1 ORGANIZATIONS AND THEIR DISCONTENTS: MIASMA, TOXICITY AND VIOLATION Yiannis Gabriel The Tanaka Business School Imperial College South Kensington Campus London SW7 2AZ. Tel. 020 7594 9202 Fax. 020 7594 9191 y.gabriel@imperial.ac.uk Paper presented at Critical Management Studies 4 Conference Cambridge July 4-6, 2005 “If the immediate and direct purpose of life is not suffering then our existence is the most ill-adapted to its purpose in the world: for it is absurd to suppose that the endless affliction of which the world is everywhere full, and which arises out of the need and distress pertaining essentially to life, should be purposeless and purely accidental. Each individual misfortune, to be sure, seems an exceptional occurrence; but misfortune in general is the rule.” (Schopenhauer, 1970) Why psychoanalysis? There was a time when this question did not arise – the time, shortly after Freud's death, when, in the words of in W. H. Auden's famous phrase, Freud "is no more a person now, but a whole climate of opinion under whom we conduct our different lives". Today, the climate of