JOURNAL OF
MANAGERIAL
PSYCHOLOGY
12
Personal counselling of managers is one of the
most common methods in organizational
counselling, the assumption being that through
the counselling of managers it is possible to
influence the systems for which they are
responsible. In fact, this method is a major tool
for generating change in other areas, such as
education, and certainly in clinical counselling.
Personal psychological counselling in general
(educational, clinical, organizational) is based on
certain assumptions concerning the human nature
of the person counselled and the nature of the
counselling interaction. Sometimes these
assumptions are intuitive and sometimes they are
based on coherent theory. For example,
psychoanalytical and existentialist theories see
man, his development and his potential for change
differentially, so the Freudian counsellor will
focus on certain processes and variables, the
Adlerian on others, and so forth.
In the field of organizational counselling there
does not appear to be a comprehensive theory of
personal counselling (there are techniques) but
rather a great deal of transfer from other fields[1].
Predictably, the result is that some of the
assumptions about human nature are taken from
individual psychology and transferred to the
context of organizational personal counselling.
The purpose of this article is to examine these
points of departure and indicate theoretical
directions for understanding personal counselling
of managers in organizations. The subject will be
discussed in terms of “work and love”. This is not
an eye-catching title, but refers to basic Freudian
concepts, and is also the title of a book written by
the American psychiatrist, G.B. Rohrlich[2]. The
concepts in his book serve as the basis for the
discussion below, in which I will diagnose the
manager’s work from a psychoanalytical
perspective and attempt to show these points
where viewing the manager’s work and
counselling him/her in psychoanalytical terms
may be different and sometimes even in conflict
with vi