Symposium Papers

Miranda Alcock 
Shining light into the shadow. 
Three Group Relations Conferences in Apartheid South Africa, designed as an intervention into Gender Dynamics in NGOs, Unions and Universities, were subsumed by urgent emotionally charged concerns about power and authority based on racial inequality. Based on the Harold Bridger model, these conferences illustrate how the sentient preoccupations of an organisation will overwhelm its stated task to attend to its unspoken and unmentionable fundamental concerns.
Bio link: https://www.linkedin.com/in/miranda-alcock-07ba1314/

Kenneth Eisold 
Money is Magic.
The history of money has tended to focus on the coins and other objects that have served in different cultures over the years as the media of exchange, and that has contributed to the common belief that money is actually a specific commodity that was designated at a fixed value, as a standard for purposes of exchange. Now, however, many historians and even economists seem to be coming around to the view that in a world in which money is being constantly created by banks and varied sovereign powers, we actually do not clearly understand what it is. That is, we rely on it, find it indispensable, virtually a form of air our economies breathe, but it eludes our understanding.
This underlying mysterious and elusive property of money, helps to support the common belief that that Wall Street has its “wizards” and “sages” who possess an understanding denied the rest of us, and who are therefore entitled to their disproportionate compensation and profit.
Bio link: www.Keneisold.com

Jack Marmorstein/ Jeff de Klein/ Simon Western 
Poles of Technology: The competing dynamics of monopoly and decentralization.
In today’s technological ecosystem, there’s a polar antagonism between, on the one hand, the forces of centralization, scaling and monopolization, and, on the other hand, fragmentation, local autonomy and mutual incompatibility. Understanding these poles—their economic, phenomenological and psychodynamic consequences—is essential to charting a path that prioritizes individuals over corporations; privacy over big data; and transparent value-exchange over profiteering from surveilled data. This panel will explore emerging alternatives to centralization, and the psychodynamics and experience of the current poles.
Bio links: 
https://cyborgorg.net/jack-marmorstein/
http://www.analyticnetwork.com/assets/dr-simon-western-bio-2015.pdf
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffdekleijn/

Marcela Murarova 
Corporate Social Responsibility and Emotions from Fantasy to Reality: The case of banking industry. 
Banks are reacting slowly to environmental and human rights issues. We interpret this behavior as a defense through fantasy. Relating to realistic situations, we illustrate how emotions could reconnect banks to reality in the context of polarized views.
Bio link: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcela-murarova-8a89b7/

Moritz Senarclens de Grancy/ Rebekka Haug 
Suicide and the Workplace: How psychoanalytic coaching and executive training can help. 
When in 2010 three Renault employees committed suicide in a short period of time, the working conditions in the engineering center of the car manufacturer came under the spotlight of the French authorities. They revealed that the men suffered from increased pressure in the workplace in the wake of a reorganization program. Also in 2010, a series of mysterious deaths brought the Taiwanese Apple supplier Foxconn into disrepute. But even at the management level, suicides are a regular occurrence. Shortly after the suicide of the former Swisscom boss, Carsten Schloter, in 2013, the chief financial officer of a Zurich insurance company, Pierre Wauthier, killed himself. In a farewell letter, the Frenchman Wauthier wrote of pressure from the comany’s board of directors. In early 2014, former German bank manager William Broeksmit hanged himself in his apartment in London. The list of manager suicides is endless and treated as a taboo issue. A lot depends on the working atmosphere in companies, however, suicide is always the endpoint of a bunch of events. Suicides can also trigger further suicides. In fact, suicide is in some ways contagious. What can a company do if confronted with suicide? In our presentation, we convey the contents of our management training “Suicide and the Workplace: How psychoanalytic coaching can help”. We talk about suicidality, suicide and suicide prevention, and discuss the emotional side of suicide, such as hopelessness, feelings of powerlessness, self-aggression and other affective states. Coaching by psychoanalytically trained coaches makes it possible to treat serious existential crises. We illustrate this with relevant psychoanalytic approaches and offer further thinking from Lacanian psychoanalysis: Freud’s thesis of a death drive in the context of the repetition phenomen, the passage-à-l’acte and the social band. We show practical ways of crisis intervention, affect-compensation and techniques such as containing and metaphorization for use in organizations. Special aspects, like suicide among older workers are discussed. Legal aspects are also taken up.