第4章

Perceiving the Soul

1

The Wilderness Within Ancient Views of the Soul

The journey is difficult, immense, at times impossible, yet that will not deter some of us from attempting it.… I can at best report only from my own wilderness. The important thing is that each man possess such a wilderness and that he consider what marvels are to be observed there.

Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey

Andy is in his mid-thirties. He graduated with an M.B.A. from a prestigious university and sees himself as particularly skilled in transition management. He describes himself as comfortable with ambiguity and positive in his outlook on managing change—confident that he can help others with the difficult task of organizational transition.

When a reengineering was announced in his organization, he welcomed the opportunity for himself and his organization, which he saw as too insular and too reluctant to change. Told that an entire layer of senior administrators would be removed, he remained optimistic even though he was in one of the positions likely to be terminated. "Everyone was walking around with their heads down and filled with gloom," he said of his peers, "but I'm feeling upbeat about the changes. Sure, there'll be pain, but I'm not a victim. If I stay with the organization, that'll be fine, and if I don't, that's OK too."

Note: All vignette characters in this book are composites and are not meant to indicate specific individuals; all are identified pseudonymously.

In the next six months, a great deal changed. He found his ideals shattered, first by disquieting minor inconsistencies and later by a feeling of assault on his personal integrity and dignity. He was one of the few administrators among his peers who had not been terminated during the reorganization, but now that seemed a detail to him.

During the course of the transition, an outside consulting firm was hired to evaluate senior managers for potential new roles in the company. Andy's colleagues, subordinates, and superiors were asked to assess his value to the new organization. He was informed, almost by chance in a hallway, that their findings had been communicated to the CEO, who would be reviewing Andy's future in the organization. Andy was told when and where to report for the review. He was also told that a second consulting firm, hired to support employees being terminated, would be available following the interview.

The interview did not go well. There were high hopes for him in the organization, the CEO said, but nothing was mentioned about where Andy would be going or what he might be doing. The feedback on his performance was cursory, with the CEO stating that the consultants' interviews were confidential and therefore could not be discussed. The CEO did mention, however, that Andy didn't seem to be managing the transition very well. He seemed moody and not handling change in a particularly positive manner. The CEO referred obliquely to reports that at times Andy was perceived as losing control. He said that change was painful for everyone, but at Andy's level the expectation was that people should be able to cope. The CEO held out the hope that whatever Andy's new assignment, it would be an opportunity for him to grow and develop.

Andy felt convicted on charges he could not determine, let alone refute. He felt that he was supposed to be pleased with the interview, but what he actually felt was that he was being told he was a reclamation project. His performance ratings during the years of service to the organization had never been anything but positive.

Somehow, and without explanation, he had become a problem that needed to be fixed.

Andy found himself in crisis, a crisis that echoed deep within him. The certainty he had felt about himself was shaken. The self-confident, forward-looking individual he knew himself to be now gave way to new aspects of his personality that seemed foreign and uncomfortable. Something was stirred up within him, feelings and emotions that he had trouble recognizing as his own.

The soul, as I use the word in this book, stands for the multiplicity of selves within each of us; their interactions and struggles are the threads that weave the self together. In tension with this interior complexity are the constant pressures, from within and without, to foreclose the mystery of our many selves. Understandably, we fear that the unknown may be dangerous. But to care for our soul—a timeless struggle made more urgent by modern society—we must combat those forces that would reduce us to just a singular self. The soul represents the mysterious, multifaceted dimension of our personality, never fully known, yet a source of vital influence.

How does such a way of looking at soul become relevant to and reflect our experience in the workplace? How can we bring more of ourselves into the workplace and into our own awareness? When is it we are most likely to confront different parts of ourselves and the organizations we work in?

For Andy, the rupture of his singular self led to a period of deep reflection. He felt as if veil after veil of illusion had been lifted from his sight, as if all he had done to rationalize his image of himself and his image of the organization had suddenly shifted. Where he had seen only individual pain, now he saw patterns of behavior that hurt people. Where he had accepted pain as necessary and inevitable during change, now he saw examples of abuse that were unnecessary and damaging. And more critically, he saw a different picture of himself emerging.

He was not only the strong, willful individual who had previously focused his attention outward, analyzing how others coped and viewing his role as helping others to cope better. Now, feeling vulnerable, he noticed more how much he held back, even from himself, his emotional reactions to events. He became aware that his instinct to analyze others was a protective mechanism, motivated as much by a sense of others' being dangerous as by a wish to help people cope better. And he saw that even his supposed strength at coolly analyzing situations was at times also an urgent attempt to distance emotions.

He described this new awareness of himself as revitalizing, as if he were a diver discovering new treasures beneath the surface of his previous awareness. He specifically discounted these discoveries as major insights; instead he saw that he had been aware of these things before, but never with the same attention and significance. What he found so revitalizing was not the discoveries themselves, but the depth of self that he had not known was waiting there for him. Before, he had been so enamored with his intellectual skills of figuring out and fixing problems that he had never perceived a need to plunge into the murky and shifting recesses of his own mind. Now he laughed at his image of himself as being comfortable with ambiguity; he was actually terrified of it. He had just never considered ambiguity as something that might last long enough to disturb him.

Andy began to express a new kind of confidence, though tentatively. A curtain had been pulled back, revealing his past and hinting at a new possibility for his future; options existed where before there had been linear direction. He saw that his personality had not been shaped entirely by conscious will and effort but rather by what the world threw at him. He had responded to events outside his control and then, after the fact, said he had chosen rational responses. He was not a victim, but neither did he always control events or his responses to them. Andy found this revelation liberating because he had carried into his adult life a terrible burden that he could control events, if only he could figure out the right thing to do.

Andy saw the irony that the CEO's hurtful feedback triggered a personal journey that might not have happened if all had gone well. He was at a loss for words to describe his sadness at the thought that this period of reflection might not have occurred. He imagined himself looking into a mirror and seeing a face appear that had not been there before—and disappearing just as suddenly. The joy at seeing this face was life affirming, but the notion that he might never have glimpsed it was disturbing, filling him with feelings of loss. He thought, however, that he had no intention of thanking the CEO.

Andy did not use the word soul to describe his experience. Yet his "double vision," the face he knew and the other face that appeared for an instant in the mirror, had the quality of multiplicity that is an aspect of soul. Andy was not describing just an insight into his personality. He was describing a mystery, a self he was but dimly aware of, one that had darker features and that contradicted essential aspects of his conscious personality. Yet his experience was of a person finding a relative long thought dead or never born. How could he be whole without this other person? How could he see the world differently, more contoured, and with greater dimension, if not through the eyes of this other face? There were few people he could talk to about this experience, he said. Who would believe him?

In the modern organizations that have developed over the past 150 years of the industrial revolution, there has emerged a concept of an individual personality, shaped by the necessities of work and the internal control individuals are required to have over themselves. This view has created a schism within the psyche of individuals, a fundamental polarization between wanting more control and a desire to experience ourselves as part of a mystery that is beyond our control. We seem often at cross purposes with ourselves, preaching the virtue of control and practicing its opposite.

The soul as multiplicity implies a dimension to the self much greater than what we know about ourselves consciously. Thomas Moore talks of a soul infinite in capacity, full of mystery, and contradictory in its designs over our life. Oscar Wilde, who wrote about the soul from his prison cell, said that only the shallow know themselves: if you know yourself, you have not touched the depths. But to know something of these depths, we first must be able to see in new ways.

Seeing with Soul

I was once in a photography class in Yosemite Valley. Other amateur photographers and I hoped to capture some of the beauty and grandeur of the granite rock faces and flowing waterfalls with our high-tech photographic gear. There was only one problem. It was raining so heavily that there was virtually nothing to see. Clouds covered the mountains, the fields and streams were gray, the movement of the water was almost invisible in the pelting rain. Our cameras were useless; one well-placed drop of rain could short-circuit the electronic brain, making the camera fire repeatedly or shut down entirely. Our instructor, an old hand at the idiosyncrasies of nature photography, cautioned us to remain aware of the constantly shifting light and the changing shapes of the mountains wreathed by the clouds. She encouraged us to see with a "third eye," to practice seeing with heightened awareness. Art, she reminded us, does not reproduce the visible. Art renders visible.

So I was staring at El Capitan with my third eye, only it felt like my two eyes and a headache. There was nothing much to see; the granite rock was almost completely invisible, the trees and streams flat in the dull gray overcast of the day. I was mostly engaged in an internal conversation with myself about not becoming frustrated. "What does it mean to render visible?" I asked myself.

When my attention returned to the mountain, I saw that something was happening. The rain had lessened by degrees, and suddenly feelings within me began to stir. Pulling out my camera, I framed different sections of the mountain with my lens. I saw something otherworldly, something I could not have seen were I staring numbly at the scenery. I got an image in my mind of the trees in partial silhouette staring at the mountain in awe, their sharp triangular shapes huddled together below the mysterious outcropping of rock that hovered above them. I now understood that to render visible is to see through the visible into a world that becomes animated with imagination.

Seeing through and beyond is essential in our work as well. We cannot know ourselves, or the workplaces we are part of, in any depth unless we engage the full breadth of our humanity, vitality, and understanding.

The elusive nature of knowing how to see with the soul requires a certain stillness and attentiveness. Stillness creates an opening in the surface world of things. Attentiveness leads us out from the thicket of thoughts, events, and beliefs that snare us. How could I see through the flat gray landscape of an overcast day if I was snared by my frustration with technology, my disappointment with the weather, and my confusion with mystical abstractions calling me to see with a third eye? The instructor's comment to watch the light was both a concrete suggestion and a metaphor for finding a way below my conscious thoughts and beyond the limits of my vision. Attending to the light brought a hidden awareness to the surface that rendered visible not just a landscape of trees and cloud and rock but one of mood and emotion and fantasy.

So it was with Andy in the story that opens this chapter. He knew himself too well. There was no mystery to his responses. Through his frustration, he learned that any reasonable person reviewing a common body of facts would not, as he believed, come to a conclusion similar to his. Frustration taught Andy, as it taught me, to sense greater depth and complexity and to open to mystery. The challenge of finding soul in organizations, as in life, is to embrace not only what we see, hear, and understand but also to attend to what we don't know, what we cannot see at first glance or hear on first listening.

The soul in its multiplicity is an idea directly contradicting the literal, rational, unitary interpretation of events so common in organizations. The soul speaks in the language of metaphor, fantasy, and emotion. I watched clouds taking on different shapes and colors with each subtle shift in the wind and nuance of light; that is exactly how the unconscious feels to me when I pay attention to it in myself. My thoughts, moods, fantasies, and emotions are constantly shifting, rearranging, coming in and out of focus. What is real for the soul is different from what is real for the objective manager who assumes a reality that can be discovered through external facts and reasoned argument. Below the surface of reason is an unconscious wilderness animated by feelings of awe and danger.

We need an approach to soul that respects its own complex language, that allows us to see its stirrings in the workplace and in our own hearts. Soul reminds us of what has been forgotten and disowned. We bring more of ourselves into the workplace when we remember what we have come to achieve and what struggles we must face.

The soul's vitality as an idea lies in its capacity for renewal, a conception born in the depth of human imaginings about the limitations and infinite potentialities of being human. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who decried that God was dead, insisted that we should keep soul alive, for it is "one of the oldest and most venerable of hypotheses" (Thiele, 1990, p. 52). Why is this so? What is it about the soul as a symbol that it can remain open to new forms of interpretation, yet still represent a timeless attribute of beauty, human fragility, and the longing for meaning? How does one approach the soul?

Ancient Wisdom About the Soul

As far back as we can trace, concepts of the soul have been diverse, with multiple meanings in varied contexts. The word soul is used so frequently today that it has become something of a projection screen from which we each can envision our own particular meaning. Soul is a concept used in religion, literature, philosophy, poetics, psychology, politics, and now increasingly in the world of management and the workplace. The Soul of Business by Tom Chappell has become a best-seller, Bolman and Deal write about Leading with Soul, and Tom Peters uses the word soul repeatedly in his books on the changing workplace. But soul is an ancient idea, central to traditions in both the East and the West.

The soul as an ancient hypothesis seems to touch at least four core themes vital to human health and resilience. The first, linked with early Greek writings, is that soul is associated with the underworld, a place of depth and shadowy realities. The underworld is what gives us dimension and connection to unconscious facets of ourselves.

The second, evident in Greek and Hebrew stories, is that soul is associated with our vitality, the source of animation, essence, and renewal.

Third, soul is a place of union among opposites, the joining of spirit and matter, the light and dark aspects of the whole person. This theme is found in Hebrew as well as Taoist philosophy.

Fourth, soul contains a spark of the divine, a bridge to the qualities of a supreme being or a cosmic aspect to consciousness. Gnostic myths portray this theme vividly.

These themes overlap and move off in uncountable directions. Each theme relates to creation myths or stories about the origin of the soul and the responsibilities associated with having souls. No tradition holds exclusive rights to knowing what stirs soul into being. What is common among the themes is that soulmaking is an odyssey of self-discovery that connects us to the world and to our duties in this life. To approach the soul means to go deeper, down into a place in which past and future blur, where what we strive for and what drives us can be glimpsed.

The Greek Idea of the Soul

The Greek word for soul, psyche, also meant butterfly. This suggests to us both a certain gentleness and a consideration of the soul's ability to take flight. If we approach the soul with too rigid a definition, we risk caging its essentially "wild" nature. If we approach soul with objective reason, we risk pinning its wings to study it. And if we sentimentalize it, making it only a concept for our best intentions, then we risk it flying away from our benevolent net. To approach the soul with respect and rigor, we must be prepared to appreciate its capacity for metamorphosis, its contradictory nature, its habits of taking flight and remaining still. We must be prepared to follow its path as it has appeared in ancient traditions and as it still appears in our day-to-day lives.

In ancient Greek literature, The Odyssey is a vivid portrayal of what it means to go down into the depths of an underworld. Odysseus, Homer's protagonist, is told by Circe that he must consult the shades (disembodied souls) in the land of the dead if he is to continue his journey. In Hades, he meets his dead mother, whom he wishes to embrace:

Three times I started toward her, and my heart was urgent to hold her, and three times she fluttered out of my hands like a shadow or a dream, and the sorrow sharpened at the heart within me, and so I spoke to her and addressed her in winged words, saying: "Mother, why will you not wait for me, when I am trying to hold you, so that even in Hades with our arms embracing we can both take the satisfaction of dismal mourning? Or are you nothing but an image that proud Persephone sent my way, to make me grieve all the more for sorrow?"

So I spoke, and my queenly mother answered me quickly: "Oh my child, ill fated beyond all other mortals, this is not Persephone, daughter of Zeus, beguiling you, but it is only what happens, when they die, to all mortals. The sinews no longer hold the flesh and the bones together, and once the spirit has left the white bones, all the rest of the body is made subject to the fire's strong fury, but the soul flitters out like a dream and flies away" [Knox, 1993, p. 158].

Homer's image of the soul, slipping and fluttering away from the body, gave way in Greek art to the portrayal of the soul as a butterfly, and later as a beautiful young girl with wings. The soul hypothesis of this ancient Greek story is that of an essence that can fly away from the limbs, out through the mouth, the chest, or a wound in the body. Ironically, the origins of the Greek soul hypothesis reflect less a psychological or moral concept of the soul than an attempt at physical description of it.

This ancient Greek story is more, however, than a physical description of the soul after it leaves the body. It stimulates our imagination, offering a picture of an underworld that lies beneath our journey, our personal odyssey. Odysseus is forced to consult the souls of the dead prophets and make offerings to shades from his past and from recent battles. Without these offerings, the dead will not speak the truth. Odysseus must listen to their prophesies, even though he may not fully understand them, and he must mobilize all his strength. His mother wonders how he even came to Hades: "My child, how did you come here beneath the fog and darkness and still alive? All this is hard for the living to look on" (Knox, 1993, p. 157).

At times we too have to consult parts of ourselves that are difficult to hold onto. We too are disrupted from our goals, obliged to make an offering of our time in order to pay attention to realities we may have resisted. We too wonder, "How did I get here? How, amidst the confusion and darkness, can I see what I need?" The meaning of Odysseus's journey to the underworld still echoes in our individual and collective imagination, carried forward by modern interpreters of ancient myth and in the works of twentieth-century depth psychologists such as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Jung wrote: "The dread and resistance which every natural human being experiences, when it comes to delving too deeply into himself is, at bottom, the fear of the journey to Hades" (Jung, [1953] 1968, p. 336).

The underworld is where the deeper part of our soul resides, where the shades of our collective past and our multiple selves still live. Sometimes we are obliged, like Odysseus, to confront these shadowy selves, but the cost of refusing to go there can be severe. When the conscious mind attends only to what lies at the surface, the deeper parts of our soul no longer animate us, no longer offer us counsel, prophecies, and warnings. The butterfly takes wing.

Lessons from the Greek Idea of the Soul

From the Greek myths we have come to understand the soul as the source of vitality, physical presence, and animation. The Latin root, anima, meaning breath or soul, is the source of our English word animation. When we lose our souls, metaphorically, we lose our animation, our natural rhythms—including the most natural of all our instincts, the flow of our breath. We hold tightly, we try to stay in control, but we are no longer "animated" by our deeper self.

Observe any meeting or group encounter where something significant is left unsaid. There is that moment when we notice a deadening in the conversation. We might say the meeting is empty or even soulless. What is often meant is the absence of any vigor, any physical presence of the people participating. At these moments, we fear the journey to Hades, far below the surface of the situation, where danger lurks in the form of a spontaneous eruption of the truth or the expression of a strong emotion. For it is in this underworld that we repress from consciousness what we both yearn for and fear.

To shut out the underworld, to constrain the unconscious, is to foreclose the individual and collective odyssey that we must undertake to wrest meaning from the commonplace and mundane. If we attend to only the surface of reason, staying in control, trying to make sense, we often find ourselves frustrated with the outcome. The bridge to the underworld follows a meandering course, not unlike the soul that meanders from the body in death or sleep. The hypothesis that we have souls, and that they can leave us, reminds us that awareness is not solely in the realm of our surface consciousness. To remain animated, physically present in our bodies, aware of what is happening around us, we must stay alert to what is happening inside us and to us.

I learned this the hard way, in a conference designed to bring out the relevance of unconscious processes in groups. I was still in graduate school and one of my instructors, an African American woman, was the conference director. She inspired fear and respect from the conference participants. In leading a session of the whole group, she seemed deadly serious and annoyed with the quality of our interpretations about our group's behavior. The more we participants in the conference tried to make sense of events, the more I found myself empty and numb. Finally, at a point of uncomfortable silence that seemed to last forever, her assistant director commented that it was important to attend to our fantasies.

I immediately took a breath and sensed the tension in my shoulders and neck. From out of nowhere (or from out of the underworld), I had an image of the director as secretly enjoying our discomfort. I spoke out, reporting my fantasy. I said I thought she was so turned on by our struggling that in the evening between sessions she probably snuck out to a local blues club and danced the night away in pink hot pants. The mood of the room was so still as I spoke that my immediate thought on finishing was that I could kiss my graduate degree goodbye. From out of this stillness, however, came gales of laughter. The severe expression of the director melted and she looked down at the floor, stifling a laugh. The energy in the room shifted, the sense of an oppressive weight was lifted.

The soul is expressed in images, metaphor, and stories. We had come to the conference to struggle with the effects of unconscious behavior, and here I was pointing out a contradiction: that our very ineffectiveness was a demonstration of our capability. Our struggle was in some fashion a gift to the director. I had given the group an image and a story of the director that made an undersense, that got underneath our unspoken fear of disappointing her. The image of this stern woman dancing in hot pants permitted some relief from the oppressive nature of our reasonable—but superficial—explanations of group behavior.

I am sure there are a variety of explanations for the laughter, but for me there was another valuable lesson in this episode. I learned something about what it was like to find myself in an underworld of fog and darkness. I had allowed myself to listen for activity in my unconscious, and to let it animate my actions. The fantasy of the director in hot pants blended both my irreverence for what was happening and my respect for her. It felt, however, as if I had announced a discovery from below, a discovery not completely of my making although one having my unique stamp. I discovered that the soul that resides below can be both personal and an expression of the group's consciousness.

The Ancient Hebrew Idea of the Soul

The underworld is not the exclusive domain of the soul. Soul also stands for the grittiness and earthiness of the human spirit. In Hebrew scripture, the soul hypothesis begins with the creation story of how a divine being gathered up the dust of the earth and made a human being from lifeless matter. Many of us know this story from childhood, a religious story about the first creation of a human being, as opposed to a scientific explanation of how humans evolved. What may be less known is that this story can also be understood as one of the earliest and earthiest of the soul hypotheses, one proposing that body and spirit are inseparable.

The King James translation of the Bible describes the creation of the first human being as follows: "And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul." The living soul is an outcome of matter animated by spirit. In other English translations, living soul is defined simply as human being. But isn't the soul something inside the human being? How could something supposedly inside the body be synonymous with a human being?

The answer lies in the Hebrew words distinguishing "dust of the ground," "breath of life," and "living soul." In Hebrew, the word for the phrase "dust of the ground" is adamah. Adam gains his name from the root of this word, literally meaning earth. The soul's earthiness, its grounding in the realities of matter, is suggested by this early relationship between Adam and adamah. Here the soul, in contrast to a butterfly that takes flight, is associated with the muck, the impurities, the richness, and the grittiness of the earth.

The second term, "breath of life," in Hebrew is ruach. God gathered the earth together and breathed into its shape ruach, Hebrew for breath or wind, but also rendered in English as spirit. In other words, God breathes spirit into lifeless matter, and the result is a living soul. Spirit—as distinct from soul—is the wind of a divine inspiration. Spirit comes from higher up and descends into the body. The metaphor suggests that for the spirit nature to have reality, it must be embodied, it must join with the physical nature. Soul is in the middle, holding together spirit and body, lofty inspiration and physical limitation.

Nephesh is the Hebrew word for "living soul." Among its many meanings, it suggests a human being animated by breath. For the ancient Hebrews, soul suggested neither body nor mind, but rather the totality of instinct, emotion, and thought. In contrast to Greek ideas that influenced later Jewish and Christian theology, the living soul did not have a continued existence after the death of the body. It ceased to exist when the physical body died.

Soul is a gift of divinity, but it is also something closer to life, connected to the mundane and everyday. The living soul of Hebrew scripture is not something inside or outside, but rather a term that weds divinity with humanity, spirit with body, and the beating of the human heart with sacred inspiration. By not distinguishing the soul as exclusively the realm of mind as opposed to body, or feeling as opposed to thought, or higher as opposed to lower, the soul hypothesis of the ancient Hebrews avoids the dualities that will come later with the institutionalization of philosophy and religion. The living soul hints at a mysterious union of opposites: being human includes both the base textures of the earth and the ethereal nature of the heavens. This is a soul of both appetite and vision.

The living soul has meaning today as a metaphor for coping with the contradictions and limitations of modern life. The soul that is made up of the earth does not move away from failure, disillusionment, or inferiority. This soul is comfortable with instinct, unperturbed by the desires, needs, and longings of the body. For this soul, the struggle amidst contradictory urgings is not simply tolerated but acknowledged as necessary. This soul knows that it must extract a deeper meaning from the ongoing feast of possibilities that lie before it. In living, there are times of fierce combat within ourselves, times that demand heroic efforts to mediate contradictory impulses within ourselves. The living soul expresses appreciation and respect for the multiplicity of drives, instincts, and emotions that at times oppose reason and virtue. Nietzsche, who had a unique feeling for this heroic aspect of the living soul, wrote that "struggle is the perpetual food of the soul, and it knows well enough how to exact the sweetness from it" (Thiele, 1990, p. 11).

The body that is brought to life by the wind of spirit can also appreciate striving for greater awareness and higher values and seeking greater consciousness. Spirit suggests a transcendence of the mundane, a capacity to see far off into other worlds and into other dimensions. Creativity can be an outcome of feeling the wind of inspiration move through us. Teamwork can be a function of group inspiration. The body that is quickened by spirit is capable of extending beyond itself because it is comfortable with intuition, imagination, and metaphor.

The soul of the ancient Hebrew hypothesis holds together the middle, what is heavier and darker than spirit alone because it has body but also what is lighter and less predictable than matter devoid of spirit. Soul suggests that matter and spirit need each other. Spirit, without being embodied, has no substance, while matter that has lost touch with spirit's breath becomes an inanimate body, corrupted and shallow.

Lessons from the Hebrew Idea of the Soul

In organizations today, soul can no longer hold the middle between the material and the spiritual world. Instead, there is too often a polarization between cries for spirit on the one hand and recognition of the harder, harsher realities of what really matters in the business world. The consequences are that the spiritual and the material have been split off from one another. The search for spirit has become a thin and airy call for abstract workplace virtues such as teamwork, responsibility, accountability, and inspired leadership. The material world is now associated with fierce competition that leads to the corruption of the corporate body. In Care of the Soul, Thomas Moore emphasizes this point by suggesting that polarization intensifies the pathological aspects of both the material and the spiritual. The more compulsively materialist we become, the more desperate and neurotic we become in our search for spiritual fulfillment.

This was illustrated to me in a recent walk through a local bookstore. On the shelves marked Business were titles such as Den of Thieves and Liars Poker (tales of greed on Wall Street), Free Fall and Too Big to Fall (on the demise of Eastern Airlines and Olympia & York), True Greed and Barbarians at the Gate (on the takeover of RJR Nabisco), False Profits and Rude Awakening (on corruption and mismanagement at BCCI and General Motors), as well as general titles such as Crashes and Panics, The Morning After, and Capitalist Fools. These titles evoke the most materialistic and corrupt passions of the soul: greed and arrogance, fear and dominance, foolishness and dishonesty. Turning my head only slightly, I observed a second list of titles under the heading Management. If I had not known better, I would have wondered if someone was playing a joke on me. These titles were uniformly idealistic and spiritual in the sense of being abstract and lofty in their aspirations. They touched on leadership, ethics, teamwork, and global responsibility to community and ecology. The titles included Stewardship and Alchemy of a Leader, The Wisdom of Teams and The Corporate Coach, Principle Centered Leadership and The Healing Manager. If I were simply innocent, I might have wondered how Business could be so ruthless and demeaning while Management could be so kindly and visionary. But I am not so innocent. I recognize here what I face daily in my practice as an organizational consultant. The demands of the workplace can be absolutely ruthless and crushing, while the dreams of the people in the same workplaces can be inspiring.

The ancient Hebrew passage reminds us that soul holds the middle between the most corrupt passions and the loftiest of ideals. We cannot compartmentalize these attributes as neatly as a bookstore can categorize titles under Business and Management. We are the whole story, both the passions and the visionary ideals. Forgetting this simple lesson adds to the polarization of the spiritual from the material. People are not simply good or bad, sacred vessels or physical commodities. When spirit loses its depth and substance, when it does not descend into the realities of the body, then we can say it has no soul. And when the body no longer seeks the struggle brought about by vision and ideals, then we might also say that the coarseness of life is no longer leavened by spirit, breathed fresh each day into a living soul.

The polarization of the spiritual and material is so much a matter of course that we often cannot easily see how it colors our day-to-day lives. Tom, a manager in a corporate communications department of a large apparel company, thought he had found a balance between his spiritual needs and his corporate identity. He worked for a company that was well known for its charitable contributions, had won numerous awards for its philanthropic activities, and was rated highly by progressive investment money managers. The community-mindedness of the firm was one of its chief marketing assets. The spirit of the company's corporate giving matched well with Tom's own interest in spiritual pursuits and social responsibility; he meditated regularly, volunteered his time in community activities, and took an active interest in Buddhist philosophy.

During his time with the company, however, something changed. He became aware of a discrepancy between the company's public persona and how it actually operated. He felt constant pressure from above to tell a story that wasn't true. As he grew more cynical, he became more reserved and cautious. He found himself putting more and more distance between his corporate identity and his personal life, becoming a collector of antique cars and restoring them on weekends. He repeatedly clashed with his boss and realized that, for sheer callousness, he could never match either his boss or other senior managers. Secure yet unhappy, he could say he was staying primarily for the salary and benefits. In a conversation with a management consultant hired to increase team building in his department, Tom acknowledged how skeptical he had become of any real improvement in the way the company operated. He said he was now working for "fuck-you money." One of these days, he said, he would have made enough money to go into his boss's office and say, "Fuck you, I'm out of here."

Tom began having trouble sleeping at night. Downsizing in his department increased his numerous responsibilities and decreased his empathy for others. When a local newspaper ran an expose that his company, along with other high-profile apparel makers, was subcontracting with sewing shops exploiting Asian women in windowless rooms at below-minimum wage, he exploded to a friend: "Don't they know that if we don't stay competitive, the work just goes overseas and these women won't have any work? Don't they understand this is a ruthless industry?"

Tom's job was to protect the company's image. In a strange way, his job was made easier by no longer really believing in his company. The more disillusioned he became, the easier it was to compartmentalize, to immerse himself in work on weekdays and then tinker with his cars during the weekend. He took medication for his disturbed sleeping, and he meditated more fervently. He found himself calling consultants for any number of proposed change projects, but he never followed up. He had to admit to himself that he was profoundly lonely, but he blamed his boss and the downsizing for the demoralization of his staff. He could no longer even recognize what he really believed. He came to imagine this is what it meant to be a lost soul.

The Hebrew hypothesis of soul suggests that the spiritual and the material are inseparable. Tom cannot balance the ledger by meditating more fiercely in proportion to working more compulsively. He cannot change the deteriorating relationship with his workplace by restoring antique cars. He cannot excuse the exploitation of workers by rationalizing that he also feels abused. The signs of psychic disturbance—troubled sleep, rationalizing, sense of loneliness, identifying with whatever was convenient—all point to a soul in crisis, a mind and body unable to be penetrated by spirit or mobilized by an instinct for what matters. Tom, the whole person, the living soul, finds himself troubled and ill at ease. We might even say that he has lost not so much his soul as his appetite and vision of the soul's responsibility to hold together the spiritual and material.

Tom's predicament, his loss of appetite to struggle with contradiction, his absence of being able to see into the darker recesses of his own and his company's motivations, mirrors a dilemma of modern times. We are all confronted with our conflicting needs to fashion a balance between a personal life that is internally fulfilling and a work life that is stimulating and to some measure externally meaningful. The Hebrew soul hypothesis suggests that being whole implies not simply parallel journeys between these two aspirations but a relationship between the inner and outer worlds. The living soul, the whole human being, is where the inner and the outer world meet.

The Soul in Gnostic Thought

If the soul, as a metaphor for the whole human being, can function as a bridge to an unconscious underworld, then it may also provide a path to a cosmic divinity. The theme of the soul as a transcendent source—a way of practicing eternity—is illustrated by traditions as diverse as Taoism in the East and Christianity in the West. The transcendent suggests the mystery of rebirth, whether of a physical reincarnation, or the renewal of crops after a winter frost, or a reimagining of what it means to be fully human. The transcendent qualities of the soul hint at the awe of nature that has inspired people throughout human history. In the transcendent, we glimpse the eternal, the pattern that is unknowable yet repeats itself again and again through the tapestry of our lives.

The transcendent qualities of the soul were a central motif of Gnostic thought of the first and second centuries of the Christian era. Gnostic writing, branded as heresy by the institutional Christian church, most likely blended Greek, Hebrew, and early Christian views as well as Egyptian and other non-Western religious traditions. Gnostic influence is echoed in the writings of William Blake and W. B. Yeats as well as in the philosophical writings of Rudolf Steiner and the psychology of Carl Jung.

Gnostic legend portrayed the creation of souls as an outcome of an overarching unity that ceased to exist. The story that is told is of a time before time, when there existed only light. The wholeness of the light was shattered, hurtling fragments of the divine unity throughout the universe. The light in flight through the heavens gathered density, lodging in the souls of individuals, tiny sparks hidden within the physical body.

Gnosis, concerned with the struggle for an awareness of these sparks within, hypothesized that in each of us is a particle of the transcendent unity. The particle in each of us is minute, yet it contains the infinite, the "world" as Blake said, "in a grain of sand." The Gnostic legend of how souls were created provides a metaphorical link to the heavens, a way of knowing the world beyond the limiting organs of perception. June Singer, a psychologist and interpreter of the relevance of Gnosis today, wrote:

The intent of the ancient writers as well as of our own contemporary search for meaning springs from the same source—namely, the desire to liberate the sparks of divinity that have been embedded in the natural world from its beginning. These glimmer—sometimes in the wisdom of old crones, sometimes in the precocious questions of an innocent child. The sparks wander through the centuries, surfacing as Faust in the poetic imagination of Goethe, shining in the symphonies of the child Mozart.… It may be that a spark is present in every person, yet many do not recognize it in themselves [Singer, 1992, p. xix–xx].

The contemporary search for meaning, the question of our individual and collective destiny, was echoed centuries ago by the Gnostic teacher Valentinus, who asked: "Who am I? What have I become? Whereunto have I been thrown? Whereto do I speed? Wherefrom am I redeemed? What is birth, what rebirth?" These are the soul's questions. They are questions of origin and destiny, redemption and revelation, choice and fate. They are questions that alert us to our responsibilities in life, our place among others, and our connection to divinity.

The Gnostic soul links a cosmic divinity with the human being, who through direct experience—through trial and ordeal—must discover and recover the knowledge hidden within. The soul hypothesis of Gnosis is fundamentally opposed to institutional codes of conduct or group definitions of morality. Morality acts as a false guide because it cuts too clear a path through the wilderness that everyone must journey. We must each make our own path through wrestling with our fate, through engagement with our creative impulses, and through expressing our own heart.

To approach the soul of Gnosis, we must be prepared to lose some part of our normal ways of ordering and organizing our world. We must be ready to be awakened at a moment's notice, as from a daydream concerning the details of our life. When we talk of losing ourselves in a walk along the ocean, in creative pursuit, or in work that means something, then we glimpse the soul as described by the Gnostics. The soul hypothesis of Gnosis reminds us that our lives are not our own, at least not in the way we normally talk about our lives. Diane Ackerman, author of A Natural History of the Senses, described the sensation of losing the normal boundaries of day-today reality during her intense periods of writing, as a realization that her life was not her own, "as if my soul has been kidnapped. I can only explain it as a form of love" (Madrigal, 1994, Review p. 7).

Lessons from the Gnostic Idea of the Soul

Laurel, a client of mine, was the chief of anesthesiology in a midsized hospital. She resented how a subordinate, a key manager, dressed in short skirts and flowery blouses. She mentioned repeatedly how this manager never wore a white coat and how this directly affected her credibility with other physicians and technicians. Laurel admired aspects of her manager's performance but did so grudgingly, pointing out many ways the manager did not support her. I asked if there were clear expectations about both dress and performance, but Laurel changed the subject to recount an incident in which her manager contradicted her in front of a physician colleague.

Sensing I was barking up the wrong tree, I remarked that she seemed to have very strong expectations of herself and was conflicted about what it was appropriate to ask of a subordinate. She agreed, saying she wanted to be partners with this women and was uncomfortable with a hierarchical relationship. She also began talking about her own experience, twenty-five years earlier in medical school, of wanting to prove herself in an environment that was largely male and very competitive. "What was it like being a woman in such an environment?" I asked. She reflected for a moment and told me a story about one of her very first classes. The male professor had said, somewhat offhandedly, that physicians wore white coats to hide their genitals. He said it was important that physicians not be seen as having gender.

Laurel told me this story matter-of-factly, noting that at first she had been taken aback but over time had come to see his comment as sensible and appropriate. We talked briefly about how this experience might be influencing her views of the manager's dress, but we drew no grand conclusions from the memory. I did suggest, however, that our expectations of what others should do and how they should be were often buried in assumptions that we rarely took the time to examine.

To my surprise, Laurel returned after an extended vacation and announced that she now felt much less resentment toward her manager: "I wanted her to be an extension of myself, thinking like I thought, making decisions the way I would." She explained how she realized that her desire to be partners with this woman had been only on her (Laurel's) terms. Laurel would have an opportunity to apply her new insight when the two of them next met; it would be "the first time I've met with this woman with the assumption that we might have different approaches and need to discuss them openly," she said.

Laurel told me that during her vacation she had spent time hiking and exploring in Peru, climbing along the high ridges of the Andes. She described losing herself in thought, being back in medical school, remembering and feeling again what that was like. She thought about how much she had internalized a concept of partnering and teamwork as meaning that one does what the institution expects. She recalled how in her first classes she felt uneasy and isolated but overcame those feelings by satisfying her instructor's expectations. What mattered to her now was not to repeat this process with her subordinate: "I actually like the fact that we are different." She smiled, "It actually frees me from worrying about what I'm doing wrong with her." She implied an awareness that she herself could be different, not only the uneasy student who must conform but also an individual who held many competing values.

The soul is spurred by thought that awakens memories and feelings, prompting new assessments of what is significant. Losing herself in the Andes, Laurel discovered a new awareness of herself. She described no mystical experience or life-changing insight, but she sensed something that allowed her to reimagine her concept of partnering with others. The soul hypothesis of Gnosis suggests that we earn wholeness a piece at a time, discovering directly from our own experience how to navigate the mundane and extraordinary events of our lives.

The connection to our own experience as a source of insight propels us forward to new discoveries. The sensation is not so much learning something new as being reminded of our own humanity. The stirring of soul whispers of our dignity and the dignity of others. It can be found in the most unlikely places and situations.

In the inner city of Richmond, California, a contractor working for a local development company found himself increasingly robbed of his compassion as he spent time in neighborhoods with crack houses and "hubba heads," men and women who were addicted, tormented, and dangerous. He bought a pistol and kept a double-barreled shotgun in his truck. He learned to react quickly and violently to threats; he felt nothing but disgust and hatred for the burnt-out "humanity" of the neighborhoods. Returning to his truck one day, he found a man bent over the door. Without the slightest hesitation, he grabbed the man and rammed his head into the truck. As the man's head hit the window with a thud, the contractor's only worry was that the glass would break:

I violently turned him toward me, prepared to exact an instant conviction with a sentence of pain. I don't remember what he said, but his face was permanently burned into my memory. He stood there bundled in several layers of stinking clothing and a dirty, torn ski hat. His weathered face looked terrified. His sunken eyes were the saddest I'd ever seen. He had both hands raised in submission, and one of them held a Bic razor. My anger turned to shame when I realized he had been using my mirror to shave himself, in one small grasp at regaining an element of his humanity [Kendall, 1993, p. 12].

In an instant that began with burning rage and a reflexive desire for retribution, a spark of the divine humanity buried within each of us was revealed. In the sunken and sad eyes of this man, the contractor saw a mirror of his own profound detachment and alienation. The contractor could see with other eyes; like Andy imagining a glimpse of a second face in a mirror, or Laurel finding sanctuary for another part of herself, he found a compassion that had become exiled. The Gnostic hypothesis lives on today in our capacity to find a hidden soul through tests and trials, to see an "other" and find reflected some part of our own divine humanity and grace. The contractor and my clients discovered an "other" in themselves, and the revelation propelled them forward to new discoveries and new modes of action.

The Many Voices of the Soul

The soul remains a vital metaphor, particularly during periods of change, because it speaks to timeless longings for meaning and purpose. We often feel that rationality and science have abandoned us to answer on our own the most fundamental questions of human existence. Some turn to traditional religions, others to new-age philosophies. We can all turn to the soul as a way to ground ourselves in something "outside of" and larger than ourselves. Beneath the contemporary language of enhancing workplace productivity (accountability, empowerment, teamwork) lie deeper questions about where we are going, how we will survive, what really matters, what we will surrender. These are the soul's questions. We cannot access the values implied by these business terms if we forsake the deeper underlying questions they imply.

The thread that is woven through the ancient ideas of the soul is that there are many selves whose interactions and struggles shape our thought and our consciousness in general. The journey to Hades is a story of the multiplicity of souls that inhabit an underworld, offering the individual soul advice, prophecy, and counsel—if one learns how to listen. In the Hebrew hypothesis of a living soul, each human being is both flesh and spirit. Our physical nature is fused with our spiritual nature, the breath of life that is blown into us from celestial forces. And the Gnostic vision of a unity of light shattered into fragments that lodge in each individual also suggests many forces that are at once unknowable yet revealed to us through our life experience.

The soul hypothesis of this book is about achieving a greater comfort with the awareness of the many selves within us: flesh and spirit, heaven and underworld, earth and sky. The tension of these apparent opposites strives to link us with the meaning of being a whole human being. I think we miss the value of these stories if we take them too literally, trying to pin down, for example, how a psyche that flitters away like a butterfly in death can also be a living soul that has no existence after the body dies. Each ancient tradition finds its own way, through stories and images, to express the multiplicity of forces inherent in being fully human. Taken together, these ancient soul hypotheses express the importance of appreciating how soul can mean one's essence and vitality as well as a bridge to underworlds and a path to cosmic spheres.

The Dance of Souls in Organizations

The themes that link Andy, Tom, Laurel, and the contractor center on how each of us struggles with different parts of ourselves, wrestling with assumptions and internal personalities hidden from conscious awareness. Tom, who takes "fuck-you money" during the workday and seeks transcendence on weekends, cannot reconcile his divided loyalties. Laurel, who wants partnership but is frustrated with her subordinate, wrestles with her own assumptions about being a genderless physician yet a women who can respect the choices of others. Andy, who prided himself on developing others and remaining undisturbed by ambiguity, finds new regard for his fears and limitations. And the contractor, who rediscovered compassion in the act of seeking retribution, finds that he allowed the hopelessness of his environment to shape his own internal world-view. These are stories of the multiplicity of the soul, brought down to earth by the realities of interaction with other souls and with our social realities.

To approach the soul in organizations, we must be able to hold in our minds the dance of souls interacting within larger and larger circles of participation. The multiplicity that lies within one individual makes even a relatively simple interpersonal interaction complex. If we try to imagine group interaction, the complexity to understand what is happening multiplies arithmetically. The implication, however, is not that we should give up trying to comprehend; rather, we must appreciate that the tensions in each individual soul can also be felt as forces in the larger and larger circles of interacting souls. Each individual wrestles with essential questions of meaning and purpose, power and assertiveness, competence and inclusion—as do groups, organizations, and societies. We might consider the soul as a microcosm that resembles the macrocosm, as in ancient stories where the individual soul resembles the cosmos. The question is how to look at the whole.

Looking at the whole requires an ability to stand back far enough to see the outline of patterns that weave together complexity and multiplicity. In organizations, this is difficult because the farther back we stand the greater the loss of detail. We associate loss of detail with loss of control, with information that is no longer meaningful. We try to reduce complexity, ignore multiplicity. We look at the whole only to reduce it to its component parts: technology, information systems, human resources, market influences, and so on. Thus the idea that each individual soul is also an imprint of the tensions in larger and larger social spheres is disconcerting at first. Yet understanding in depth what one person is experiencing can provide vital clues to what others are going through. Andy's story, for example, opens a window on how others in his organization might be experiencing the tension between the rhetoric of caring and the behavior of superiors. His individual story is a fragment of what might exist as a pattern in his organization and in other organizations as well. In fact, Andy himself was embroiled with a subordinate who found Andy's performance review of him painfully distant and punitive. When we stand back far enough, we begin to see that patterns of tension take on meaningful form at levels as basic as the individual, yet extending to greater and greater networks of interaction.

Standing back means gaining enough distance to see patterns in the sweep of human history as well as in the psychological makeup of the individual. The importance of the soul, anchored by archetypal themes but constantly being reimagined, is that it is a reminder that our search to picture the human soul is always tentative. We are not searching for fixed patterns or the ability to reduce the turbulence of the soul to an unchanging formula. Rather, we are searching for caution and a note of realism in the challenge to create organizational and social settings for the whole human being. The loss of soul in organizations, an experience common to many of us, must be seen against the backdrop of history and the choices made along the way. Yet the opportunity remains that the more we can account for the multiplicity of selves that lie in one body, the greater our chance of imagining settings that might do this for everyone.

2

Shadows of the Soul Acknowledging the Dark Side of Our Best Intentions

… [W]hoever looks into the mirror of the water will see first of all his own face. Whoever goes to himself risks a confrontation with himself. The mirror does not flatter, it faithfully shows whatever looks into it; namely, the face we never show to the world because we cover it with the persona, the mask of the actor. But the mirror lies behind the mask and shows the true face.

Carl Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

How can anyone see straight when he does not even see himself and that darkness which he himself carries unconsciously into all his dealings?

Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion

We are aware that we have a shadow or dark side, parts of ourselves that we are uncomfortable with, indications that something is askew, a chaos within ourselves and our world. The daily papers and news inundate us with evidence that the dark side exists. The portrayal of nations waging war, massacring their own people or those of a different tribe or nation, are visual reminders of the savagery and darkness that lie as a potential of the human soul. Heroes and celebrities, personalities we have become familiar with and feel that we know are routinely shown to be something different from our expectations. Woody Allen, Michael Jackson, and O. J. Simpson are but a few in the cavalcade of stars that have fallen back to earth. Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky are examples from the business world of a dark side to enterprise. Closer to home, we often know personally a family member, neighbor, or friend struggling with the darker elements of mind and body: depression, rage, illness, and death.

It's not that we're unaware of a dark side; it's that we fear it. This chapter inverts the assumption, both understandable and at times necessary, that we must ignore or repress the dark side of the soul. Instead, the dark side must be accounted for in ourselves and others. This means reclaiming responsibility for parts of ourselves and others that we ignore, fear, deem unnecessary, or simply lack the imagination to perceive.

In organizations, both leaders and members have something to gain from attending to the shadow. In Chapter One, Andy, Tom, and Laurel all faced shadow aspects of their own and their organizations' values and attitudes. To varying degrees and with differing results, they confronted tensions between cooperation and submission, responsibility to others and self-interest, compassion and indifference. The contractor from Richmond who saw an enemy in the faces of the community he worked in found in one man's eyes a mirror of his own soul. To see oneself reflected in the eyes of a perceived other is what it means to account for the shadow.

Stories about wrestling with our shadow, like the legends of the origins of soul, are ancient. The darker forces at work in the world are portrayed in stories as diverse as Adam and Eve being tempted by the serpent in Eden, and Buddhist legends of Mara, the great Tempter, trying to stop the Buddha from continuing his spiritual journey. The shadow is portrayed in various guises: as Lucifer, the fallen angel of Christian and Islamic traditions; as the serpent Satan, who embodies darkness; and as an evil spirit, Ahriman, who confronts the good and wise Ormazd in the Zoroastrian (ancient Persian) tradition. Each culture finds a way to make sense of the many forces at work in consciousness and in nature.

In the Western tradition, a duality emerged between the forces of good and evil. It taught that each individual must choose between the powers of darkness, destruction, and temptation and the forces of good. We can sense this tension today in popular culture as well as in management theory. The success of a children's film like The Lion King evokes once again the call to battle evil and proclaim the ultimate victory of the good. A cover story in Newsweek featured political figures (Bill Bennett, Peggy Noonan, and Hillary Clinton) as angels under the title "The Politics of Virtue: The Crusade Against America's Moral Decline." The article emphasized the need to inculcate such qualities as fortitude, temperance, and prudence during a period of perceived chaos and moral decline. Virtue promises the knowledge of how to choose between good and evil.

In management theory, the emphasis on vision and values, on principle-centered leadership, and on heroic portraits of successful leaders is a cry, especially during morally ambiguous times, for the good to be asserted once again. BusinessWeek devoted a cover to the CEO of Levi Strauss and featured the company's values-oriented management philosophy. In management theory, the simplicity of Douglas McGregor's Theory X and Y neatly cleaved the bad, dominating, dictatorial X manager from the enlightened, good Y manager who believed in his workers' capacity for self-motivation, achievement, and personal growth.

In current organizational practice, I hear senior managers talk about their obsession with an idealized vision, such as service or quality, as the only way to change their organizational culture. Recognizing a dark or inferior aspect within the workings of the organization itself would be viewed as a distraction from the leadership mantra of empowerment, accountability, ownership, and customer focus. "Of course there are problems with them" (the employees), say senior managers; why else would they have to repeat the mantras of productivity? The irony, obviously, is that the workers feel the same way in reverse: why are they, the senior managers, so unrealistic, unsupportive, and hell-bent on demanding that employees be accountable for the chaos they (the managers) created? Both sides see the shadow in the other.

If we are to create organizational settings that are driven by values which recognize the dignity of employees and that are also socially responsible, then recognition of the shadow is a necessary reality check at both personal and organizational levels. The history of our business organizations is littered with good intentions gone astray; the result is decreasing credibility in both leaders and the institutions they lead. The credibility problem is not solved by recognizing shadow, but recognition gives leaders and organizational members an opportunity to acknowledge and assess responsibility for unaddressed facets of their own personalities and their organization's direction. If our defenses are engaged in addressing those troubling facets, we should not be surprised or too judgmental. One learns to stare into the pool of self-reflection only with practice and with the gradual development of courage.

The Soul's Journey: Ambiguity and Integration

Is it necessary to portray so starkly good and evil, right and wrong, idealized vision and unrelenting reality? Are there stories that might speak to the relationship of good and evil, order and chaos, light and dark in ways that reimagine the polarization between shadow on the one hand and virtue on the other?

Elie Wiesel, writer, witness, and survivor of the holocaust in Germany, tells a story about the battle of good and evil as he heard it from his grandfather. A long time ago, the soul of a great and pious man was to be sent down to earth. Satan petitioned the celestial court, arguing that such a man would be so righteous and his teaching so persuasive that the choice between good and evil would become a moot point. "I will be beaten in advance. I demand justice," Satan argued. The celestial court agreed with his argument. The first soul would still be sent to earth to inhabit a great Rebbe (teacher). But to reassure Satan, another soul would be sent to earth with all the outward manifestations of piousness and righteousness, mirroring almost exactly the virtues of the first soul. What only Satan and the court would know is that this second soul's allegiance would be to Satan.

"How is one to know? How does one recognize purity?" Wiesel asked his grandfather. And the grandfather told the young Wiesel, "But one is never sure; nor should one be" (Wiesel, 1972, p. 164).

In this tale, the clash of good and evil, the ambiguity of knowing right from wrong when neither can be clearly seen, suggests the daunting responsibility of moral choice. We can never be sure— nor should we be. The ambiguity hints at the individual responsibility to examine one's own heart and one's own motivations. How else can one know how to act when there are no outward clues? If we give our whole allegiance to a theory or a teacher or an institution, we give away our power to trust in our intuition, our right to struggle with inward complexity, and our ability to recognize when something that may in fact have been appropriate once no longer is. The senior manager who too fully embraces new management ideologies may be missing crucial information about the reality of her organization, as opposed to the vision. The employee who clings too tightly to behaviors that were once accepted and rewarded as good may be limiting his capacity to change in beneficial ways.

The ambiguity of knowing good from evil shifts toward the challenge to perceive how good contains evil and evil good. If we re-imagine Wiesel's tale of the two souls in more human terms, then it is no longer about the wrangling over good and evil in the heavens but the divided loyalties within ourselves. In each of us there is an allegiance to a light and a dark potential: the capacity for courage, personal insight, and compassion as well as the ability to act with timidity, distorted perception, and malice. The metaphysical question about the origins of evil becomes a very practical one about how we mediate the opposites within ourselves. How much easier it is to see our actions as reactions to evil rather than owning the divided voices within ourselves. But if we understand our soul's journey differently—as a need to mediate the opposites within ourselves and among others—then appreciating shadow dynamics becomes an essential tool for honoring the multiplicity of the soul.

The dynamics of light and shadow fascinate those who become aware of them. Thinkers like Carl Jung both experienced and studied shadow dynamics as a way of expanding our sense of personal responsibility and awareness of collective behavior. As individuals, we continuously face shadow dynamics in the workplace and in society. As we see in the cases that follow, shadow dynamics are manifested at different levels and in different ways, reminding us that what we don't see in the upper world of rational behavior also has consequence.

Containing Opposites in Ourselves and in Organizations

Rob Asch was a man with a mission. He had just been appointed regional manager of a large electronics company specializing in customized products for manufacturing plants. The company, still dominant in its field, was at a major crossroads. The senior leadership at corporate headquarters had made clear that their cost advantage had evaporated and their continued success would rest with the development of innovative products and superior customer service. Asch had been selected because of his energy, his ability to delegate, and his "people skills." He was viewed as one of a new breed of managers capable of managing the strategic priorities of the organization while still retaining the loyalty and dedication of his subordinates.

Arriving at his office for our initial conversation about his new role, I noticed how friendly he was with the staff, inquiring about their families, shaking hands, patting people on the arm or back. His interactions seemed genuine and the staff responded with warmth and smiles.

During our talk, I asked him what he believed his core values to be and also what he believed drove him to achieve and be successful. I was struck by how much he relished these questions. He started by saying that he thought a great deal about core values, but much less about what drove him. I suggested he begin with his core values. He answered immediately: respect for the individual, and by extension his own immediate and extended family. He told me that he knew what it was like to have lower status in society, and he hoped always to respect individuals for who they were rather than what economic or ethnic background they came from. Coming from a depressed economic area, he wanted to be a role model and give back to the community the gifts he had received in his own personal odyssey.

When he thought about what drove him, he acknowledged that it was harder to see. He imagined it was very important that he be seen as competent and be well respected as a person. The economic hardships he faced growing up taught him to fear vulnerability and any associations with not being able to get a job done. He said he was driven by success, both for himself and for his family and community.

Rob acknowledged, however, that he could be both conflict-averse and bullheaded. Belying the appearance of the collaborative leader, he was uncomfortable with negative emotional display (anger, panic, weakness) and strongly attached to what he believed was right. He noted that as a child, in his own family disagreement was not valued. As an adult he learned to be agreeable in the presence of others, but he could be dogged, and at times dogmatic, in pursuing his own agenda. He felt I might support him in becoming more comfortable with direct confrontation while also using me as an "intellectual sparring" partner outside the corporate structure.

I was immediately impressed with Rob's openness and awareness of his own psychological nature. He seemed to understand intuitively the relationship of his own personal tendencies and their potential consequences in how he took up his organizational role.

Without using the word shadow, Rob indicated that he was prepared to examine his own darker nature in order to pursue the emerging vision he held for the company.

In the sessions that followed, the tension between how Rob wanted things to be and how they really were was constantly tested. He insisted that the problem with his organization was the deadly slow pace at which decisions got made and implemented. He was committed to hiring new senior managers who would, like himself, think strategically and then delegate downward. He wanted an organization that moved swiftly from strategic priorities and broad goals to implementation and action. And he believed that subordinates, understanding that the organization's future was at risk, would respond swiftly to directives from above. He had no intent to micro-manage those below him, did not even wish to participate in operational decisions, and assumed that in return for respect, subordinates would set aside turf battles and personal agendas. As he spoke, he sat bolt upright in his chair. His presentation was at once sincere and icily logical.

I listened carefully to his words and observed his body language. He had asked to spar with me intellectually, but he had so tightly packaged his presentation that I could not see where he wanted help or even discussion. I told him he seemed to believe that subordinates would gladly follow his direction even though it might mean dramatically altering the way they currently worked. He seemed to assume they would work harder and with greater focus even as the organization was laying people off and asking others to take on additional responsibilities. I recalled from earlier talks that there was as much fear as enthusiasm for the organization's ambiguous and potentially dangerous future. I also observed that he had neatly cleaved strategic thinking and abstract goals from the operational realities that frontline people had to deal with. I wondered out loud if what he was describing was a new kind of obedience that had more to do with tyranny than with comforting notions of empowerment.

"Tyranny… what are you talking about?" Rob nearly stuttered in a controlled but clear flash of anger. His face flushed: "Are you suggesting I'm being tyrannical?" I paused, wondering if I had gone too far in my response.

I told him that I understood he believed himself to be first and foremost an advocate of individuals, and that he would never intend to be personally tyrannical. There are times, I said, when we find ourselves in a conflict of values, in this instance between our regard for individual respect and organizational imperatives to move forward quickly and with minimal distractions. I suggested that at times like these we can too easily rationalize that conflict does not exist; that is when tyranny can take hold. We had already talked of subordinates, acting on Rob's direction, who bullied people lower in the system by simply saying that such and such was what Rob wanted.

Wasn't it possible, I wondered, that his own issues with being conflict-averse but at the same time dogmatic were akin to an organizational culture that portrayed itself as collaborative but remained paralyzed by taboos against discussing how power and decisions were truly negotiated? I added that I did not believe Rob would be the cause of organizational paralysis; that had existed long before he even came to the organization. What I was concerned with was his question about how to change those dynamics.

Rob became deeply reflective, and the focus of our conversation shifted. We began to talk about how systems can degenerate from the mission and values portrayed by leaders. We told stories from our own experience about what really happens to people when right and wrong, good and bad, order and freedom are ambiguous and hard to distinguish. I mentioned that a business periodical had recently called the evil of psychological numbing among employees a by-product—a shadow—that so often followed the good intentions of corporate reorganization. I speculated that psyche in the word psychological is about the power of the soul to contain the opposites in some creative fashion. When the psyche is numbed, I suggested, individuals learn how to cope, not how to learn.

Rob laughed; his body relaxed. He said he didn't know there was a branch of organizational consulting called management metaphysics. I told him I didn't either, but maybe that was what we needed—if we could keep it grounded in the realities of his role and his organization.

Seeing through the visible world of rational behavior and narrow intentionality requires an awareness of the other within ourselves. The many faces of the soul are stirred to life by a recognition of opposing forces, conflicts in duty, and deep reflection, as Carl Jung found in his personal grappling with shadow.

Carl Jung and the Exploration of Shadow

In 1957, at age eighty-two, the Swiss physician Carl Jung began to write his autobiography, setting down the forces and influences on his intellectual and spiritual development. He believed that in each of us there is a struggle of opposites: on one hand, a conscious intention to be good, to live up to our ethical aspirations; on the other hand, an unconscious aspect that has within it suppressed motives and even demonic potential. He called this unconscious aspect the shadow, the developmental homework of the soul.

For Jung, how we each deal with our shadow constitutes a test of our capacity for self-knowledge, our ability to emotionally comprehend parts of the self that parallel (and at a deeper level intertwine with) conscious intention. The recognition of shadow is akin to discovering a stranger living in one's own home. To acknowledge and then resolve the contradictions implied by the shadow requires of the individual considerable reflection and moral effort.

In his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung recorded his first intuition, as a young man, of an "other" presence in his psyche:

… I had a dream which both frightened and encouraged me. It was night in some unknown place, and I was making slow and painful headway against a mighty wind. Dense fog was flying along everywhere. I had my hands cupped around a tiny light which threatened to go out at any moment. Everything depended on my keeping this little light alive. Suddenly I had the feeling that something was coming up behind me. I looked back, and saw a gigantic black figure following me. But at the same moment I was conscious, in spite of my terror, that I must keep my little light going through night and wind, regardless of all dangers. When I awoke I realized at once that the figure was… my own shadow on the swirling mists, brought into being by the little light I was carrying. I knew, too, that this little light was my consciousness, the only light I have.… Though infinitely small and fragile in comparison with the powers of darkness, it is still a light, my only light [Jung, 1961, pp. 87–88].

Jung understood his dream as visually capturing the struggles he then faced. He had to drive forward into the storm of his future responsibilities and fate—into study, moneymaking, entanglements as well as confusions, errors, submissions, and defeats. But just as certainly, he was dogged by his past, by what he was trying to run away from. He called the figure who bore the light "No. 1," the figure he consciously identified with; he called the figure following him "No. 2," a "specter, a spirit who could hold his own against the world of darkness" (Jung, 1961, p. 89).

These two internal natures within Jung formed a whole that was divided within itself: the one utterly committed to shielding the light, driving forward at any cost, never looking back; and the other a ghostly illumination given shape by the candle of consciousness, a haunting presence not clearly defined but definitely present. The light of consciousness and the specter of consciousness: one fears being overwhelmed, the other fears never being known. What Jung realized was that he didn't have to acquiesce to what haunted him.

The shadow appeared in many disguises. In a second example, in a dream he felt disgust and remorse for having allied himself with an "unknown brown skinned man, a savage." Together, they hunt down and kill the German heroic figure of myth, Siegfried. The year was 1913, and the Western world was on the brink of war. In panic over the dream's content, Jung pondered his own heroic aspirations: "Siegfried, I thought, represents what the Germans want to achieve, heroically to impose their will, have their own way. 'Where there is a will there is a way!' I had wanted to do the same. But now that was no longer possible.… After the deed I felt an overpowering compassion, as though I myself had been shot: a sign of my secret identity with Siegfried, as well as the grief a man feels when he is forced to sacrifice his ideal and his conscious attitudes" (Jung, 1961, p. 180).

Here the shadow takes the form of an alien figure, an ally of sorts, partnering with him to do what his conscious attitude could not have done on its own. The revulsion in the dream and the panic on waking offer evidence of the conscious attitude that is being threatened. Here again is the driven Jung of the storm, having to reassess his own heroic mission. To do so, he needs the help of a "savage" who knows the ways of the inner realm. He needs to take seriously the part of himself that wants to hunt down the Siegfried in himself so that he does not simply impose his will on others. In shedding the heroic ideal, he creates the opportunity to make new choices about his life.

What is common in both these manifestations of the shadow is its irreverence. In the first dream, the shadow is a presence that doggedly follows the conscious aspect of the person. In the second dream, where the savage must kill the false heroic ideal, the shadow appears as an ally in the form of the "brown skinned man." In each case, the experience of shadow wounds or mocks an idealized aspect of one's conscious identity. Jung, the responsible physician bent on preserving the candle of consciousness, is hounded by a dark figure that holds his past and its disowned meaning and disavowed feeling. Siegfried, the hero of high culture, is destroyed by the savage. Each idealized figure falls short of its heroic persona. The shadow acts irreverently by testing the conscious viewpoint, finding its flaws, and mocking its idealized qualities.

The psychological paradox presented by the shadow is that the more we try to escape our fears, the tighter are we bound to them. The irony is that examining the other side of our conscious outlook is most relevant and most healing when we find ourselves frightened, boxed in by what conscious knowledge cannot explain. There is wisdom to be gotten from the shadow—when the conscious attitude can tolerate it. This is why Jung called the shadow "gold."

To become aware of the shadow is to seek not only self-knowledge but also a portal to the larger world in which we live. Without explicitly looking for the shadow, Rob Asch found a door to his organizational role, illuminating a deeper sense of responsibility for his organizational mission. He could then reflect on his idealized values of collaboration and empowerment and see the shadow of tyranny behind the ideals. His capacity to be irreverent, to laugh in the face of the contradictions I proposed, allowed him to take these contradictions seriously and so remain open to new learning.

What we find in our personal shadow relates intimately with what is also suppressed in the larger collective culture from which we, as individuals, derive our roots. Tyranny and the distortion of reality are not simply personality traits but shadow aspects of group life and social organization. What is difficult for the individual to explore is even more threatening at an organizational level.

Shadow and the Soul in Disarray: An Organizational Case

Liz Kantor was an activist's activist. She understood community organizing: how to get the right people into a room, how to raise money, how to direct the media toward supporting the social programs she developed. Over twenty years, she had helped establish a battered women's shelter, a rape counseling center, and a hospice program for women with AIDS. She understood how to direct the diffuse energies of people toward getting things done. In the space of a few hours, she could walk into a room with twenty-five people who barely knew each other and leave with committees dedicated to fundraising, facilities planning, and program development.

Her pride and joy was the women's hostel, The Haven, which she founded for women who were homeless, drug addicted, or victims of violence. She remained a member of the twenty-five-woman board responsible for fundraising, policy, and finances. The board operated as a collective, as did the staff of twelve women responsible for counseling, organizing programs, and generally providing the varied services needed for their diverse clientele.

Liz was tolerant of the collective process for decision making, but it contradicted her hands-on, get-things-done style. She quietly fumed as a purchasing decision on the cost and colors of towels dragged on for forty-five minutes. She believed, however, that consensus was necessary to model an alternative to hierarchical organizations that concentrated power in a few hands. Yet she secretly tallied in her mind the board members she viewed as cooperative and those who were "bad."

The real concerns began for Liz when four of the five women of color on the board formed a minority caucus to "explore policy procedures that would fight racism." Liz saw the action as a direct threat to her vision of the board as an extended family working together in the communal kitchen to nourish the less fortunate. She did not approve of this splintered-off subgroup, with its own self-serving agenda.

Growing tensions within the board ignited when the issue of working with particularly violent and self-destructive women was addressed. Three staff, two of them women of color, acknowledged that they did not feel they had the skills to handle the severity of these women's problems. They wondered if more harm than good was the outcome of keeping these women within The Haven. The rest of the staff and the majority of the board did not agree. The Haven was a place for the dispossessed; once boundaries were created for one group of women, then other constraints would surely follow. Board members argued that since no physical harm had actually occurred, it was inappropriate to act on the fear that it would.

The staff who brought up their concerns felt dismissed. They viewed this as one further example of their concerns and needs going unheard. They viewed the attitude that was expressed in the board meeting as "if you can't handle it, fuck off." One staff member stated publicly that the collective decision-making philosophy of The Haven was hypocritical: the primarily white staff and board members, who had been around the longest, held the real power and would not give it up. The staff who brought up these concerns characterized the issue as between themselves and white staff who were privileged workaholics.

The situation polarized along issues of race, sexual preference, ideology, and personality. When the minority caucus threatened to expose the board as racist, another subgroup of board members prepared to call the primarily heterosexual caucus members homophobic. When one caucus member accused another board member of being involved solely to soothe her guilt for being part of a racist society, another board member complained about being victimized by "people" who mistakenly perceived her as a member of an international corporate elite. Nothing could be further from the truth, both sides argued about the other's perceptions.

Liz Kantor stayed out of the fray as much as she could. But when she brought to the board's agenda a proposal to open a resource center for past and current clients of The Haven, all hell broke loose. She had expected joy and a respite from the bitter acrimony. Instead, a new member of the board, also involved with the minority caucus, requested an updated needs assessment and suggested that Liz be more consultative with other board members.

Liz exploded. Raising her voice, she declared that this was a window of opportunity and that obstructionists had no place working in organizations that were committed to the community. She was sick, sick and tired of the na?veté and stubbornness of people so wrapped up in their ideology that they could not get anything done.

In the interim between board meetings, the minority caucus met to compose a letter of rebuttal and a request that issues of power and privilege be openly acknowledged on the board. Kalia, the minority caucus member selected to read the letter, broke down crying, testifying how she personally felt silenced and ignored. Many of the board members thanked her for "sharing her pain." Liz Kantor did not. She wanted to know how Kalia could feel this way. Breaking rules of client confidentiality, Liz asked how Kalia could say this after being helped as a former client of The Haven. Kalia bristled, shouting that her gratitude did not hold her prisoner from telling the truth. The facilitator tried to restore order, but Liz continued to shout back at other board members. The minority caucus left the room to discuss what had just occurred. A board member who came over to give Liz a hug was later accused of association with racism.

A compromise to the feud was never found. Liz agreed to apologize for breaking rules of confidentiality, but she would not apologize for her combative spirit or her right to confront others. A coalition of community and board members was assigned to draft structural and procedural changes that would allow more minority representation. One of their recommendations was that Liz Kantor resign her membership on the board.

Liz's letter of resignation came prior to the board's debate on the recommendation for her dismissal. She had no interest in fighting anymore. She felt humiliated, scapegoated, and very tired. However, when her letter of resignation came before the board, there was one final problem. The board could not agree on the wording for accepting the resignation. A subcommittee was formed to review Liz's resignation letter—to determine if it was a racist document.

Steering Through Shadow in Organizations

For those of us with personal experience of organizational issues as portrayed in story of The Haven, our stomachs clench. We have an immediate wish that good people with good intentions should not have to suffer so. We also feel anger and sadness that the tragedy of The Haven could have been avoided if only the individuals could have demonstrated better interpersonal skills, or found a common vision, or recognized that the tensions in their organization are mirrored in so many others. We wish to save people from themselves, or at least rescue the organization from the disarray that hinders their efforts. What tragic spell so envelopes efforts to do what is right and just? What mythic structure helps us understand what has happened here? What feelings must be evoked to draw out empathy and lead us to heal the wounds so deeply festering in our organizations?

What often hinders those of us who wish to choose good are just those qualities that we find repellent in ourselves. We find them as exaggerated qualities in others; at The Haven, the enemy was found at every turn. Liz could not deal constructively with her feelings about the caucus because the members' assertiveness represented a selfishness—having their own agenda—that was so opposed to her own perceived sense of altruism and commitment to others. The caucus members, in turn, so identified with the larger social problems of race and power that they could not imagine themselves doing wrong or victimizing anyone else. The shadow is most virulent in individuals and organizations when unresolved aspects of our own personality are channeled toward blame and the repressed negative qualities within ourselves are projected onto others.

The Haven, founded by the light of Liz Kantor's vision, was an idealized inversion of what was believed wrong with society. If society was male-dominated, obsessed with power and self-interest, as well as hierarchical and segmented by class, race, and gender, then The Haven would be a corrective experiment run by women. It was to be a place for the dispossessed, an extended family operating with collective values that shunned power, inequality, and hierarchy. Liz never believed she held power, let alone institutionally sanctioned authority, but rather only the capacity to influence others for a common good. The Haven was to be a community for those who needed care as well as for those whose role was to be caretakers.

With time, however, it became thick with its own shadow, mired in the unrelenting realities of group process: who feels included, which subgroups maintain influence, how conflict is addressed, why certain needs are given priority and others not. In shadow, as Jung noted in his alchemical studies, there is literally very little light to help us find our way. We feel that nothing is happening; we are stuck and blind in darkness. Yet we also feel our lives falling apart and we do not have the means to pull the parts back together. The multiplicity of the soul is thrown into disarray.

The same process is true in organizations. When individuals in organizations are confronted with realities repellent to their ideals, they split off the rejected parts and project them onto others. While Liz secretly tallied the board members whom she viewed as unrealistic, caucus members whispered dark truths about other members of the board. The organization becomes the container for taboos that cannot be discussed outwardly. Secrets must be shared only with one's allies. Scapegoating polarizes people from each other, relieving the anxiety related to the painful ambiguity of human relationship. People within the organization talk and meet and meet about the talk, but everything has become dark and foreboding. Nothing seems to be happening, and only the sacrifice of a leader or the removal of a subgroup relieves the paralysis in the short term.

At The Haven, the shadow of power, hierarchy, and inequality darkened the relationships among members. Power was seen as dominance leading to the victimization of others, and thus the aspects of power that furthered the organization's goals were rejected. Power could not be valued as an element necessary and healthy for action, so it became twisted. Only those who could declare themselves victims and abused by power could, ironically, have any power within the organization. Negative power, the ability to negate the actions of others, became the currency of interaction. Kalia had power when she declared herself silenced and ignored. The minority caucus held power as long as they focused attention on instances of insensitivity to race and powerlessness. Majority board members negotiated in the same way, declaring themselves victimized by being associated with the inequalities of the larger corporate society or held hostage to the demands of a subgroup. Everyone identified first and foremost with her powerlessness rather than how she actually held power; power became a despised and rejected element within the organization.

The elements of hierarchy and inequality suffered the same fate. Hierarchy was rejected as the source of illegitimate and abusive power rather than as essential to coordinating organizational life. Inequality was associated with the evils of the larger society. Yet boards have legal responsibility for the health and welfare of the organization. Long-term members of an organization have unequal histories compared with those of newer members; founders of organizations have status associated with their initial vision and action. Hierarchy and inequality must exist somewhere in the structure of an organization; they are part of our realities. When we cannot imagine the part they play in organizational life, they become twisted and toxic.

Hierarchy is organizationally sustaining when accountability and responsibility for the organization's actions are at stake. The acknowledgment of inequality is necessary within organizations in order not to create a pretense that all members are the same. Recognizing the multiplicity of one's own soul is intertwined with recognizing the diversity of others. However, if all the conflicting parts of the self are equal at the same moment, one cannot act. If all members of an organization are equal in the same way and at the same time, the organization cannot act. The concept of shadow reminds us that within ourselves there are complementary and at times oppositional forces, but never are they all equal at once. We act from the tension of unequal forces.

The staff who felt ignored when they raised concerns about violent behavior in The Haven were not victims of hierarchy and inequality. They were participants in a system whose membership was uncomfortable with the limitations of their idealized organization. Some wanted The Haven to be a place for all women in need. Others wanted an organization that created sanctuary for themselves. The discussion of what to do about violent women darkened and became destructive because the tension of opposites—safety and risk, membership boundaries and inclusiveness, staff development needs and staff competencies—could not be discussed and acted on constructively.

To include soul in our view of organizational behavior necessitates a recognition of its shadows. It also suggests being alert to the mythic patterns that repeat themselves time and again in the drama of organizational life. When Odysseus returned from the underworld, he set out with his ship's crew to navigate a narrow pass between two sheer cliffs guarded by the monsters Scylla, a many-headed creature living in a dark cave, and Charybdis, a powerful, ship-destroying, whirlpool-generating force at the bottom of the other cliff. Circe, the goddess who guided Odysseus in his journey, told him to row like mad and to resist the temptation to stop and fight.

Liz Kantor and her crew also found themselves negotiating a narrow pass guarded by seemingly dangerous forces. They feared the rigidity of hierarchy, which would cause the organization to lose its heart and its spirit. And if collective decision making were mired in blame and shadow projection, then the organization would be sucked down into chaos and disruption. We must row like mad and be willing to risk some losses in order to pass through the sheer cliffs of such opposing forces. We must learn to address shadow dynamics before they become so toxic that we become stuck in our own shadow. Like Odysseus, Liz was fierce and proud, and she had difficulty heeding Circe's warning not to get personally engaged in the battle with these opposites. Once her anger was triggered by Kalia's accusations and she could not back down, she was vulnerable to the whirlpool of the organization's dynamics. The Haven was not the idealized sanctuary that Liz Kantor had sought. Instead, The Haven's idealized values blinded its members to the encroaching, virulent shadow.

The Shadow of the Collective

The collective shadow may be viewed as the disowned parts of individual members of a group, race, or nation projected onto others. The motto for such a group is "Whatever my group does is good; most everything other groups do is bad." When in the grip of a collective shadow, we can tolerate only an idealized image of ourselves; we scapegoat someone or some group to reflect the parts that have been disowned. War psychology has made this principle abundantly clear; every aspect of despised humanity is projected onto the enemy. The story of The Haven, though of a different scale, follows the same course, with the various subgroups becoming the projection screen for the disowned parts of the individual members.

We often see the collective shadow as foreign and unimaginable because we have not recognized the shadow within all of us. How can acts of violence, for example, be understood if I cannot imagine violence in myself? How can acts of senseless and hideous brutality be grasped if I know that I could never behave in such a way? For those of us who view ourselves as innocent of the soul's extremities, the reminder of dark forces only furthers our defenses, the sense that evil lies in an enemy outside ourselves but getting closer. Denying shadow, however, is fruitless; the consequence, so often, is the psychological need to scapegoat, to see the long shadow of evil looming only in others.

Jung wrote that what is true of humanity in general is also true of each individual, that our souls are linked in innumerable ways. If humanity suffers from violence, from willful domination of others, from senseless and brutal acts, then each individual suffers from these things as well. The challenge is to recognize these forces as symptoms of a disturbance in ourselves as well as the world around us. "In this way," Jung wrote, "man becomes for himself the difficult problem he really is" (Jung, 1954, p. 77). Jung suggested the person who recognizes his or her shadow knows the question is no longer "How can I get rid of the shadow?" but instead "How does one live with the shadow without enduring a succession of disasters?" The difficulty of that individual quest is only amplified at the collective level.

In England, two ten-year-old boys abducted and murdered a two-year-old child who had wandered momentarily from his mother in a shopping mall. The public, usually numbed by constant communication of murders, violence, and social decay, was outraged. A crowd of angry citizens rushed the police vans escorting the two boys to their arraignment. The family of a twelve-year-old boy who had been questioned in the incident but later released had to go into hiding as disorderly crowds shouted abuse outside his home. The two major political parties attempted to outdo each other with new programs for public safety, one declaring an "all out war" on crime, the other calling for new measures to lock up young offenders.

I listened to a news report as social workers, psychologists, and politicians each had their say on the matter. Most striking was a minister of the government, who insisted in a raised voice that the one thing that mattered most is that those who did not commit the crime had no culpability. The prime minister of England asserted, "I feel strongly that society needs to condemn a little more and understand a little less."

The duality evoked by this comment is startling to contemplate. It associates understanding of the act with excessive tolerance of its viciousness and brutality. Condemnation is the tried but untrue "fix" for deviance. There is no exit from this formulation. We cannot condemn the act and still contemplate its social context. We cannot "understand" and still experience the outrage or examine the capacity of evil to function in the human animal, regardless of age. We are perplexed by the limited choices of either more prisons or more social workers. Most distressingly, we cannot find access to forces within society that would allow us to assess our culpability and to link it with action in the world. The prime minister, who represents the authority of the state, offers a solution— to condemn more—that cannot or will not link the light of society's progress, its onward rush into the storm of the future, with the darkness embodied by the two boys. What is it these two boys, in their horrific act, "carry" for the collective? What is it we do not want to know?

These two children who committed the horrific act can be viewed as alien to the good, law-abiding citizens of the state. This is why the government minister insists that there is no culpability for anyone else. The children, from this perspective, are simply bad seeds that must be eliminated. The rest of us can then have the comforting but unwarranted certainty of being "not guilty" of the economic and social catastrophes we live with in the real world. We function as if there is no collective shadow that we must share responsibility for. There is only individual evil to be eliminated. The result is the need for more repressive policies, more prisons, and further applications of a moral varnish to the rough planks of human nature. Yet civilization cannot be held together by moral injunction and social repression. Rather, we must comprehend the cruelty within ourselves and the social conditions that give rise to such horror.

Amidst all the rage and recrimination, I was struck by the calm voice in an article written about this event by William Golding, the English novelist whose book Lord of the Flies remains one of the most vivid tales of childhood cruelty. He suggests in the article that to contemplate such an act of horror, we must ". . . live in the real world and not little worlds of our own making…" (Golding, 1993, p. D-1). He offers a hypothesis: "If it is true, as it seems to be, that there is a simplicity about human goodness, then it is just as true that there is a corresponding complexity about human evil" (Golding, 1993, p. D-1). But even if complexity allows no single certainty or explanation, there are some conditions, he writes, ". . . in which cruelty seems to flourish, which is different from saying that it has clear causes. What are these conditions? Chaos is one, fear is another. In Russia after the First World War, there were, I believe, gangs of children who had lost their parents. Dispossessed, without anywhere to live or anything to live on, they roamed the country attacking and killing out of sheer cruelty. There was, at that time, social chaos in many countries, and left to themselves, these children found a kind of elemental cohesion in their viciousness" (Golding, 1993, p. D-6).

Golding then makes a connection to current conditions in England, in which offspring of an underclass also face the experience of being dispossessed, are also brought together by fear, and also find that being "afraid together" permits an almost bottomless immersion in violence. The social conditions that twist human action are real and observable, as is the cruelty in each of us. Both are true; one does not displace the other.

The failure to work with shadow dynamics at the collective level is ultimately about the inability to make the connection between apparent opposites. In this case the opposites are represented by the singular responsibility of an individual for his or her own actions and the collective responsibility of caring for others as part of one's membership in a group or a society. If the representatives of the state cannot find that link in their own consciousness, they are hard pressed to help others from polarizing the situation further. The vigilante group that attempted to take the boys away from their police escort and the angry crowd that tormented the family of the boy who was questioned and released are extensions of this type of consciousness, which copes with shadow dynamics by polarizing the opposites more severely.

An entirely different approach can be seen in actions taken by tribal elders of the Tlingit Indians in Alaska. In this well-publicized case, two Indian youths who brutally beat a pizza delivery man for pocket money were banished to two separate islands. The grandfather of one of the assailants sat on the council that sentenced the boys, and the victim of the beating was also present at the tribal hearings. Some journalistic accounts emphasized that compensation to the victim, in the form of a new home built by the tribe, was central to the final resolution. The Indian youths, still facing potential imprisonment on their return, were to be aided in their banishment on the islands by four elders who would give them a crash course in subsistence survival.

I do not mean to compare the murder of a child by ten-year-old boys with the assault on a youth by teenagers. The finality and brutality of the first case far outweighs the violence, even though vicious, of the second. The point is the stark contrast in approach between the two cultures. By their actions, the Tlingit accept responsibility for the behavior of their members. Part of their responsibility is to punish, part to compensate the victim, and part to offer their children—even children whose actions are repellent— some further information for survival. It is as if they are saying through their leaders, "We are all culpable.… Where do we start to heal the divisions among us?"

Confronting the Shadow in Ourselves

Today we face a new moment in history. We are at the edge of our understanding of human behavior in a modern, technologically driven society. To a great degree, we face this challenge as individuals without comprehending the power and contradictions of the shadow, believing instead that the inculcation of individual virtues will save us. What lies outside the false duality of virtue versus immorality, condemnation versus understanding, or personal responsibility versus social programs is the question of just how the individual is bound up in the collective. The pathologies of the living soul, of the whole human being in crisis, will not let us ignore this question.

When the institutions that hold communities together—religions, law enforcement, education, health care, workplaces, family—are in disarray, then people begin searching for new models for how to organize themselves. The danger of our times is that we will read the warnings seen in youths out of control and in society falling to pieces as signals for harsher and more repressive policies, or as a superficial call for virtues and values that are viewed as singularly good: romanticized portraits of the nuclear family, instances of self-sacrifice, examples of rugged individualism. Shadow dynamics suggest that the outcome of such initiatives will not result in a more civilized society but instead will lead to attacks on convenient targets: deadbeat dads, violent youths, repeat offenders. These messengers—those who carry the shadow—become thereby not the symptoms of our social condition but scapegoats for our anxiety and sense of soullessness. In such a misguided environment, no one can safely say, without being accused of being an apologist for horror, "We are all culpable. Where do we start?"

If the shadow, whether individual, organizational, or collective, were only evil, we would have cause to ward it off, to keep it constantly at bay. Yet shadow, as I have used it, contains wisdom and a warning. When we recognize the shadow as a natural process, following us as Mara followed Buddha and Jung's dream specter followed him as he held the candle of consciousness, then we can begin to respect the multiple selves that lie within. The shadow offers us access to the unresolved issues of our past, the dispossessed feelings, attitudes, and emotions that can offer new vitality and a more comprehensive humanity, if recognized. We learn that we can be both this and that, tyrannical and empowering, just and unjust, altruistic and controlling, compassionate and cruel. The experience of one-dimensionality can give way to a creative polarity that provides the tension necessary for new learning and new approaches to living a more differentiated and psychologically richer life. The confrontation with shadow is the first tentative step we make toward reclaiming wholeness.

Collection and Recognition of the Whole

Organizations reflect and refract the light of the larger society. What happens in society—loss of core values, scapegoating, panic for solutions—happens also in organizations. The challenge to create settings that take account of the whole human being begins with the confrontation of shadow dynamics.

I am reminded of a client, the CEO of a software company, who was concerned that his administrative staff was constantly complaining to him about the degree of stress in the organization. Could I suggest a program for stress management, he wondered? I offered to talk with him about what might prove useful by understanding more clearly his role and his perceptions.

In exploring the question further, he acknowledged that he was furious with his staff and believed that stress was a function of individual capacity to cope: I did it, why can't they? He felt like lashing out at individuals who appeared morose and not part of the team.

In the sessions that followed, he reflected more deeply on how the staff's concerns threatened his belief that he was a caring and competent manager. And he agreed to examine how stress was manifest in his life, describing how he often did not sleep the night before a new week began, and how he periodically felt guilty about not being more present with his son. By degrees, he became more interested in understanding the role he might be playing in others' stress, and how he might contribute to organizational strategies in support of his staff generally.

I found it remarkable that he was courageous enough to link his anger at the staff with his doubts about his own self-image. He feared his own capacity to cope. He was able to see, through his own reflections, that stress had multiple sources aside from individuals' capacity to cope. He was able, therefore, to begin to address the experience of stress in his organization beyond what it meant about him; considering more fully now the implications of his staff's relationships to their work, their families, and each other. One of the liberating aspects of addressing shadow dynamics is that it softens our own harsh judgments of others.

We also resisted making stress a "management program." The "morose" individuals were not singled out for condemnation; nor were they subject to the group's pity or misdirected care. Rather, we made explicit an assumption that we all cope with life and that together we might learn more about how we cope as individuals as well as how groups cope with the demands of the workplace.

These conversations led to a focused conversation with his staff. He was able to tell them that he took personally the constant concerns they voiced about everyone's stress level. He was also willing to acknowledge that his responses had gotten in the way of their working together to find approaches that might offer people support. In response to his honesty, his staff acknowledged that they too felt that their subordinates' dissatisfaction reflected on their own performance as managers. They also owned up to the responsibility they shared, admitting it was easier to point out the problem to him than to do something about it themselves.

Together the CEO, his staff, and I agreed to explore the behaviors and conditions that fostered stress in their system. What were these behaviors? Individuals acknowledged that when faced with unfamiliar situations, they often became tentative and felt overwhelmed. As a group, they spoke of how the urgency of multiple deadlines contributed to less careful scrutiny of the choices available and avoidance of hard decisions.

Everyone came to see that behaviors were double edged: useful and problematic. Humor could be used to provide perspective, or it could be laced with hostility that communicated powerlessness. Becoming more organized and working harder was necessary, but it could become obsessive and lead to rigidity and too-concrete thinking. What we began to see was that behaviors contained within them light and shadow qualities that could lead off in different directions. Relying on oneself could amount to both productive independence and a dangerous withdrawal from the group. Ignoring issues that made people angry or frightened could be both appropriate in the short term and dangerous if never addressed. The group broke out laughing when one member quoted Leadbelly's summary of the blues: "In the first verse, you use the knife to cut a slice of bread; in the second, you use it to shave. In the third, you use it to cut your lying lover's throat." The context of the behaviors, not the behaviors themselves, had to be assessed.

The discussion of personal and group coping then turned to how departments could work together on behalf of clients and employees. Members began to creatively address how, separately and together, they could channel existing resources toward supporting each other. The human resource director suggested expanding employee assistance programs, previously directed at individuals in crisis, toward fostering interpersonal skills among intact work groups. The head of marketing expressed excitement about talking with his managers about how they coped and how they might better support others. The administrator of operations support recognized how her most recent efforts in developing a service strategy could be a vehicle for remedying confusion and distorted expectations between her departments and others.

The effect of these discussions was to create a new connectedness among these people that had little to do with what is traditionally thought of as team building. They had brought to light the devouring and enveloping forces that they constantly faced. By addressing the Scylla and Charybdis of their collective journey, they began to see more vividly the necessity of their need to row like hell—together.

We all felt the emotion behind the tears of one of the members at the end of the day. She told us this was the first time she had felt a connection to the group that was not born out of guilt or compliance. She spoke of having feared she would be scapegoated because she had recently become so overwhelmed. She thought that others coped so well and that her problems must be evidence of her deficiencies, demonstrating her lack of managerial competence. She had felt completely alone.

The CEO looked over at her and told her that he too felt in the dark. He secretly believed that he was the one who would be blamed, that he lacked the necessary leadership skills. Now, he saw that although the urgency and deadlines would not stop, his own way of coping with them could change. He had been generating so many initiatives that he couldn't see how much they were undermined by lack of integration.

His words allowed other members of the group to acknowledge that they too, no matter how it appeared otherwise, had fears and good reason to try out new behaviors. It was as if each member were saying, "I thought I was the only one who felt this way." I also noticed that paradoxically the commonality of their experience allowed each member to differentiate himself or herself in some way. Senior people were able to openly offer support to newer members, and individuals with specific knowledge and skills gained recognition for their unique contributions.

The experience for me, being in the room with them, was of individuals collecting parts of themselves and saying, "This too is me: both the self-reliant and the withdrawn figure, the organized person and the obsessive personality, the cheery group member and the isolated stranger."

The struggle with shadow, as Jung suggested, initiates entry, through a tight passageway, into a house of self-collection. As I witnessed it here, the dwelling is a place where people can live with more of themselves. It is not a place of final reconciliation or of static harmony. Rather, it is a place within oneself and among others.

This grappling with shadow dynamics contrasts with intentions, often benevolent, that end up wounding the whole person. We create organizational settings that seek to mold personalities as if only the upper world of rational behavior mattered. In the next chapter, we see how organizational structures arose historically to manage the soul's troubling behaviors, to quell a soul too chaotic to manage.

3

The Domination of Souls How Organizations Become Our Keepers

Under the absolute government of a single man, despotism, to reach the soul, clumsily struck at the body, and the soul, escaping from such blows, rose gloriously above it; but in democratic republics that is not at all how tyranny behaves; it leaves the body alone and goes straight for the soul. The master no longer says: "Think like me or you die." He does say: "You are free not to think as I do… but from this day you are a stranger among us.… You will remain among men, but you will lose your rights to count as one.…

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

No one can mature in a culture or organization without internalizing aspects of it. We are by nature dependent on family, community, social institutions, and our workplaces for our survival and to a large measure our sense of identity. To become aware of what it is that culture blurs—namely, the distinction between our utter uniqueness and the demands to fit in—is an essential task of soul seeking. We must continually confront the questions of meaning: "Who am I?" "What have I become?" "Where am I headed?" To answer these questions, we must confront our own history and socialization. We must also confront the power of ideas to shape both us and the organizations we are part of. The question of how we become more fully what we are takes on meaning and texture when we look inward and outward.

This chapter explores how organizations become our keepers, by watching over us, directing us, and attempting to control our actions. It also explores how we are shaped to become our own keepers. In what ways do we internalize the requirements of our organizations in order to watch over ourselves, direct our own behavior, and control our own actions? The dilemma for organizations is how to acknowledge the multidimensionality of a person, without simply molding people to group aims. The dilemma for us as individuals is how to retain more of ourselves in the face of shifting organizational demands that erode our own confidence and hinder access to our own experience.

The weight of these questions came home to me in a recent consultation with a senior manager who was wrestling with budget cuts. Janet Peters was ready to resign in response to the constantly changing and contradictory messages she perceived within the organization. "The question," she told me, "is no longer who's in charge of what, but who's in charge of what today? I seem to have lost my emotional intelligence, the common sense, perspective, and judgment I thought were my strengths." With a sigh, she told me that in the past there had been financial constraints, "but we knew we could say when enough was enough. In this new world, since the reorganization, I don't know if that is any longer true."

I asked her to tell me more about this "new world." Janet described an emphasis on analysis and action that devalued common sense and respect for human limitation. I asked her if there was evidence for that description; did anyone actually say one should not use common sense? "Of course not," she said, "but it's implicit in the constant reminders that we must focus on rapid deployment of initiatives and that we must demonstrate a capacity to act. It's the subtle message that now that we've been empowered, we better demonstrate results immediately." Janet was not resisting imperatives for action, but she was troubled by what she saw as the results. The power of these ideas had led to individuals' subordinating themselves to the new organizational structure in ways that decreased the intelligent design of systems and got in the way of bettering the company's products. People actually became less able to respond to genuine customer needs.

What seemed to animate Janet was her memory that, old world or new, she has faced these dilemmas before. She has experienced ambiguity and the contradictions inherent in managing cutbacks while still requiring that staff improve their performance. She rose in her organization because of, not in spite of, her constant questioning of the organization's direction. "What I think has gotten in my way," Janet told me, "is that I've tried to adapt to this new world without questioning it. I've seen this rush to solutions as normal and the plowing-over of people as being beyond my role to question. My peers say they're doing just fine and that makes me feel inadequate. When I'm tired and frustrated, I wonder what's wrong with me. But guess what? My peers aren't any clearer or getting anywhere faster. When I look past their words, I can see that they're also just barely holding things together."

There is no greater challenge to the soul than the forces of authority and the group that seek its surrender. The immense power of the group to demand conformity and inhibit access to our own experience is rooted in the power of ideas and the organizational structure that shapes and organizes these ideas. For Janet, the ideas implicit in the new world she referred to suggested subordination and compliance. Of course, she could have her own ideas, but as Tocqueville warned (in the epigraph that opens this chapter), she risks becoming a stranger among them.

This does not suggest that groups are evil or that conforming to group norms is by itself a problem. We become more aware of ourselves by recognizing that we internalize aspects of the groups we belong to. And we become more aware of ourselves by recognizing our power to transcend the limitations of what we think the group demands of us. The needs of the workplace and those of the individual are not necessarily contradictory, but neither are they necessarily compatible.

Power and Knowledge

Janet's struggle to find herself amidst seemingly new expectations reminds me of my own experience in graduate school. A philosophy professor, teaching a course in organizational theory, introduced us to the writings of Michel Foucault by way of an experiment conducted at our expense. To us, Foucault was an unknown philosopher whose writings were dense, often impenetrable. We placed our recently browsed chapter of his on the desks in front of us and looked expectantly at our instructor.

"What are Foucault's nine disciplines of power," the instructor asked, "and how do they relate to his central thesis?" We looked at each other with anxiety and discomfort. We began burrowing into the chapter in front of us, heads inches from the paper, as if we could hide from the instructor's gaze. One student started to speak, then stuttered and stopped. We looked up and then down helplessly, defeated in our ignorance. I still remember my feelings of that moment: angry, anxious, tentative, without a voice to express what was happening inside me.

Then the instructor's voice softened. "What is happening in this moment is something of what Foucault is describing. He is arguing that power and knowledge are intertwined. Who is viewed as holding power may dictate the scope of what is considered knowledge, what questions may be asked in discussion, and what the format for those discussions will be." The response of those under the gaze of authority, he went on to explain, becomes subject to review, interpretation, study. "Your hesitation becomes the data from which I gain further knowledge, the means by which I make judgments about you in order to develop further methods to teach you about my knowledge, to discipline, reward, and punish you. To measure your compliance against a norm. And when you are able to answer my questions, so that they are also your questions, then I have internalized in you regard for my power and my knowledge."

My instructor's words fell on me like hail in a storm. My classmates and I sat in silence, looking bewildered. We had been the subjects of my professor's little experiment in group dynamics. We had rapidly lost the power of our own voices when confronted with his assumed knowledge. Literally, students stuttered, lost their thought, became silent. His question, designed to intimidate, had left us docile and potentially more willing to learn his answers than to seek our own.

Yet my instructor's words were liberating. Didn't we at various times in our professional training bristle, complain, and then go along with the knowledge imparted to us? Didn't we feel, at times, that we were losing our own voice and adopting the voices of others? And then didn't we also take our new knowledge and impose it on others, often feeling superior and proud of our achievements? The experience of this interaction was thrilling and transformative, the sense of being high up on a balcony, looking down on a scene where actors are learning their roles. But the actors do not know they are actors, and they do not know they are learning a role.

The professor's experiment, conducted at our expense but well worth the price, opened a door in my mind to thinking about power and the willingness to subordinate ourselves to the perceived norms of a situation. The bonus was that it introduced me to the writings of Foucault, who, though well known in academic circles, is relatively unknown in the field of organizational behavior and management theory. To Foucault, knowledge did not emerge in isolation but rather was associated with the apparatus of power: institutions, programs, technology. Knowledge was always part of a web of social relations that included dynamics of power, group inclusion, and the threat of exclusion. Foucault asked, as my professor had: "Whose knowledge is given authority?" "Who must be observed?" "Who must be taught that their plight is justified and should be accepted?" He applied these questions to moments in history when the confinement of individuals within institutions became a metaphor for the domination of souls.

Suppressing What Does Not Fit

In the historical management of leprosy, mental illness, and social maladjustment, Foucault found analogues of exclusion, domination, and good intentions gone astray. "Who will be society's leper?" "Who will be viewed as maladjusted and subject to cruelty and rehabilitation?" "Who will be regarded as on the periphery of society?" "Who will be confined and judged?" Faced with such questions, one is obliged to ask, "How is it that we come to think of ourselves as normal and rational, and others as deviant?"

In the preface to his book Madness and Civilization, Foucault sets the tone by quoting from Pascal: "Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness" (Foucault, 1965, p. ix). Pascal's words remind us of the extremes of our own soul, and of the consequences of false ideals, such as narrow notions of reason and conformity, that can be imposed on us. The idealization of reason and social conformity has a shadow: one of domination and false adaptation.

The confinement and domination of an "other" who is different from us is in part protection from our own fear of madness, our own inkling that there are forces within ourselves that need to be controlled and kept at the periphery of awareness. Organizational structure, when coupled with a fear of disorder, sets in motion shadow dynamics that blur our legitimate need for some common behaviors, on the one hand, with punishment for difference on the other hand. The more benevolent our intentions seem, the greater the potential for the encroachment of shadow because we no longer see what lies behind those intentions.

Lepers in medieval times, like the mad who would take up a similar social function later, were seen as wicked and dangerous. The leper was a symbol of the social outcast. The danger of becoming the leper was and still is the danger of being dispossessed: one is no longer included in the social body—one no longer fits in. The leper represents an "other," repository of our fears and reassurance, however tentative, that the rest of us still remain in the light of God's grace.

In the corporate sphere, the lepers are those who are different: minorities, gay men and women, or those no longer of value in the reorganized workplace. As I was consulting to a large financial institution in the early 1980s, a vice president described to me the low morale in the office because many bank officers were waiting for reassignment or termination during a corporate shake-up. "They are our lepers," he said. They hover at the periphery, waiting for corporate action on their behalf, a warning to others of a potentially similar fate.

Exclusion is only one facet of the treatment of those who don't fit. A second strategy is confinement, management, and discipline. The first group in Europe to be confined on a large scale were those with the least power: the poor. In l656, by edict of the French king, the poor were rounded up and housed in various hospitals, many of which were similar in structure to those used for lepers. The edict was specifically intended to prevent an old sin from being born anew in a changing economic landscape. Idleness and begging were viewed not as symptoms but as the source of communal disorders.

The king's action represented both a form of charity and a warning to those who might refuse to work. The confining of the poor was to provide a cure for unemployment, a remedy for the increasing dislocation of individuals lost amidst changing economic circumstances. However, the institutions that housed the poor also acted as quasi prisons, including the use of stakes, irons, and the dungeon. Domination of the poor was an economic necessity and a social policy mediated by enforcement.

The French hospitals, where the poor were housed, soon made labor an essential aspect of confinement. Labor was regarded as a moral and social imperative, a redemption from idleness and a way to contribute to society. This confinement "solution" to poverty and unemployment, however, became a new social problem. The forced labor of the individuals confined to the hospital created further unemployment for those who were not. As Foucault saw the state's response, poverty had to be recognized as an essential aspect of a prospering nation, which meant the poor had to be maintained outside of the care of the state.

The institutions that for a time confined an undifferentiated mass of beggars, women, madmen, wayward children, and criminals were now expected to differentiate its various populations. The mad and the criminal were to be identified and rehabilitated. At the end of the eighteenth century in France, the poor were freed and those deemed mad were released from dungeons and chains. But this was neither a matter of simple philanthropy nor the progress of medical science. A new form of authority was emerging, one that sought techniques to control the social outcast in a more subtle fashion. The body can be held by chains or kept confined in a dungeon, but the mind is still free to roam, to wail, to curse the tormentor. Now the person must be tamed; the soul itself must be institutionalized.

The Castle of Conscience

Foucault chose for his analysis of these new techniques the work of a man conventionally viewed as the founder of modern psychiatry. Philippe Pinel was physician to the Bicêtre and to the Salpêtrière, two of the leading hospitals in France for the mentally ill in the late 1700s. Until the late eighteenth century, both hospitals functioned as de facto prisons for the destitute beggars, lunatics, prostitutes, and children deemed unruly. Pinel, in taking over the management of these institutions, was one of the leading proponents of a new technique for reining in madness, what Pinel himself called "the rules to follow in the moral treatment of mental disease" (Zilboorg and Henry, 1941, p. 341). Pinel is known today as the man who released the mad from their chains, responsible for the introduction of humanitarian institutional practices.

Pinel was an archetypal humanist, a scientist in no doubt of his rationality, a man who proposed to lift the mad from the dungeon of their ignorance. Surveying his own motivations for the challenge of treating madness, Pinel discovered only his best intentions, dictated by science and "by a truly sincere love of mankind, or rather by the honest desire to contribute to the general welfare. I shall leave it to the enlightened reader to decide whether I have achieved this aim" (Zilboorg and Henry, 1941, p. 341).

Foucault took Pinel up on his challenge. In him Foucault saw a symbol of monstrous rationality, at times benevolent, sometimes harsh, and always a controlling and judging figure of authority. Pinel articulated a new form of authority that sought to impose moral standards on individuals while having them accept responsibility for their actions in relation to institutional demands. Foucault argued that Pinel and his peers released the mad from their dungeons and chains only to hold them confined in another, moral world, a "castle of conscience."

The castle of conscience was a place of subtle tyranny where outward conformity, fear of isolation, and the imperative of labor ruled. In this world, inmates must always regard their keepers as working on their behalf, and show gratitude for what freedom they have and contrition for bad behavior. Foucault's asylum is a rendition of a nightmare, a "cuckoo's nest" where the Nurse Ratcheds rule and there are no McMurphys to come swinging through the door. It is the asylum as horror chamber, ruled by sovereign reason and misguided philanthropy.

Pinel himself proposed that this new form of therapeutic confinement accomplished "the happy effect of intimidation, without severity; of oppression, without violence; and of triumph, without outrage" (Robinson, l977, p. 66). His technique emphasized the subtlety needed by those in positions of authority to impose their demands. In Treatise on Insanity, which he wrote during a time of revolution in France, he described the meaning of his intervention:

A Russian peasant, or a slave of Jamaica, ought evidently to be managed by other maxims, than those which would exclusively apply to the case of a well bred irritable Frenchman, unused to coercion and impatient of tyranny… [therefore] to render the effects of fear solid and durable, its influence ought to be associated with that of a profound regard. For that purpose, plots must be either avoided or so well managed as not to be discovered; and coercion must always appear to be the result of necessity, reluctantly resorted to and commensurate with the violence or petulance which it is intended to correct [Robinson, l977, pp. 67–68].

Pinel advocated the threat of confinement, the straitjacket, and the keepers' use of superior numbers to control the inmates. He saw in all these activities not coercion but a treatment strategy that forswore random violence and was always in the patient's best interest.

In one case, of a man freed from twelve years in chains, Pinel instructed the keepers to maintain silence in their relations with him. "This prohibition," Pinel wrote, "which was rigorously observed, produced upon this self-intoxicated creature an effect much more perceptible than irons and the dungeon; he felt humiliated in an abandon and isolation so new to him amid his freedom" (Foucault, 1965, p. 260). Pinel understood that the subtle but very real threat of isolation and humiliation in the midst of seeming liberty was a tactic more "perceptible" by the inmate than the symbols of overt coercion, the irons and the dungeon. Individuals were now expected to take responsibility for themselves in an environment organized by their managers. "Fear no longer reigned on the other side of the prison gates," Foucault wrote about asylum conditions; "it now raged under the seals of conscience" (1965, p. 247).

In his techniques, Pinel concentrated on the individual's conscience, that capacity to internalize social standards of behavior and morality. He documented the case of a man who developed this conscience after being threatened with perpetual confinement for his loud outbursts. The man was told that he would remain confined until he agreed to behave. After three days of actual confinement, the man requested to be released. Pinel wrote that after release,

a single look from the governess was sufficient to bring him to his recollection… lest he might draw upon his benefactress the displeasure of the governor, and incur, for himself, the punishment from which he had just escaped. These internal struggles between the influence of his maniacal propensities and the dread of perpetual confinement habituated him to subdue his passions and to regulate his conduct by foresight and reflection. He was not insensible to the obligations which he owed to the worthy managers of the institution, and he was even disposed to treat the governor, whose authority he had so lately derided, with profound esteem and attachment [Robinson, l977, p. l06].

The gaze of authority was all that was needed to trigger correct behavior: "a single look from the governess was sufficient to bring him to his recollection." The inmate must watch his keepers, but he must also watch over himself. He must become his own governess, working on behalf of the greater authority, judging himself as the external authority figure would judge him. Only then could a "cure" be awakened that is internal and permanent.

Rehabilitation would be achieved through moral cures. But at the core of this strategy lay the figure of authority who saw to its management. The manager would be immovable, cool, and indefatigable. The patient, we may imagine, would be disordered, unruly, muddled within himself or herself. Pinel saw in the governor, who administers the asylum, an impressive figure of humanitarian care, his courage unshrinking, his voice that of thunder. In the chambers of La Bicêtre, a symbolic confrontation took place between the figure of chaos and the figure of rationality and conviction. In this confrontation, the figure of authority could not understand what he faces; he knows only that he must dominate what has become so separate from his own personality.

Internalizing the Demands of Authority

In the years that Pinel was freeing the mad of their chains, freedom was also sweeping away the chains of sovereign authority in Europe. The American colonies had declared independence from England. The spilled blood of the royal family in France had consecrated the end of the rule of the nobility. Over the next 125 years, the Russian tsar would fall, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire would commit suicide, his successor would be assassinated, and the kaiser of Germany would meet defeat. Freedom was creating new anxieties about individuals' behavior in the absence of a sovereign ruler.

Kings, after all, watched over their subjects and brought order. Subjects offered obedience, and for their dependence they received protection. In the collective psyche, the question was how to retain order now that everyone was free. Freedom demanded new mechanisms of control, new methods for ensuring compliance. Freedom was adding a new urgency to the definition of what should be viewed as normal.

In this changing world, where sovereign authority would no longer dictate order, Jeremy Bentham, an innovator and moral philosopher, became obsessed with an idea and a plan. Bentham, too, had the best of intentions. He had just published a paper entitled Panopticon Or The Inspection House: A Plan of Management (1791), in which he hoped to bring order and humane treatment to the horrific conditions imposed on the swelling population of criminals in England. Like Pinel, he grasped instinctively that power would not, as in the preceding centuries, reside in the control of land and its resources. It would be contingent on the control of human bodies, their minds, and their functionality. He set out to develop an architecture for rehabilitation, a means to ensure correct behavior. Freedom must be leavened with order.

Bentham conceived an enlightened prison, whose "shadow" was the capacity to regulate the smallest details of everyday life. The architectural plan for the panopticon was modeled on a factory that his brother Samuel, an engineer, had built in Crecheff, Russia. It was a plan that would balance freedom with control, a structure that could ensure proper conduct. In a preface to his writings on the panopticon, Bentham listed its benefits: "Morals reformed, health preserved—industry invigorated—instruction diffused—public burthens lightened" (Bentham, 1843, p. 39).

Bentham believed, long before the word became popular in our own time, that his creation was empowering. The panopticon would allow the inmate, the pauper, the schoolchild, and the worker an opportunity to adapt their behavior to the conditions around them, to mirror physically and mentally the behavior necessary to fit into the social body.

The word panopticon comes from the Greek panoptes, meaning all seeing. "We know the principle on which it was based," wrote Foucault about the physical structure of the panopticon:

A perimeter building in the form of a ring. At the center of this, a tower, pierced by large windows opening onto the inner face of the ring. The outer building is divided into cells, each of which traverse the whole thickness of the building. These cells have two windows, one opening onto the inside, facing the windows of the central tower, the other, outer ones allowing daylight to pass through the whole cell. All that is then needed is to put an overseer in the tower and place in each of the cells a lunatic, a patient, a convict, a worker or a schoolboy. The back lighting enables one to pick out from the central tower the little captive silhouettes in the ring of cells. In short, the principle of the dungeon is reversed; daylight and the overseer's gaze capture the inmate more effectively than darkness, which afforded after all a sort of protection [Foucault, l980, p. l47].

What can be made visible is believed essential to control. The panopticon can be seen as a metaphor and a model for a new form of disciplinary environment, one that embodied the exclusionary nature of the leper community and the classification system of the asylum. The panopticon proposed to confine individuals in order to make them tame.

The panopticon, as in the leper community, had the capacity to identify and confine selected populations. Schoolchildren, workers, convicts, and patients could all be secluded and observed at a distance. As with the mental asylum, the panopticon had the capacity to oversee every aspect of the individual's behavior and movements. The structure of the panopticon insisted on order and was inherently linked to hierarchy, classification, surveillance, and the separation of individuals from each other.

Bentham developed the panopticon during a time of changing economic conditions, when the newly industrializing areas needed a large labor pool. The enclosure of so many individuals under one roof brought fears of idleness, rebellion, and sabotage. The panopticon, wrote Bentham, would be "a mill for grinding rogues honest and idle men industrious" (Bell, 1961, p. 228). He saw the panopticon as a tool to shape conscience by enforcing the "perpetual gaze."

Bentham viewed the surveillance aspects of the panopticon as essential in aiding the individual to achieve correct behaviors and to establish good work habits. "The fundamental advantage of the Panopticon," Bentham wrote, "is so evident that one is in danger of obscuring it in the desire to prove it. To be incessantly under the eyes of the inspector is to lose in effect the power to do evil and almost the thought of wanting to do it" (Miller, 1993, p. 220). Visibility ensures surveillance, and visibility and surveillance are assumed to ensure a wholesome conscience.

In the panopticon, surveillance is maintained at a distance and is one-directional. Special shades were to be constructed in such a way that the inmate could not see inside the central tower. Whether the overseer had his back turned or was asleep or was not even present did not matter. The inmate within the cell believed he was being watched and judged.

The panopticon supported hierarchy by proposing to diminish acts of disobedience before they happened. It lessened the demand that authority be a relationship, albeit among unequals, and fostered an invisible network of methods for monitoring and detecting exceptions to the normal. Bentham anticipated a time when surveillance would be taken for granted, when the individual would anticipate being watched and would therefore police himself or herself. Right conduct would come not only from fear of reprisal but also from the anticipation of guilt if one betrayed the internalized social eye. The chains are removed, but freedom is now bound by the decorum established by the collective will over what is the correct way to think and behave.

The Gaze of Authority in the Modern Organization

The panopticon as metaphor has not escaped writers and consultants on organizational behavior. Daniel Bell, in his essay Work and Its Discontents: The Cult of Efficiency in America, noted that the passion for order demonstrated by the panopticon created a "new calculus of time" that disrupted the agrarian and craft nature of work. Work would no longer be dictated by the rhythm of seasons or the art of the craftsman. Instead, work would be internally organized by a clocklike, regular, "metric" beat. Bell wrote: "The modern factory is fundamentally a place of order in which stimulus and response, the rhythms of work, derive from a mechanically imposed sense of time and pace. No wonder, then, that Aldous Huxley can assert: "Today every efficient office, every up-to-date factory is a panoptical prison in which the workers suffer… from the consciousness of being inside a machine" (Bell, 1961, p. 229).

Nearly three decades later, Shoshana Zuboff, in her book In the Age of the Smart Machine (1988), raised similar questions about how modern technology, involving information and automated systems, creates new and more perplexing dilemmas concerning control. Visibility, she pointed out, is no longer only vertical, as it was in the panopticon. It rests on horizontal scrutiny as well, the collective group watching over themselves and each other. Zuboff (1988, p. 351) wrote: "The model is less one of Big Brother than of a workplace in which each member is explicitly empowered as his or her fellow worker's keeper. Instead of a single omniscient overseer, this panopticon relies upon shared custodianship of data that reflects mutually enacted behavior. This new collectivism is an important antidote to the unilateral use of panopticonic power, but it is not a trouble-free ideal. Horizontal transparency breeds new human dilemmas as well.…"

The office with no doors that allows constant visibility, the microprocessor built into the operating equipment to monitor individual productivity, the information systems that monitor compliance with centralized standards are all contemporary extensions of the panopticon. They are not necessarily evil, but they are a new means to harness the power of the group to watch over us and implicitly demand compliance. The effect, though unintentional, can be chilling if the individual senses that their use is unilateral and arbitrary. "Often the level of frustration disables the work," wrote an employee in a workplace environment survey I conducted; "the sense of being inspected and having your words and actions parsed for possible lapses makes me feel more defensive than attentive or productive. This translates into a sense of not having one's judgment trusted." Surveillance evokes a generalized loss of status and personal control.

In contemporary organizations, conformity is gained by way of appraisal systems and a tight corporate culture. Everyone feels watched and judged, even if the manager is less overtly controlling. The organization can depend more on self-regulating units guided by specific boundaries governing what each small unit can influence. Conformity becomes a defense against the anxiety of not knowing who is behind the shades of power, who determines what information is relevant, and what consequences are in store for non-compliance.

What is essential about the panopticon as a metaphor of domination is that it is premised on the structure itself, a machine programmed by its architects for order. All individuals have their established places, with their accountabilities and responsibilities identified. Everyone is interchangeable; no one individual can influence the basic nature of the structure. The underlying rules that govern the system—where power is actually located—are invisible. Domination is not simply a function of one thing, whether surveillance, architecture, or punishment; it is an elemental force that feels pervasive. Everyone feels watched and judged.

The panopticon symbolized a new attitude toward domination, more machinelike than personal. Bentham's proposal offered a solution to the naked power of the autocratic sovereign by stripping power from all individuals. "This is indeed the diabolical aspect of the idea," Foucault wrote:

and all the operations of it. One doesn't have here a power which is wholly in the hands of one person who can exercise it alone and totally over the others. It's a machine in which everyone is caught, those who exercise power just as much as those over whom it is exercised. This seems to me to be the characteristic of the societies installed in the nineteenth century. Power is no longer substantially identified with an individual who possesses or exercises it by right of birth; it becomes a machinery that no one owns [Foucault, l980, p. l56].

The panopticon is a metaphor of a machine with human parts, a system without feeling or creative spirit. The human pieces are subordinate to the will of the machine, adapted gears in a "tremendous clockwork," to use a phrase from Nietzsche. Freedom is replaced by a craving to be happy, to be relieved of the painful choices and struggles to shape how one fits into the larger social body.

The panopticon represents an approach that attempted to change people from the inside out by making it necessary for individuals to tame their own wild and mercurial nature. As their personal identity is stripped away, individuals feel less attentive to their internal world, less able to contemplate the larger system they are in, and finally less able to tolerate the dissonance between the two. It is a disciplinary system that proposes to make individuals conform for their own good. "Call them soldiers," Bentham wrote, "call them machines: so they were but happy ones, I should not care" (Miller, 1993, p. 221). Happiness comes at the expense of a soul too chaotic to manage.

Taken together, Pinel's asylum and Bentham's panopticon offer us overlapping images of what it means to be in an enlightened prison. Everything must be submitted for inspection. We are constantly subject to the power of the prevailing notion of normality, whether it be under the eye of someone in the hierarchy or of our peers, or simply imbedded in the architecture of the system itself. Being under the watchful eye feels like a pressure "applied to the forehead," a colleague told me once. We can't always see it, but we can feel it.

Confronting the Machine

Does the logic of the panopticon and the asylum—precise classifications of individuals based on personality and functionality, surveillance, and treatment of what is perceived as deviant—still infuse the organizational logic of today? Foucault made no attempt to balance out the diversity and contradictions in actual institutions. He did not have the usual academic compulsion to hedge, equilibrate, narrow the questions asked to safe proportions. He acknowledged setting out to write historical fiction, to provoke in the reader a response, to act corrosively upon normal assumptions about power, authority, and institutional life. In this sense he was a consultant to society, acting no differently from the best organizational consultants, who ask of their clients to examine their assumptions, who frustrate their clients' easy solutions, who offer their clients not a new ideology but a method for arriving at their own conclusions.

Foucault joins with writers throughout history who have warned us of any system that promises to meet our needs without considering the costs. Sergei Aksakov, a Russian writer of the early nineteenth century, summarized this viewpoint by warning of the costs of seemingly benevolent social aims:

However widely and liberally the state may develop, were it even to reach the extreme form of democracy, it will none the less remain a principle of constraint, of external pressure—a given binding form, an institution. The more the state evolves the more forcefully it turns into a substitute for the inward world of man… the more closely man is confined by society, even if society should seem to satisfy all his needs. If the liberal state were to reach the extreme form of democracy, and every man to become an officer of the state, a policeman over himself, the state would have finally destroyed the living soul in man [Woodcock, 1962, pp. 401–402].

The idealized image of a perfect society or a perfect workplace is illusory. The living soul, as the phrase is used here, encompasses the full dimension of being human. Humanity has within it pain as well as joy, the unchanging nature of the tragic as well as striving for prosperity and happiness. When we deny one for the other, we can no longer embrace the fully human dimension of experience. The consequence of denial is that part of the self is disenfranchised and goes underground, fermenting fantasies of rebellion, violence, and revenge. The body can be made docile, the mind numbed; but the spirit of the person is free to burn and rage. We are possessed by the very shadows we seek to distance. Irrationality returns in more vivid forms, and disorder does not stay banished for long. Our good intentions, especially our good intentions, can become distorted in ways that subordinate the person and crush the vitality of the soul. What is our freedom if it is purchased at the exclusion of other classes of people, isolated from the rhythms of nature and community, maintained by becoming an officer over ourselves? How do we confront this unintended domination?

One lesson we might learn from these tales is that there are inadvertent outcomes of our best intentions. Pinel and Bentham were reformers who genuinely sought better conditions for those they hoped to help. They believed that by establishing the rules by which others would live, they could cordon off the inner world of emotions, thoughts, and fantasies that sometimes interferes with outward social compliance. What they could not foresee was their shadow, and how destructive their actions would be. They could not foresee how alone individuals would become when removed from participation in the whole. The panopticon, you will recall, was a social machine that no one owned.

Besides realizing unintended outcomes, we must be willing to see beyond our own individual dilemma and identify the larger purposes from which we shape our own organizational role. An example from my consulting work may help illustrate this dynamic in groups.

Recently, I worked with a patient care division of a hospital in which we had addressed a number of organizational issues. In one situation, we were discussing one of the group's main intentions, to create strategic alliances with the financial division of the hospital. I pointed out that this was not a new aim; they had tried in the past. And they knew perfectly well that this was a critical alliance. Yet the outcome of their effort was invariably the same: distrust and mutual loss of credibility. They not only felt judged by the data from the financial division but also disturbed by oversight from the "bean counters." Repeatedly, during our sessions, I listened to stories of budget information on their operations being put forward that they disputed or felt was irrelevant to their tasks in delivering patient care.

I suggested that they could not find any genuine common ground with the financial division because they were so preoccupied with their anger and sense of humiliation from previous interactions. They were hiding the truth beneath their stated intention, I said; they really had no wish to cooperate. The group was initially silent. Out of this empty space came words from the director of emergency services. He said he had never thought about it this way. He did, in fact, see the finance people as antagonists he continually placated, offering them expense projections that were not realistic, revising his figures later when necessary. "What if they are right?" he said. "What if they do have information that I could use or that might guide me in making different decisions on staffing? I have seen my role as protecting my staffing from them. What if that is not the whole picture? This is scary."

The emergency services director had a real dilemma. If he acted on the information that he was over budget, he might have to cut his staff or services in ways that could further compromise the morale of his department and the safety of his patients. If he ignored the information or continued to placate the finance people, he might jeopardize the fiscal viability of the whole hospital and risk his job. He realized that he must confront more deeply the assumptions of his organizational system, the implications of how the health care machinery operates. He knew, for example, that the majority of his patients did not present serious emergencies but were individuals unable to gain access to medical care in other kinds of clinics. The staffing pattern he maintained was a response to other parts of the health care machine that were not functioning effectively. The underlying purpose of his hospital was to care for people, not to offer a Band-Aid that masked the dysfunctionality of the health care system.

The effect of his insight was liberating, although frightening. He was freed from his own view of the financial division as people unworthy of respect. They had become shadowy figures high up in a tower, peering through the shades of their fiscal knowledge. Now, he realized, they could prove to be a valuable resource in managing during a cycle of cost cutting. He also acknowledged having more personal energy. He escaped the feeling of being suspended between despair— nothing could be done—and fanaticism—marching alone against the impersonal forces of the hospital. He, and by extension individuals in other parts of the system, recovered some additional aspect of a common humanity and a common task. What had happened?

The unintended outcome of bureaucratization within the hospital had left people, like the manager of the emergency department, in tiny cells from which they could not view the whole system, while they in turn felt constantly under inspection. The data from the finance department was perceived as punitive, part of the machinery of the system that gave feedback without engaging in a dialogue. But by confronting these restrictions, and by confronting his own internal feelings of anger, humiliation, and rebellion against the restrictions, he could begin to think in new ways about his dilemma. Unlike the panopticon, a machine that no one owns, he could acknowledge that everyone must own the whole system and that alliances were not simply a function of human relations but an aspect of his core responsibilities. From this psychological stance, he could then proceed to act in strategic ways.

The Soul Emergent

The lesson in all this is a message that lies at the heart of all spiritual teachings: You cannot be someone else. You cannot gain freedom by conforming. You cannot adapt yourself to circumstances and then feel you are a victim or a bystander. I recall a story from my own childhood about a certain Rabbi Zusya, who said, "In the coming world, they will not ask me: 'Why were you not Moses or Akiba or Abraham?' They will ask me 'Why were you not Zusya?'" This question lingers today as it has for centuries, for it is a question about the resiliency of the soul, the utter uniqueness of each individual.

In each of us lies this question about being more fully who we are as opposed to becoming someone else's ideal. We are pulled in so many directions that the inevitable cry from within is "I can't find me." But who is the I and who is the me? The lessons of the soul teach us to regard the question with reverence. In organizations, we are constantly distracted from this essential question because the pull to live up to someone else's expectation is so profound. The workplace of today embodies a sometimes innocent, sometimes harsh assault on us as individuals—we who need connection to our own experience and our own destiny.

We are on the path to becoming real when our inner work joins with a creative outpouring that is relevant to the world we live in. We are on the way when we attend to our experience, when we recognize both the awe of a larger force operating in the world and also the darkness implicit within human consciousness. This "path with heart" is central to all spiritual teachings.

The soul is endangered by a metaphoric prison in which the inmates and keepers become more machine than human. When we attempt to create an enlightened prison, as did Bentham, we may become shut off from our own experience. For Bentham, as for us, there is an aspect to our consciousness that equates happiness with comfort and order—a painless existence. In contrast, the living soul can be a source of disorder, where competing passions lie, where we journey into alternative realms, sometimes wondrous and sometimes maddening. Nietzsche suggested something of these multiple perspectives of the soul when he wrote in poetic form: "My soul, its tongue insatiable, has licked at every good and evil thing, dived down into every depth" (Thiele, 1990, p. 59).

We elevate reason beyond our own experience and consensual reality above being real, at the expense of what lies creative within us. I am reminded of what Ingmar Bergman said about his art: "I have always had the ability to attach my demons to my chariot." These demons, problematic at one level, are the wellsprings of his creativity, the basis, Bergman says, of "a language that literally is spoken from soul to soul in expressions that, almost sensuously, escape the restrictive control of the intellect" (Weiner, 1994, p. 4). Bergman's demons are dual-natured, at once troubling and enlightening. But he could think of them as part of his experience, imagery from the multiplicity of his soul. And experience can give us perspective on ourselves and our organizations.

This capacity to hold the tension of our two natures is what lies on the other side of sovereign reason and group conformity. There is danger, but as Bergman knew, there is at least a chance that our souls can power the chariot of our lives. To approach such an alternative view of the soul, however, we must be realistic about the social threads of our culture, closer to Bentham than to Bergman. We are still just at the beginning of our story as to how organizations challenge the soul.