Psychoanalysis, Sex, Sexuality and Gender in Organisation Studies

Sex and gender in organisations are long-established topics for research and theorising, while psychoanalytic theory is becoming increasingly influential in our understanding of organisations. Psychoanalytical theory has, since its beginning, been concerned with questions of sex, sexuality and gender, while gender studies have drawn widely upon psychoanalytical theories. There has as yet been little attempt to bring together these mutually informative disciplines to the development of a critical understanding of organisations. This stream aims to provide a forum for the exploration of psychoanalytically-informed theories of gender, and gender-informed psychoanalytical theories, and what these may tell us about organisations.

Psychoanalysis, sex and sexuality

From its inception, psychoanalysis was and continues to be concerned with questions of sex, sexuality and gender; attributing a very great importance to sexuality in the development and mental life of the individual (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1973:418). The existence of an infantile sexuality, considered by Freud to operate from the start of life, is arguably responsible for the widening of the field which psychoanalysis looks upon as the sexual domain, assuming a transformation of the ways sexuality is conceptualised (Freud, 1905, 1909); linking the development of sexuality to developmental lines operating from the pre-verbal to adulthood. This ‘discovery' of the sexuality of children and the attendant theorisation have implications that remain unpopular. For example, despite Freud's work, the temptation is still to see sexuality as interpersonal sexual relationships, and sexual phantasies or auto-eroticism as perverse (Mitchell, 1974: 16). Furthermore, although Freud posits the idea of innate bisexuality through the identification of an infant as polymorphously perverse, acceptance of the implications of this for adult behaviour are still controversial and remain so within the psychoanalytic community and, from the 1970s, have been increasingly challenged by disciplines lying outside it. However, even within his own lifetime, Freud's particular ideas in the area of female sexuality were contested (e.g. Abraham, 1919; Horney, 1924; Deutsch, 1925).

Whilst diversity was needed as a condition of growth in the psychoanalytic movement, that diversity post Freud has, to some extent, fractured between national cultures. In Britain, psychoanalysts have increasingly focused on the ungendered baby of the pre-oedipal period and on the relationship with the mother who is phantasized to contain a penis. But in France, the father continues to be seen as crucially important, because it is he who detaches the child from its symbiotic relationship with the mother and thereby releases it into language. In general, more attention has been paid to the very early, pre-verbal child and its relationship with its mother. For some authors, the sexuality of women was explored not only in relation to men, but in terms of their relation to motherhood and to children with the question of intrinsic differences between men and women remaining a minefield. Until the rise of feminism in the 1970s, British psychoanalysts never really regained much interest in specifically female sexuality and although feminism and the legalization of homosexuality influenced analytic thinking, many therapists and analysts are uneasy with the nature of lesbian eroticism and may have taken refuge in the mother/baby paradigm in the effort to avoid considering adult desire (Budd, 2005).

Psychoanalysis, gender and organization

In terms of organisation studies, it has perhaps become taken-for-granted that organisations require employees to act in ways deemed appropriate for their sex (Adler, Laney and Packer, 1993; Pateman, 1983; Cockburn, 1990; Mills, 1992). The male has to be rational, the female emotional; the male is regarded as having a natural right to public space in which the female, whose space is the private, is the intruder, and woman is close to