ISPSO ANNUAL MEETING 2027

The ego is not master in its own house (Freud, 1917). This paper takes that provocation into the organisation and asks what happens when leaders are expected to be exactly that: masters, immune to their own incompleteness. Bion's (1961) basic assumption dependency is the classical account of what a group does with this expectation: locating omnipotence in a leader and relating to them accordingly. Read this way, dependency remains a one-way construct — the group depends, the leader contains (or not). This paper argues against the fashionable assumption that containment is something only leaders “do” (cf. Bergquist, 2019) as such construct is incomplete, and proposes a reworking, replying to the call’s emphasis on stimulating new thinking: co-dependency rather than dependency, in which leader and group contain each other's incompleteness while working on task (French & Simpson, 2010; cf. Tchelebi, 2017). This is a “new” reading of “old” theory, and a genuine innovation rather than a restatement of received wisdom. Advances of this kind matter for our field: if we are to remain relevant to contemporary thinking, our theory must keep moving – while honouring the roots from which it grows. 

The argument draws on empirical data from two months of ethnographic fieldwork within a closed convent, combining participant observation with interviews. The author was treated as postulant, a nun in formation, partaking in the community's daily routines throughout. Co-dependency here is structurally intense and worked with openly, offering direct access to how it is lived rather than merely reported. Analysis of this material shows co-dependency functioning not as a regression against the work group, but as a creative, on-task container (cf. French and Simpson, 2015), holding both leader and group through incompleteness. This reframing has direct links to the relevance of Bion's (1962) container-contained model (see also Rinaldi, 2023; Winnicott, 1960) in contemporary teams: if dependency can be mutual, containment itself must be reciprocal rather than directional, with consequences for how the two concepts are theorised together. 

In the second half, the paper grounds this reworking in three recent case studies drawn from organisations in the automotive, pharmaceutical, and information-technology sectors, showing how mutual containment operates, and fails, in strategy making and implementation across different organisational contexts. In a climate marked by technological acceleration, economic pressure, and social polarisation, the capacity to contain incompleteness is a condition for organisations remaining able to think (cf. de Felice et al., 2019). 

The paper speaks to the conference theme, scrutinising what a psychoanalytically grounded, empirically tested organisational practice looks like once incompleteness is accepted rather than defended against, by leaders and their teams alike. It also makes a broader disciplinary argument: that our tradition's theoretical legacy retains its explanatory power for contemporary organisational life only when it is actively reworked rather than conserved, and that such reworking is strongest when theoretical rigour and practical applicability are developed mutually.