“Justice, Organizations, and Psychoanalysis”

Theme of the ISPSO 2025 Annual Meeting and Symposium

THEME: Justice, Organizations, and Psychoanalysis

ISPSO aims to explore how psychoanalytic thinking can further our understanding of organizations and the broader social influences that impact them. The insights gained are used to promote and support the development of healthy, humane, high-performing organizations.

Our Annual Meeting 2025 theme will focus on that purpose as it relates to a wide range of significant issues related to “Justice, Organizations, and Psychoanalysis.” We are invited to consider this theme together in 2025 in the US. city of Philadelphia,

There can be little doubt that justice and fairness are shaping events worldwide. In the U.S., one-tenth of one percent of the population owns 10% of the wealth. CEOs are paid 344 times more than what the typical worker earns. Since 1972, the black unemployment rate has been twice the white unemployment rate. Throughout the Midwest, white working-class families have endured the scourge of the fentanyl crisis as breadwinners confront the long-term results of de-industrialization. Millions in Africa and Latin America live substandard lives, their human potential unrealized. Political freedom is the foundation for justice, yet 70% of the world’s population lives in settings where dictators rule and elections are compromised.

These inequalities shape the settings in which organizations pursue their goals and accomplish their purpose. ISPSO members are compelled to ask if and how the organizations we belong, and consult should respond to issues of justice and inequality. On the one hand, organizations are encouraged to pursue the purposes for which their stakeholders, including shareholders, hold them accountable. Hospitals, law firms, and insurance companies are pressed daily to satisfy their customers and clients, achieve their goals, and meet and exceed the competition. Leaders believe that the pressures of their primary task preclude their focus on justice issues outside their remit. Yet, we also know that the broader environment of justice and inequality exists inside organizations. Workers without unions to protect them face stagnant or declining real wages, minorities struggle to be recognized for their achievements, and some people in high positions behave as sexual predators.

In addition, social justice organizations face challenges. Conflicts over mission, challenges to the hierarchy, and tensions between identity groups can undermine performance. These organizations are not immune to the irrational dynamics of group life.

While pursuing justice is compelling, it can sometimes create felt injustice. For example, people within organizations have pushed back against DEI programs (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion), arguing that they impose views rather than educate, undermine meritocracy, and impugn people’s motives. It may be easy to dismiss this backlash as politically motivated or simply racist, and sometimes, this is true. Yet we are encouraged to follow the psychoanalyst Ed Shapiro’s counsel and ask, “How are they right?”

Finally, describing people as victims of injustice may inadvertently reduce their humanhood. When we see people as victims only, we ignore their substantial accomplishments and the fullness of their lives. We risk projecting onto them the psychological struggles we face in achieving our own personal agency and satisfaction.  

Psychoanalysis as a discipline and treatment has focused, for the most part, on the patient on the couch and less on the patient in society. Yet, in the last decades of his life, Freud increasingly leaned toward social psychoanalysis and its implications for individual, organizational, and cultural life. In his paper on group psychology, he declared that social psychology is “the oldest psychology,”

Freud thought that society took a heavy toll on people’s psychological makeup. In Civilization Its Discontents, he argued that an increasingly complex society represses instincts and triggers guilt. Yet, he added that people would be unhappy without equality, freedom, and justice.

We encourage people to submit papers for our conference to consider all the themes of justice. 

As a site for the conference, Philadelphia represents the challenge facing us. For some, it is the site of history and memorials for liberal democracy, including the Liberty Bell, Independence Hall, and Congress Hall, and The Johnson House, Philadelphia’s vital stop on the Underground Railroad. For others, it is also viewed as a cradle of refusal to abolish slavery, respect the equality of women, respect the rights of indigenous peoples, abandon colonialist ambitions, and affirm at and in its constitution the fullest definition of “We the People…”  

ISPSO invites you to explore the unconscious dynamics that underlie and impede advances toward a more just society and organizations where we work, consult, or study. 

AM 2025 CHAIR

Wally Fletcher: AM25Chair@ispso.org