Psychoanalysis and management: the strange meeting of two concepts

Psychoanalysis and management are “strangers” to one another for epistemological reasons mainly related to their different spiritual fathers, scientific goals, validation criteria and dominant methodologies. However, some of these spiritual fathers did, in the early twentieth century, have the intuition of interesting partial convergence. Today, there is some good research, even if marginal, in both the managerial and psychoanalytic fields, being conducted at the intersection of psychoanalysis and management. This research focuses more on a psychoanalytical attentiveness to management acts than on a managerial use of psychoanalysis, which would, in fact, contradict basic psychoanalytic hypotheses and methodologies.