The unwanted self: Projective identification in leaders' identity work, Part 2
The unwanted self: Projective identification in leaders' identity work, Part 2 The unwanted self: Projective identification in leaders' identity workThe unwanted self: Projective identification in leaders' identity work, Part 2 TW: Normalized, mutually enforced self-loathing based self-harm based in fragilities that have failed to sufficiently integrate, with underlying disability a likely descriptive cause.
Link: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0170840612448158
Citation: Petriglieri, G., & Stein, M. (2012). The unwanted self: Projective identification in leadersâ identity work. Organization Studies, 33(9), 1217-1235
TW: Normalized, mutually enforced self-loathing based self-harm based in fragilities that have failed to sufficiently integrate, with underlying disability a likely descriptive cause.
Full disclaimer on the unwanted presence of AI codependency cathartics/ AI inferiorists as a particularly aggressive and disturbed subsection of the narcissist population: https://narcissismresearch.miraheze.org/wiki/AIReactiveCodependencyRageDisclaimer
Most organizations suffer similar fates when massive fraud is discovered at every level of the company. In a world where the royal family insinuated that they should run governments like a business, the government is no exception.
Aldoâs identity as a moral authority stood in sharp contrast to his business conduct. Under his leadership, millions of dollars in taxable revenues were âsiphoned to offshore companies under a system of false invoicingâ (Forden 2000: 86). The problem came to a head when an executive trained in the law discovered âmassive fraudâ at every level of the company (Forden, 2000: 106). When he tried to persuade Aldo of the gravity of the situation, the latter responded that, because he had built up the company, he âdeserved to get something back. (Forden 2000: 107).
Sustaining identities worthy of positive regard often meant keeping unwanted identities at bay.
For instance, a person who views his attraction to men as deeply threatening and outing him for what and who he is may desperately look through whatever evidence he can get, illegally or legally, for evidence of someone else who is in the hot seat and seems like they could be sufficiently gay. He then attempts to violently transfer these projections onto so that both for a time people are distracted from seeing how well they fit with him and also so he can feel that by putting it on someone else who fits the profile it is almost like he doesnât have the quality at all.
For instance, someone who is really profoundly gay trying to hide it may both select Putin for a gay attraction to him as well as to violently projectively offload his hated, unintegrated feelings of gayness onto him without even remotely sufficient evidence or context. This person is marked desperately clinging to the first evidence they can get to violently offload the hated unwantedness in them at the first possibility.
They usually do it way out of proportion to the level of the evidence. Disproportional aggressive action is the telltale sign.
Sustaining these identities, however, required keeping his discrepant history and practicesâand the identities they impliedâat bay. We suggest that Aldo could persuade himself that he fit the desired âaristocraticâ and âmoralâ identities, and could credibly enact them, because he had disowned those much less appealing, hence unwanted, identities and projected them into others.
To keep a coveted inflation, a narcissist will take any incoming suspicion or feeling of an unwanted nature and put it onto whoever he feels he can; women and children are usually the first targets of the narcissistic coward who is staving off his own feelings of reality. Thus he âbuysâ his delusion for a short time, but it never lasts for long, getting him literally addicted to hate.
It becomes especially clear that it is projective identification when there is little to no connection and they are still aggressively projecting like they are close to or have a strong relationship with the person.
In light of our theorizing, it may be argued that Aldo dealt with potential feelings of not being specialâhighly discordant with an âaristocraticâ selfâby projecting them into other people. In public, for example, he often referred to his first son Giorgio as âthe black sheep of the family (Gucci 2008: 87) and repeatedly told his wife that she was âa nobody, a nothingâ (Gucci 2008: 82). Aldo may also have been able to sustain his âmoralâ self by projecting the most controversial aspects of his practices into others.
By trying to violently insist on these violent ânobodyâ and âcriminalâ projections of his own behaviors and feelings of himself at the core level, he hopes that for a short time it will distract others and himself and he can continue to delude himself as a moral aristocrat. In fact, if the person seems more like a fit for the coveted identity, moral aristocrat, he may most violently project onto them ânobodyâ and âcriminalâ as if somehow magically if he feels the âmagical thresholdâ of transfer has been achieved, he is now in possession of those traits through magical thinking alone and that he now partakes in the threatening admirations he felt for this other person through the violent transfer. None of this follows logically, showing the narcissistâs magical thinking and broken preformal logic.
In addition, Aldo sent to the Italian chief prosecutor, fiscal police, tax inspection office, and Ministries of Justice and Finance, documents purporting to reveal how Maurizio financed the purchase of his yacht with illegal funds (Forden 2000: 126). In short, we suggest that constantly finding and eliciting the ânobodyâ and âcriminalâ among close others was instrumental to sustaining Aldoâs âaristocraticâ and âmoralâ identities. This may have bolstered his leadership, but at a price.
Obsession with life as a play or all things being a stilted drama often is a feature described of the projective identifier.
As we described earlier, the process of projective identification is likely to be unconscious and the consequences significantâespecially if the recipients do not recognize that they are being used as a character in the leaderâs drama, or the leader is close to them, or the projections resonate with aspects of their own identity. In some cases, recipients may introject the projections and collude in enacting the leaderâs perception of them. In others, particularly when projective identification triggers anxieties about their own identities, recipients may feel compelled to get rid of the projected elements and âreturnâ them to their source.
Violent projections of insanity when the man clearly felt trapped in a loop of his most insane actions were clearly seen as well.
Even where he may recognize later these were projections, again and again he makes the same mistake, projecting something new the next time, firing the son repeatedly, learning nothing, feeling like he realized once and for all only to just collapse into the exact same mistake again.
In such cases what feels like a choice, a smug decision to betray, becomes clearly in review an actual addiction to betrayal and abuse and interpersonal disability.
Aldo had been forceful in painting his son as starkly different from himself, calling him a âson of a bitchâ and âcrazy (Forden 2000: 83), firing him repeatedly, and claiming that his ventures were illegal. Paolo could thus be understood to have retaliated by returning the undesired criminal identity into his father while claiming to be above illegal activity and highly âmoralâ himself. Hence, claiming to be a better fit for leading the firm.
Watching the mentally ill projective identification and seeing it normalized with no repercussion, or even facilitated by the weakest members, it becomes normalized and people take on a pathology that should have (and probably was, at the time) immediately stopped in its tracks and circulate it like a normal behavior. Before long the whole organization is broken.
The recipients of projective identification may not just introject or âreturnâ the leaderâs projections but may also become inclined to project into others. This can fuel a destructive cycle that impacts an entire organization. Through emulating leaders, projective identification may become the prevalent means of making sense of self and others at all levels of the organization. This can result in a toxic culture in which anyoneâs identity is bolstered through the manipulation of someone else. All contact is then experienced as poisonous, with trust and collaboration becoming all but impossible.
Rodolpho also showed signs of projective identification, taking what was wanted and discarding all that wasnât, calling two relatives âthe pizza brothersâ, betraying his own and breaking his own company.
Similar behaviors are described in a mother calling her own son a âson of a bitchâ. It is the exact same mechanism; the broken projective identification on whoever is convenient that what is usually interfamily becomes intrafamily and self-crippling in a most embarrassing fashion.
For example, he objected to his sonâs choice of Patrizia as his wife, calling her âa social climberâ (Forden 2000: 42) who was not of their class. This toxic culture also affected the relationship between Paolo and Maurizio, the latter of whom told investment bankers that Paolo was âa complete liabilityâ and his other cousin, Giorgio, was âtotally hopelessââdescribing them as âPizza brothersâ (Forden 2000: 141). For his part, Paolo did his best to expose Maurizioâs illegal activities.
They even went so pathetically far as to weaponize their police ties to break up their own familyâs brand. They crippled themselves, â[precluding] the possibility of effective work.â Generation after generation crippled their own children and then wondered why they werenât acting like those who hadnât precisely for refraining from such ill-advised behaviors.
Maurizio retaliated by sending the police to break up the launch party for Paoloâs âP.G.â
brand (Pergolini and Tortorella 1997: 120). The acrimony of these encounters led to a
downward spiral that precluded the possibility of effective work.
It became so normalized that people would compare how interpersonally broken their latest Gucci run was as being worse than the other personâs in how bad they handled their business.
Such toxicity was by no means confined to family members. Gian-Vittorio Pilone, Maurizioâs chief adviser (McKnight 1989: 199), was centrally implicated in Maurizioâs conflict with his wife Patrizia and his cousin Paolo (McKnight 1989: 114, 189). Another nonfamily member, Domenico De Sole, was appointed by Maurizio as head of Gucci US (Forden 2000: 111) and ended up vehemently antagonizing Aldo, whom he claimed was guilty of âmassive fraud ⌠[and would be] ... going to jailâ (Forden 2000: 106). Later, when Maurizio removed him from Gucci US (Forden 2000: 111), De Sole took Maurizio to court (Forden 2000: 217). On occasion, even Gucci employees treated customers contemptuously. New York Magazine, for example, ran an article about the Gucci shop assistants âdrop-dead put-downâ under the title of âThe Rudest Store in New Yorkâ (Forden 2000: 66). As Forden (2000: 66) put it, â[M]y- Gucci-story-is-more-outrageous-than-yoursâ became a familiar discussion point in elite New
The issue wasnât whether or not the claims were correct, the issue was why grown adult professionals were okay presenting a business face of a family bickering like children to the point one would not hire a therapist who was crying and self-harming in the same way one would not hire a business owner that didnât even have the âcohesive interpersonal glueâ to keep the businessâs family together, much less anyone elseâs.
These examples, which we use to illustrate our conceptual framework of projective identification in leadersâ identity work, could also be interpreted through other lenses. One alternative explanation is that, rather than exchanging projections of unwanted aspects of themselves, Gucci members simply voiced accurate views of each otherâs character. Besides denying the social nature of identity, this reading does not account for the attempt to deny those identities in oneself, which was widespread in this case. York circles.
Projective identification therefore seems to be tied to profound maladaptation; namely the normalization of dysfunctional dynamics. It seems that these were witnessed more often than not, without any real evaluation whether they were worth replicating in oneâs own life having achieved an attractive end, like a smooth-working low conflict business. This doubly brings home the sputtering and hacking engine metaphor of the failure to integrate causing ongoing collapses that result in unnecessary and self-disabling dysfunction.
Among psychodynamic theories, an alternative explanation for the dynamics describe above is that they were manifestations of siblings rivalries and Oedipal conflicts in a dysfunctional ffamily (Kets de Vries at al. 2007).
Much of projective identification is considered a subconscious âallergic reactionâ type behavior that the person canât get in front of. It can come off as a real disability for that reason. The problem is it doesnât get better with anyone, there is nobody that theyâre not âallergicâ to in the projective identification way.
Had Aldo simply aimed consciously to deceive others about his humble origins, he would not have needed continuously to diminish others. Had he just consciously tried to cover up his illegal financial activities, he might have been better served by turning a blind eye on supposed wrongdoing in other parts of his firm.
A lot of this behavior is incentivized. People normalize and encourage the dynamics. For example, I had some questions when I found out Obamaâs favorite show was the Sopranos as attested to by Michelle Obama. Much of these broken family dramas include profound suffering of many who donât want a part of the drama and literally donât have any part of it. It shouldnât be normalized or seen as something attractive as opposed to dysfunctional, in the same way watching someone limp around on a crutch is an interesting choice for TV.
Perhaps it is useful to learn how to navigate a system that isnât taking feedback that it is dysfunctional anytime soon, or at least not doing anything about it expediently.
While relationships in the family and firm became increasingly acrimonious and damaged the Gucci organization in various ways, it seemed difficult for anyone to leave or break the cycle. Even while family members accused each other over the approaching demise of the firm, they did not leave or sell their shares when they were still worth a fortune. We suggest that one reason for their reluctance to do so was that their identity was inexorably linked with, and dependent on, both the rewards of their leader identities and the projection of unwanted selves into others, of whom they then could not let go.
Organizational scholars have called for a different response, saying we need to study the suffering here and understand the dynamics of harmful work relationships. Projective identification seems to be a big one.
Choosing the truth over oneâs narcissistic injury is another critical piece of the puzzle.
Organizational scholars have generally sidestepped exploring personalized relationships at work (Sluss and Ashforth 2007) and called for more research on the dynamics underpinning harmful work relationships (Gersick et al. 2000).
Someone who feels disgusted by a cloying attempt to cater to the opinions of those who wouldnât care about the personâs last name may feel a sort of antisocial antipathy towards those around them, but reject it in themselves along narcissistic lines.
However, if someone isn't sufficiently integrated upon this features they will latch on through the compulsive tie to someone who has integrated normal and casual, kept personal and private disgust expressions that will inevitably happen. Thus the projective identification process will begin.
They may also view being a female as being âthe one who receives sexual assaultâ and a person from a country with a history of violent colonialism may therefore engage in the compulsive tie and the projective identification towards women, trying to pass on how they were victimized in âfeeling like the girlâ on the woman by being the one to "make her the girl" first before they are forced into actions that "make them feel like the girl". The clear dealing with that is established to be one is the victim until they start playing perpetrator. The disability is their inability to outthink this whole toxic nightmare, just trying to be the first to engage it.
We propose a link between negative interpersonal identification, sustained by projective identification, and positive organizational identifications. Specifically, we argue that to craft an identity that befits a coveted leadership role, individuals are likely to unconsciously develop problematic relationships with people who embody their unwanted selves. Hence, the more identified a leader becomes with an
organization, the more likely he or she will be to engage in projective identification to reduce the gap between his or her personal and organizational identities.
Overidentification by people projectively identifying with people they really are not like in an attempt to power share is behind a lot of longevity of the worst leaders.
This expands views of overidentification as a pathology of organizational identification. Dukerich et al. (1998) highlighted the negative consequences of overidentification for the individual, such as diminished willingness to question organizational practices and take responsibility and/or increased vulnerability to identity threat.