Should organizations carry a health warning? Do they have the capacity to get under the skin? How do they cause emotional stress or physical ailments? What are the ailments that different work places infect? What is a healthy organization lower stress, less sickness or systemic effectiveness?And importantly, What do the characteristic patterns of organizational ailments reveal about organizational positioning and strategy in relation to their market and environment? These are crucial questions for directors, managers, HR, consultants, psychotherapists, counselors and the work force.This groundbreaking book seeks to address questions that underlie organizational health and humanity. Each chapter develops the relation between bodily experience of the individual and experience of the body of corporate and social organization. An early chapter addresses the seemingly catastrophic risks of giving birth - to bodily life, emotional liveliness, and belonging. An endnote describes a death and its meaning that, like its earlier bookend, describes how we might be connected in humanity.Leadership that contains anxiety applies the theory and practice of individual, group and organizational dynamics. In being informed by psychoanalysis, group and open-systems theory, this book seeks to develop tools for organizational change not top down or bottom up, but outside in and inside out. How are the individual s defenses against emotional conflicts embodied in the work group? What draws people to specific kinds of workplace and work group culture? How do the complex bodily, emotional and social experiences of work interact? What makes people go sick or stay at work when they are unwell?More than that, how can we begin to define the spirit or soul of an organization in a way that goes beyond its morale, its esprit de corps? And if there is such a thing, how can thoughtfulness about it provide a nourishing skin to keep body and soul together under the fire of overstretched working lives, and the often disjointed complex of inter-related systems that contemporary organizations comprise?"

This book explores developments in psychoanalytic field theory internationally, and their relevance for therapeutic theory and practice. The roots of psychoanalytic field theory can be traced back to the work of Kurt Lewin, and it has taken particular shape in the hands of the Barangers, Bion and Ferro. The book's focus is on developments in field theory post-Bion ('Post-Bionian Field Theory') in Italy, with contributions from Brazil, Serbia and the USA, in the form of chapters by Boffito, Civitarese, Fagundes, Levine, Mazzacane, Mojović, Morgan-Jones and Snell and Penna and Hopper. Among the themes the book explores are the transformative potentials of play and the centrality of dreaming. The book is informed by a psychoanalysis not so much of decoding and archeological uncovering as one of being and becoming, within a shared ‘field’ in which therapist and patient are partners in creating, exploring and developing. The chapter by Mojovíc and the commentary by Penna and Hopper extend the use of field theory: in other historical and geographical developments field theory and group analysis have productively been brought together, notably in Argentina where the two are most closely linked. This book will be essential reading for students and scholars of Psychology and Psychotherapy interested in field theory and contemporary psychoanalysis. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of European Journal of Psychotherapy and Counselling.

Using the frameworks of psychoanalysis, group relations, systemic organisational observation, consulting and research, this book explores the relationship between the health of the work force and the health of organisations. It seeks to do this through an exploration of experience that has three dimensions linked in a single matrix: The bodily, the emotional and the social. This exploration is inspired by Bion's original idea of the protomental matrix from which the group dynamics of basic assumption mentality are derived, leading to his initial ideas about group diseases and their cures.