the settlement of a debt rather than on projection toward the future. The leader may then carry the group’s projections and make others pay a debt contracted elsewhere, which is a destructive legitimacy, or on the contrary share a surplus of recognition in the form of self-giving, which is a constructive legitimacy.

6. At the confluence of family and organization

The organizational collective unconscious is never purely organizational. Each person stands at the confluence of several relational systems, among them the family and the organization. What I call resonance is the cross-projection of the Shadow between these systems: a family inheritance, loyalties and permissions to succeed received in childhood are replayed, without our knowledge, on the organizational stage. This is why the practitioner must know their own inheritance and their own system of projection before claiming to hold an ethical equidistance. One does not read a collective’s unconscious from a neutral point of view, but from a place one must have brought to awareness.

7. Raising awareness rather than interpreting

What, then, is to be done with such an unconscious? My choice is not to interpret it in the analytic manner, but to raise the collective’s level of systemic awareness. The point is to move from first-order change, solving a problem, to second-order change, understanding the dynamic in order to transform. A founding myth cannot be removed, but a ghost can be honored through ritual, the collective history can be restored through a process of exoneration that suspends the cycle of vengeance without imposing either reparation or forgiveness, and projection toward the future can thus be reopened.

Working on the collective unconscious is therefore neither psychologizing individuals nor designating culprits. It is making a collective more aware of itself, and thereby more capable of regulating itself. It is, ultimately, the condition of genuinely sustainable performance: an organization that has made peace with its history frees the energy it devoted to settling its debts and makes it available for cooperation and the creation of value.

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Further reading

Becker, E. (1973). Boszormenyi-Nagy, I. Giddens, A. (1991). Girard, R. (1982). Giust-Desprairies, F. (2003). Jung, C. G. Laing, R. D. (1960). Ricœur, P. (1990, 2004). Poirot, M., Les dettes psychologiques au travail (L’Harmattan) and Arrêtez de vous épuiser (Eyrolles).

 

About the author

Matthieu Poirot is a social psychologist and Doctor in Management Sciences (Paris II Assas). Founder of Midori Consulting, he is the creator of Intervention Contextuelle Intégrative (ICI®), a methodology for regulating complex psychosocial crises and organizational psychological debts. He is the author of Les dettes psychologiques au travail (L’Harmattan) and Arrêtez de vous épuiser(Eyrolles). Contact: matthieu.poirot@midori-consulting.eu · www.midori-consulting.eu