Introduction:
If you read this blog, or follow my Twitter, you probably know I work in mental health.
Out of grad School I was an eager Psychoanalyst in outpatient practice and a psychodynamic outpatient therapist in schools.
It wasn't long - a year or so - before I traded the school for the ward. I maintained my psychoanalystic practice while working day, eve, and night shifts at a Residential and Inpatient hospital. It was there I began losing interest in pure outpatient work, and began moving up the corporate ladder from day, evening, and night shift to clinician, family therapist, supervisor, and program director. Now, I only see a few select psychoanalytic patients, and I hold a director leadership position in a partial hospitalization and intensive outpatient program.
Some recent corporate restructuring at my this job pushed me to make decisions that I am not totally comfortable with. Corporate leadership is making decisions that are financially beneficial despite going against best practice and evidence based treatment models. Their pockets will be lined, while the families we serve will suffer.
I predict this will continue to intensify until I am forced to decide between doing things that go against my values, or resigning. This looming conflict got me reflecting on the corporate work environment and the endless drone of 9-5 (or 8am to 6pm,...I've worked 48 hours in 3 days...).
Teamwork Makes the Dream Work:
"Teamwork makes the dream work" - John C. Maxwell (2002)
"The task of dream interpretation is to unravel what the dream-work has woven" - Freud (1899)
The former you have likely heard - sincerely or ironically - in your corporate workplace.
The latter is the thrust of Freud's iconic text The Interpretation of Dreams.
Freud primarily theorized that the dream worked to - or, rather, 'dreamwork' served - the purpose of keeping the person asleep when the person's body is processing internal impulses, sensations, and memory traces which could threaten to disturb sleep.
Modern science has since shown that it is not necessarily true that dreams function to keep us asleep, but for all intents and purposes Freud's hypothesis remains helpful and effective - dreams may not keep us asleep, but they do make relatively coherent, if not still odd and/or confusing, stories out of fragments of random experiences.
Dreamwork is how our mind patches disparate or disconnected impulses, sensations, and memories into stories, or narrative experiences. To use Freud's word, dreamwork 'weaves' together a fabric where there otherwise would've been only threads. Dreamwork is a narrative synthesis that smooths over conflicts, errors, to make the world and our experience tolerable, etc. (this is not unlike the oeuvre of Kant's model of cognition where our faculties and categories insistently and persistently interface with the outside to produce an experience of the world - i.e., synthesis. Freud was in many ways influenced by Kant, see Tauber's Freud; The Reluctant Philosopher for more on this).
Teamwork makes the dream work, in its most benign or generous interpretation, is simply true. If people or a group of people want to make something happen, 'yes anding' one another will be more effective than some other approach (this is one understanding of Wilfred Bion's group theory concept of 'basic assumption' - a group must have a common goal that they are willing to work towards). Teamwork - cooperation - can achieve things that were previously thought unachievable.
In a more critical sense, teamwork does not make the dream work, it makes the corporate nightmare work. Some of my readers will undoubtedly have experienced the phrase in this way. They will have experienced it as 'If you dissent from the party line, you are hurting the team;' as a shame mechanism to keep people in line, to keep people doing things they don't believe in. This is a 'They Live' or 'The Matrix' moment where corporate jargon about teamwork works to keep us asleep from the horrors of our jobs, co-workers, or lives.
Team work makes the dreamwork has to be the most unconsciously Freudian slogan for our neoliberal times. Zizek argues this is precisely the function of ideology - to patch together the irrational, nonsensical, and fragmented experiences into a master narrative that one can easily identify with. He even goes as far as to claim that in conceptualizing ideology Marx 'invented the symptom,' or rather what would become the psychoanalytical technical concept of 'symptom' which Lacan - after Freud of course - would later rediscover and operationalize in practice.
From Kant, to Marx, Frued, Lacan, and finally Zizek - dreamwork is ideology, ideology is dreamwork, both are synthetic narrative operations that make the world tolerable. This is present linguistically and practically in the slogan 'teamwork makes the dreamwork.' The slogan hides the truth yet betrays its secrets in the same breath. But like all (or most) psychoanalytic riddles, the slogan requires inversion (which is the function of the analyst): Dreamwork makes the Teamwork.
The analysand speaks on the couch in the office, he presents a subjective musing or comment (the slogan as it is - teamwork makes the dreamwork) and the analyst must make sense (synthesize - see Bion's direct integration of Kant and Freud) of the comment, but also transform the comment through the process of analysis (the analyst makes a suggestion - 'perhaps you mean dreamwork makes the teamwork?' - and sees how the analysand responds...).
Swallow:
To swallow the corporate slop, to perform tasks that may go against your values, to get along with coworkers you may otherwise notice yourself having displeasurable reactions to, etc. Some of this is part of growing up, some of it is not; the former is acceptable, the latter detestable.
To unravel the corporate dreamwork - to analyze it - is to expose the corporate nightmare lurking beneath the surface.
Take that and do with it what you will.
