INDIVIDUATION AND ORGANIZATIONS

by Martha Blake, MBA, LP, NCPsyA,
Psychologist Resident
Dunbar Carpenter, PsyD,  Supervisor

Life in the post-modern world is organizational life. Individuation, the journey towards psychological wholeness, occurs in the context of the organizations with which we engage. Both individual and organizational psyches are living systems and as such share attributes. The journey to wholeness is retold in myths and fairytales, in the same way the alchemists projected it into matter. Nowadays, facets of the individuation process are mirrored in the physical and social sciences. In the corporate world, people project aspects of their psyche onto money. The historical connection of money to ritual and sacrifice resides in the collective unconscious and constellates in organizational life. Our experience of consciousness and unconsciousness, our complexes, behaviors, values, defences, relationships and communication style reflect our individuation process. Our encounters with organizations do not determine us. Rather they offer us a venue for engaging with the collective and for experiencing our unconscious in that engagement. Engaging with others in organizations perturbs us, provides interactions that allow our personality to unfold along the edge of our shared experiences. The interactions between individual and organization are autopoietic, self-generating, mixtures of emotion and rationality. The interactions of individuals and organizations are encounters with destiny.