MASTER IN ONE’S OWN HOUSE?

Omnipotence and Incompleteness in Organizations and Leadership

Vienna: Freud’s City and a Place of Historical Ruptures

The ISPSO Annual Meeting 2027 takes place in Vienna — the city where Sigmund Freud laid the foundations for today’s understanding of psychodynamic work.

There is a reason for Vienna being the birthplace of psychoanalysis. It is a place of historical ruptures, shaped by intellectual greatness, cultural innovation, and by persecution, violence, and political destruction. It was here that Freud discovered the unconscious, for him the true psychical reality, of which consciousness is only a small part.

Freud himself was forced to flee Vienna in 1938 because of the Nazi-Terror.  Vienna’s history reminds us how quickly fantasies of omnipotence can draw human beings into their destructive behaviours and how neither individuals and institutions may not be sufficiently stable nor sovereign to fully protected against it.

Ottakringer: A Place of Organizational Memory

The corporate history of Ottakringer Brauerei lies at the center of the conference. It reflects the ambivalence of organizational history: entangled with the Nazi period, the expropriation and expulsion of Jewish citizens, and the ongoing work of remembrance and reckoning. This unresolved rupture makes Ottakringer itself a case of the conference: How do organizations live with what cannot be fully integrated? What remains repressed, what returns, and what part do mourning, recognition, and working through play in renewal?

On the Theme of the Meeting: MASTER IN ONE’S OWN HOUSE?

When Sigmund Freud wrote in 1917 that the ego is not master in its own house, he formulated a disturbing insight about human beings: that there are hidden forces at work within us that shape our lives, our relationships, and our institutions.

More than one hundred years later, this insight has lost none of its relevance: We live in a time of technological acceleration, geopolitical upheaval and social polarization. With the rise of artificial intelligence, we are at the same time witnessing the return of the old human fantasy of omnipotence, the dream of eliminating uncertainty and overcoming dependency. The desire of leaving incompleteness behind.

What does this mean for us personally and in our profession as people working psychodynamically? Organizations and leadership stand at the centre of this tension. These are places where fantasies of omnipotence become especially strong: the wish to master complexity, resolve conflicts, control uncertainty and make the future predictable.

Leaders are expected to know, to decide and to contain. And yet experience shows repeatedly that these fantasies fail. Human coexistence is shaped by ambivalence, conflict, loss and limitation. To work and to lead responsibly does not primarily mean creating completeness. Rather, it means tolerating incompleteness. It means carrying contradictions, acknowledging dependency, being able to accept help and negotiating difference in a productive way.

ISPSO and the Question of Its Own House

As an organization dedicated to exploring unconscious dynamics in organizations, ISPSO itself must ask itself the same question. Every institution carries within itself its history, its ideals, its conflicts and its blind spots.
What does it mean if ISPSO itself is not master in its own house? What creative possibilities emerge when an organization acknowledges its own incompleteness?

What the Annual Meeting 2027 Stands For

Leadership and Omnipotence: How do fantasies of control and omniscience shape leadership, power and decision-making?
Conflict, Dependency and Containment: How can organizations hold tensions without resolving them too quickly?
Mourning and Transformation: What role do loss, failure, and historical working through play in development and renewal?
Artificial Intelligence and Human Agency: Is AI an expression of new fantasies of omnipotence — or does it radically confront us with
our limits? 
Quo Vadis ISPSO: How is ISPSO developing further and what role does psychoanalytic thinking have in an increasingly fragmented world?

Join Us

ISPSO Annual Meeting: February 2–7, 2027, Vienna
Return with us to Vienna, the birthplace of psychoanalysis — to a city that, like hardly any other, stands for greatness and rupture, creativity and loss. More than one hundred years after Freud’s quote, we human beings are still wounded by the realization that we are not masters in our own house.
We invite you to keynote lectures, plenary dialogues, workshops, paper sessions, Members’ Day and Social Dreaming Matrices. Join us to honour the city of Waltz with your own dance.