Organizations as Psychic Prisons

Summary:

Chapter Seven "Exploring Plato's Cave:  Organizations as Psychic Prisons" describes the idea that "organizations are ultimately created and sustained by conscious and unconscious processes, with the notion that people actually become imprisoned in or confined by the images, ideas, thoughts, and actions to which these processes give rise.  The metaphor encourages us to understand that while organizations may be socially constructed realities, these constructions are often attributed an existence and power of their own that allow them to exercise a measure of control over their creators" (p. 207).  Morgan's idea of a psychic prison comes from Plato's The Republic allegory of an underground cave where people are chained so they can't move and they can only see the cave wall in front of them.  In the cave dwellers reality, there are only the shadows on the cave wall, the sounds from outside the cave, etc.  They construct their reality and truth from what they can experience from their limited perspective.  If someone from the outside came in and attempted to describe what the world was like outside of the cave, the cave dwellers would have difficulty finding meaning in this new knowledge and would likely cling to their familiar way of seeing the world.  This would be their psychic prison.  Morgan uses this metaphor to describe how people in organizations can "be trapped by favored ways of thinking" and "by unconscious processes".  This metaphor does much to help us understand why organizational change is so difficult.

Morgan discusses the relations between the conscious and unconscious in terms of 1) organization and repressed sexuality (the application of Freudian theory),  2) organization and the patriarchal family ( how patriarchy operates as a kind of conceptual prison that give rise and dominance to males and male values), 3) organization, death, and immortality (understanding organizations in terms of the quest for immortality), 4) organization and anxiety (looking at the impact of childhood defenses against anxiety on the adult personality), 5) organization, dolls and teddy bears (understanding the significance of transitional phenomena in organizational life), and 6) organization, shadow and archetype (the application of Carl Jung's work in terms of understanding the "general relations between internal and external life and the role that archetypes play in shaping our understanding of the external world" p.231).