Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Human Relations
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Volume 56(9): 1131–1154: 039185
Copyright © 2003
The Tavistock Institute ®
SAGE Publications
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psychoanalysis
In turning first of all to the coach’s profile and field of intervention in the
framework of psychoanalytically oriented executive coaching, we are
confronted with a number of questions of ‘propriety’ – in the two senses of
the word: both the sense of what is proper to the profession (and how then
it should ‘label’ itself) and that of deontology. Can psychoanalytic coaches,
for example, safely intrude on the territory of traditional executive coaches,
draw inspiration from their way of acting and target the same ‘objects’, even
if they do so using their own methods? And if they must break with existing
practices, at what level is the rupture to be located? Such questions necessi-
tate a closer look at different notions of management and their repercussions
on executive coaching.8
According to the first definition, which we believe to be the most widely
accepted one, management corresponds to the exercise of operational skills
that are acquired from the outside and generally assimilated to a whole set
of relevant ways of behaving, in the behaviorist sense of the term. If by
chance, the manager does not possess these skills from the outset, she or he
inevitably encounters difficulties – of differing degrees – in her or his daily
professional activities (ineffectiveness, wasted time, frictions with colleagues,
etc.). As such, difficulties are an indicator of deficiencies, and it becomes
appropriate to correct them through training, and even by applying certain
formulaic management methods. Executive coaches are likely to hold the key
to such solutions, on the condition that they are clearly referenced as a
‘subject supposed to know what to do’, or, even better, ‘supposed to know
how to do it’ (in the area of management). Therefore, they are essentially
management consultants, who hold the position of experts and perhaps even
that of experienced practitioners, having exercised various managerial roles.
Their mission consists in bringing and transferring their own knowledge and
skills to the client, with appropriate educational methods (they are to train
the client), discretion (they must be able to adapt managerial techniques to
situations encountered) and a spirit of dedramatization (they are to reassure
and assist the manager). However, this type of executive coaching can only
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work if there has been a correct diagnosis of the formative deficiency. If the
causes of a client’s difficulties lie elsewhere (mental blocks, for example),
there is a great risk of seeing the problem shift during training, since the latter
will only be treating the consequences of the underlying phenomenon
(Berglas, 2002; Kets de Vries, 2002).
In another, still very prevalent, meaning, the exercise of management
depends more on inner characteristics of the individual. Here it is no longer
only a matter of behavior or an object of training, but also of attitude. What
is involved in this case is the personal dimension of management: the
manager invests his or her personality and is his or her own very instrument
(he or she must be able to take hard blows, inspire enthusiasm by his or her
energy and charisma, etc.). Sometimes, however, the psychological mechan-
ics seize up or get out of control, and managerial errors occur. These can be
linked, for example, to insufficient emotional control on the part of a
manager: he or she ‘loses it’, ‘flies off the handle’, letting his or her emotions
get the upper hand; can no longer communicate; feels stressed, anxious,
alone; is no longer able to evaluate how to make the right decisions; and so
on. In a configuration of this type, the executive coach’s goal is to help the
client to better adapt to the work environment and to develop self-control:
in short, to reinforce the Ego. As an example, Sankowsky (1995) points out
the possibility of teaching a manager not to abuse a position of power relative
to subordinates by instructing him or her in techniques normally used by
certain psychotherapists (how to manage counter-transference, for example).
Other executive coaching practices also highlight the necessity for the client
to regain self-confidence (be this against a backdrop of the fear of others)
(O’Neill, 2000).
The second of the two profiles we have just drawn is easily recogniz-
able as that of the coach-psychologist, who is supposed be knowledgeable
about clients’ characterology and personality traits, as well as personal
development methods. Indeed, prescriptions and advice will only be well
received by clients and integrated into the latter’s system of representations
and conduct, to the extent that the coach is attributed a status of ‘subject
supposed to know’ (in the strictly Lacanian sense of the term).9 In other
words, manager-clients must believe the executive coach holds knowledge
about them – knowledge exceeding their own in any case – and that he or
she, consequently, has the ability to make them evolve. The lever of this evol-
ution thus consists in a transferential relationship (in the psychoanalytical
sense of the term), which is made use of by the coach in order to make clients
progress in a direction judged pertinent (well being, accomplishment, etc.).
This, of course, raises an entire host of ethical problems, for who, indeed,
can say what will be good for the subject?
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That being the case, in what way does the psychoanalytic coach differ
from the profile types identified above? Personally, we would give a two-
pronged response, for the psychoanalytic coach is set apart not only by his
or her capacity to act on the two traditional levels of executive coaching we
have outlined (even though such action takes a different form to that of the
technician coach or psychologist), but also, by focusing on a third level of
practice, which clearly marks an analytical positioning and retroactively
justifies intervention on the two levels just mentioned. In terms of the
Lacanian triptych ‘need-demand-desire’ (Arnaud, 1998), we would suggest
that the level of (managerial) need corresponds to the first type of executive
coaching discussed above, i.e. technical coaching; the level of demand (for
treatment and help) to the coaching oriented towards support or personal
development; and the level of desire (of the professional or social subject) to
psychoanalytically oriented executive coaching.10 That said, rather than
develop this interpretative schema as such, we would like to take up here one
of its corollaries and inquire into the different meanings taken on by the
symptom (dysfunction, conflict, management error, etc.) when it is question,
respectively, of need, demand or desire.
The hypothesis to be developed can be stated as follows. Within the
framework of technical coaching, the symptom is no more than an opera-
tional problem that is a source of relative destabilization for the manager. It
only has meaning unto itself: it is either present or absent, and as such it is
the mark of a deficiency or need. The client’s questioning will in this case be
of the type: ‘Tell me how to resolve this problem.’ In support or personal
development coaching, the symptom has the value of a sign, which means –
according to Peirce’s definition – that it has a meaning (and therefore
represents something) for someone, in this case the ‘coach who is supposed
to know’. Hence the demand formulated by the client: ‘Tell me what this
means about me.’ In psychoanalytically oriented executive coaching however,
the symptom can never mean anything taken by itself in isolation, but is first
and foremost a signifier referring to other signifiers (words, symptoms, etc.),
which drain the subject’s desire (see the notion of ‘signifying chain’, Lacan,
1966; Leclaire, 1968).
on the coach’s part predominantly serves as a safety net for the manager-
client, in much the same way, for example, as does the double qualification
of psychoanalyst and doctor relative to patients developing worrying soma-
tizations. The psychoanalytic executive coach must clearly not be limited to
this operational role of consultant, but such a skill reassures the client and,
in practice, allows the latter to quickly get rid of benign management
problems (those which are a matter of technical inadequacy). As a coach, we
have ourselves often begun phases of individualized treatment of manager-
clients by focusing specifically on concrete problems (how to run a meeting,
for example). Such a procedure has the added advantage of rendering it
impossible for the client to use the excuse that the coach is managerially inept
as a way of breaking off the coaching relationship, and is, for this reason,
particularly useful when the psychoanalytic coach is led not to respond
directly to the client’s expectations in order to avoid becoming lost in the
continual spiral of a symptomatological treatment of problems.
Moreover, even when the psychoanalytic coach does not intervene in
the client’s managerial techniques, it remains advisable to be versed in the
evolution of management principles and methods (Kets de Vries, 2000;
Maccoby, 1998) in order to better observe changes in the symptom. Indeed,
from a Lacanian perspective, the symptom can only surface in response to
the Other’s demands. To use a rather telling example drawn from our own
consulting practice, let us consider the case of a boss who, both authoritarian
and paternalistic, sees herself endowed with divine rights and decrees that
all liberties taken relative to her orders by managerial staff will be heavily
penalized (for example, executives explicitly qualified as unworthy are
threatened with destitution and demotion). In this context, an executive who
believes he deserves such punishment will experience the inability to exert
hierarchical powers over subordinates or to attend Board Meetings (where
this statutory power is recognized), as though echoing his feeling of wrong-
doing.
Similarly, if the Other changes, the symptom, too, will change. For
example, when a participative manager who solicits his or her employees’
total involvement in the corporate culture replaces an autocratic boss who
previously reigned with unshared powers, problems of motivation may well
take the place of problems of authority, and pathologies associated with
psychological fatigue at work replace the neurotic inhibitions linked to the
hierarchical structure of the former situation. This illustrates the relativity of
the symptom, which can be recognized if one has a certain amount of know-
ledge of management.
Now, let us turn to the question of whether the psychoanalytic coach
can work as a psychologist specialized in personal development. Once again,
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we would answer this question in the affirmative, seeing that identifying the
Coach as a ‘psy-something-or-other’ (Guinchard, 1996: 71) seems in keeping
with establishing a transferential relationship, necessary to all analytical
work. This is why it is appropriate to avoid all other uses of transference.
Specifically, the psychoanalytic coach must take care to avoid becoming a
management Guru, exploiting the client’s request for care, and to opt instead
for the ‘oracular’ function of executive coaching, which implies that he or
she must, like an Oracle, echo the client’s words of demand so as to prompt
the latter to reappraise his or her situation: ‘Know yourself . . . instead of
disturbing the Other’ (Assoun, 1995: 28). This method does, nevertheless,
assume that the demand has first been received, during the time it takes for
the transference to be made. By this, we do not mean, however, that the
executive coach should act directly on the symptom’s ‘sign’ (that is, give it a
meaning) by formulating interpretations, as attuned as they may be, but,
rather, that every effort should be made to favor the production of meaning
by the client him/herself. For example, when an executive coach finds
him/herself confronted by such typical complaints as: ‘I can’t communicate
with my team. I don’t know what’s going on, but it’s not working’, he or she
should get the client to talk, to clarify and explain: ‘I have no charisma . . .
so I monopolize discussions in meetings, which triggers a rejection . . .’.
A managerial symptom can always be given a meaning, after all, and
the first to try to do so is none other than the suffering manager. The execu-
tive coach’s attentive listening can pick up on the theory developed by the
client to explain the origin of her or his problems. And if the latter does not
enter spontaneously into this quest, it becomes necessary, as Granoff (2001)
suggests, to question further, as analysts do in preliminary meetings (which
also exist in coaching) or once the couch routine is established and there no
longer seems to be any desire invested in the treatment: ‘What do you think
is the cause of your difficulties?’ Indeed, it is to the extent that the client-
manager tries to answer the question that transference love develops. As in
analysis, the more one speaks to seek meaning, the more one loves the person
to whom one is speaking (Lavie, 1997). The executive coach gradually
becomes the addressee of the client’s symptoms and is even, ultimately,
strangely associated with them, to such a point that the manager thinks of
the coach when he or she encounters obstacles in management, while,
conversely, the mention of the coach is a reminder of the problems with
which he or she is confronted.
Moreover, the notion of the ‘subject supposed to know’ that Lacan
introduced with respect to the psychoanalyst, means, in fact, that the latter
is supposed to possess knowledge about the origin of the symptom. We think
it is the same in coaching, and that the client progressively tends to perceive
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the coach as someone having a certain familiarity with the cause of his or
her symptom. This idea is, moreover, reinforced by the fact that once trans-
ference has been established, there often ensues, as is the case in analysis, a
relative amelioration in the problems then under discussion. At the same
time, there can even emerge certain passing symptoms, relative to the
coaching itself. At this stage, the client, in his or her relation with the coach,
becomes very interested in questioning the symptom as sign: it is the ‘why’
that is of concern – which is to say, the (ideally external) event that triggered
it all.
This is a very delicate point for the psychoanalytic executive coach.
First, care must be taken not to intervene directly in the framework of this
causal search that polarizes the client, for the interpretation that might result
about the meaning of the symptom, as an expression of the coach’s know-
ledge, runs the risk of giving the symptom a substantiality, whereas Lacanian
metapsychology has underlined that the latter is repeated only as a signifier.
At the same time, however, the executive coach should make sure that the
client’s pursuit of causality continues, by letting him or her believe that some-
thing can be done about the symptom and that coaching will allow him or
her mastery of its cause and meaning. The fact is that the signifier, which
constitutes the basic material of psychoanalytic coaching (as we shall see
below), only appears against a backdrop of meaning. As Nasio (1992) points
out, the signifier can only have its own life beyond ourselves if we take it as
a sign that speaks to us, even unconsciously. In other words, for a symptom
to have the incisive weight of a signifier, the coach must necessarily maintain
and favor the meaning provoked by the symptom considered as sign.
However, he or she must, at the same time, know not to stop at the sign if
he or she is to favor the signifying value of both the symptom (on the client’s
side) and its interpretation (in his or her practice as psychoanalytic coach).
We might take as an example the case of a company manager who,
during our first coaching interview, was only too willing to elaborate at
length on his policy of internal communication aimed at ‘making things more
convivial’. Despite the considerable means mobilized with this end in view,
however, his policy was not working as planned. As a strategic move, we
therefore asked the client to diagnose this failure, which led him to articu-
late various problems or recriminations (such as the incompetence of the
communications director, the executive staff’s resistance to change, technical
errors in the diffusion of information, and so on). Having noticed, during
the course of this diagnosis, that the specific signifiers used by the manager
insisted time and time again on the notion of ‘exigence’, we ended up asking
him about this. To show us concretely what he meant, our client then proudly
produced a laminated card from his pocket bearing the company’s work
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charter, which he had drafted himself and then distributed to all his employ-
ees. However, at the very moment he pointed to the expression ‘exigeance of
quality’, the spelling mistake (which cannot be qualified as a lapsus) became,
quite literally, glaringly obvious to both him and ourselves. As we started to
say to him: ‘Look, it’s spelt like . . .’ he himself finished the sentence with the
exclamation: ‘like vengeance’! His first reaction was one of surprise and
consternation, yet due to this unexpected signifying substitution he then went
on to evoke the history of the turbulent relations that he had had some years
previously with the founder of the company, described by our client himself
as ‘hypocritical and smooth’. For the first time, it appeared to him that he
‘reproduced’ with his employees certain aspects of these past interactions.
This acknowledgment opened up not only an attention to the unconscious,
but also the possibility of new, more authentically positive, modes of mana-
gerial behavior. Our role had been limited to giving the signifier its chance,
without seeking to impose meaning on what presented itself analytically as
a failed phantasy of conviviality. The important thing was to consider the
logic of the unconscious within a particular symbolic order, inaccessible, as
such, to any form whatsoever of psychologizing generalization.
I don’t want to recruit my replacement. That’s ten candidates that I’ve refused
. . . or who haven’t stayed on . . . You might say I didn’t make it easy for
them.’ In this case, the repetition compulsion seems to have been precari-
ously glimpsed by the client, even though remaining, for the time being,
simply assimilated to a passive resistance to recruitment – whereas something
far more influential and structural is certainly being expressed.11
In executive coaching, tackling the signifying side of the symptom thus
means, for the client, that the cause is heard: his or her misfortune as a
manager derives first from his or her desire. Consequently, the only question
that need matter concerns the way in which this has come about. For
example, how is the chain of events in the client’s managerial life organized
and what is the order of the repetition? These are questions, amongst others,
that should be profitably raised by the executive coach, based on the hypoth-
esis of the unconscious as both a structure and a constantly active process
that never ceases to be exteriorized by acts, events or words creating the
conditions that define a signifier. Psychoanalytically oriented executive
coaching thus allows an in-depth approach to the key problems faced by
someone in a managerial situation, including those that relate to the client’s
identity as a desiring subject in the workplace.
It was within this resolutely Lacanian perspective that we introduced
the concept of ‘symbolic debt’, as applied to company functioning (Arnaud,
2002). By symbolic debt, we essentially mean commitments (in a large sense),
contracted by certain of the manager-client’s predecessors – the firm’s
founders, for example – and still operating, though on an unconscious level,
in the linguistic signifiers that they have left as a heritage in the organization
(such as adages having the value of Tables of Law).12 It is a matter of debt
to the extent that the said predecessors unfailingly pursued a certain project
(such as the constant expansion of the company, for example) and trans-
mitted, as it were, this requirement, which, by being constantly taken up by
others, then remains active long after they are gone.13 Related to the hidden
importance of the signifying order in economic life (Arnaud, 2003), the
notion of symbolic debt thus seems to us a useful one to take up here in the
perspective of a conceptualization seeking to single out the specificity of
psychoanalytically oriented coaching.
Since the signifier governs, it is appropriate to take it literally from the
start, within a discursive framework where the executive coach will take care
to listen, rather than, or before, advising. As a form of alienation constituted
in and by the Other, as Lacan (1966: 354) would say, the symbolic debt is,
indeed, situated in language. This is why the symbolization carried out by
the subject constitutes a nodal point, insofar as it must allow for a way out
of the repetition of the debt, through the use of freed signifiers. In this
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context, the psychoanalytic coach will have the role both of fluidifying the
compulsive repetition of symptoms by having the client gain increasing
freedom relative to him/herself, his or her history and words, and, as a result,
of accompanying, preserving and maintaining desire in the coaching relation-
ship. This can only be done if the coach consents to ‘play the signifying
game’, in order to avoid staying stuck on meaning, or even metaphor, with
the risk this brings of reinforcing the symptom. While there is no sure-fire
formula to orient one in this domain, Lacan’s guiding principle can, in our
opinion, be applied just as well to the executive coach as to the analyst: one
should not try to understand or to reveal the symptoms’ meaning to the
client, because it is precisely the latter who must assume this meaning (Lacan,
1966: 349, 459–92, 585–645).
As Leclaire (1998) puts it, the only way to treat a symptom as a signi-
fier is to replace it by another signifier (a word that comes to the executive
coach’s mind in the field of transference-countertransference with the client).
The best interpretation that a psychoanalytically oriented executive coach
can suggest thus does not operate by the meaning it reveals (a common
conception), but by the signifying place it occupies, which is radically
different. As a succinct illustration, let us consider a situation in which a
client, the founder and CEO of an institutional catering company, wants to
uncover the underlying reasons of his choice of profession. We would suggest
that there is probably less need for the latter to delve deep into post-war
childhood memories of having often gone hungry with his brothers and
sisters (although this may have determined his choice of a catering service to
some extent) than to bring up the image of his father, a low-ranking military
corporal, whose vocabulary was peppered with military commands such as
‘reste au rang’ (an expression which literally means ‘stand in line’, but is also
a homonym, in French, of the word ‘restaurant’) and who was perceived by
his children as needing to be ‘catered to’.
In this analytical perspective, signifying substitutions always have
instantaneous effects: just as the sudden surprise felt by the executive coach
is the irrefutable indicator of the impact on him or her of the signifying effect
of a symptom, so the sudden surprise felt by the client undoubtedly connotes
the signifying impact of an interpretation. The method used is both very
simple, yet highly complex: for the executive coach, it consists in waiting for
an impromptu event during the coaching period, all the while remaining open
to surprise and doing away with all preconceived ideas or feelings, so as to
resemble a blank surface of inscription. It is a matter of letting oneself fall
into that particular state that Lacan (1970) termed ‘semblance’, which entails
creating a silence within and becoming deeply persuaded that, relative to
oneself, one knows nothing. Once this is the case, the psychoanalytically
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Given what we have said, what form might the termination of psychoana-
lytically inspired executive coaching take? The answer, due to the difficulty
of the question, might be found by putting a new spin on yet another
question: would this form of executive coaching only come to an end if
continued on the couch, where one could personally untie all the knots that
one was unable to undo professionally? Unless, that is, psychoanalytically
oriented executive coaching is to be reserved for managers who have already
been analyzed (with the coach thus becoming a meta-analyst), or the experi-
ence to be considered a substitute for analysis. Given that we do not as yet
have the practical hindsight to be able to judge such matters, we would, for
our part, tend to draw a parallel with analytical treatment and simply outline
here the aim of this particular type of coaching. We believe, in fact, that
psychoanalytically inspired executive coaching, like psychoanalysis, must
aim to create the conditions for the subject to become – be this ever so slightly
– a stranger to him/herself, such that he or she goes through the exceptional
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Acknowledgement
Notes
1 This article deals only with individualized executive coaching practices, as group
coaching presents psycho-sociological particularities requiring the development of
specific modes of action.
2 Warren Bennis has rated executive coaching as an acceptable form of psychotherapy.
A recent study (Withers, 2001) reveals that 60 percent of coaching clients say that
they confide in their coach almost as much as they do in their best friend, spouse or
therapist.
3 See in particular the survey conducted by Béchaux and Rey (2003). See also Feli-
culis-Yvonneau (2002).
4 According to Susan Bloch, Head of Coaching at the Hay Group, executive coaching
is growing by about 40 percent a year (see ‘Executive couching’, The Economist, 8
March 2002, 364(8284): 51).
5 The term ‘the real’ was introduced by Lacan to designate one of psychoanalysis’
three essential registers, alongside of the symbolic and the imaginary. The real is not
reality, but a category produced by the symbolic that corresponds to what the latter
expels in the process of setting itself up. Lacan (1973 [1964]) retains from this expul-
sion of the real from the field of the symbolic a definition that insists on the return
and the irreducible existence of the real, despite its being held in check. The real
returns within reality to a place where the subject is unable to encounter it, except
in the form of a confrontation that arouses the latter from his or her habitual state.
Defined as impossible, the real cannot be completely symbolized by speech or writing
and is therefore ‘that which never ceases not to write itself’. In the ‘Dream of the
Burning Child’, cited by Freud in The interpretation of dreams (1900) and later
taken as an example by Lacan, a father dreams that his son, who, in reality, has just
died as the result of a fever, calls out to him, exclaiming ‘Father, don’t you see that
I’m burning?’ In fact, the dead body of the man’s son had caught fire in the next
room where an old man was supposed to be keeping watch over it. The father thus
dreams instead of waking up, but the sentence that he formulates on his own behalf
during his dream testifies to his impossible desire that his son still be alive. The fire
bears upon that which is removed here from the signifiers themselves: namely, the
real of suffering and death (Chemama & Vandermersch, 1998: 361).
6 In an as yet unpublished text (Le sinthome, séminaire XXIII, 1975), Lacan explains
that the symptom is what people have that is most real. This doesn’t mean, however,
that the symptom constitutes a truth, which for Lacan is related to a search for
93S 05arnaud (ds) 28/10/03 10:44 am Page 1151
meaning; rather, Lacan understands it to be the very nature of human reality. Psycho-
analytic treatment (or any whatsoever of its derivatives) can in no way, therefore,
consist in getting rid of the symptom qua an effect of the structure of the subject.
Some symptoms function, moreover, as prostheses, as was the case with the activity
of writing for Joyce, according to Lacan. From this perspective, an analysis must
not be pushed too far: when the analysand thinks that he or she is happy, this
suffices. This is why Lacan introduced the clinical notion of ‘sinthome’ (following
the etymology of the word ‘symptom’) as that which is not to be suppressed but
simply modified in order that desire remain possible.
7 Translator’s note: There is no adequate translation in English of jouissance (although
one might note that its English cognate was current in the Renaissance period, and
still used in 18th-century literary texts) and most English translations of Lacan’s
texts retain the French. ‘Jouissance’ shares a common etymology with the English
‘enjoyment’ (as in the ‘enjoyment of rights, and property’), but the English word has
lost most of its former sexual connotations, while the French word simultaneously
covers sexual, spiritual, intellectual, and physical ‘enjoyment’ or ‘ecstasy’. For a
more technical gloss on jouissance (which explains how it ‘transgresses’ the ‘pleasure
principle’, and, thus why the translation of ‘pleasure’ is disqualified): see the remarks
of A. Sheridon, in his translation of Lacan’s Ecrits (1977).
8 Beyond our personal experience, the following analysis is founded on 30 non pre-
structured qualitative interviews with practicing consultants in executive coaching
(working in the Paris area and the Midi-Pyrénées region). The textual content of these
interviews, each of which lasted about two hours, was then analyzed, with particular
attention given to the managerial conceptions that oriented the consultants’ practice.
9 Subject supposed to know: The French here is ‘sujet supposé savoir’, which, while
usually rendered in English in the form we have adopted here, has also been trans-
lated as the ‘supposed subject of knowledge’ (Schneiderman, 1980) in order to stress
that Lacan means by this concept that both the subject and the knowing are
supposed [translator’s note]. Lacan (1960) cautions against a tendency to conceive
the analytical relation as though it were dual and symmetrical (transference/contre-
transference). According to Lacan, the very fact that one speaks to the analyst leads
the analysand to use the latter as the support of a figure of the Other, or, that is, of
a subject supposed to possess unconscious knowledge.
10 These different levels of executive coaching are often elaborately inter-related.
11 In this case, the clinical hypothesis we formulated concerned the place of the father,
in consideration of the compulsive signifier ‘predecessor’ which the client in question
(the manager of a small business) was to mention thrice during a coaching interview
even though he was speaking of his ‘successors’. His predecessor was the former
owner of the business while the successors in question had been recruited under
conditions such that nothing was clear for them as to their future role.
12 For more details, see the case of Françoise, a business development manager in a
recruiting firm (Arnaud, 2002: 703–6).
13 Let’s take as an example the case of Caroline who ran a financial firm that had
belonged to her family for three generations. We were to discover during our fourth
coaching interview that our client’s mother, the former company manager whom
our client spoke about abundantly, had apparently been ‘seduced’ in her childhood
by her grandfather, the company’s founder. It is clear in such a case that the seduced
party no longer ‘knew’, as an adult, what had happened (anymore than her
daughter did now) yet she had, nevertheless, continually referred to it in her own
way throughout the course of her daily life, both at home and at work. There was
nothing remarkable about this on a clinical level except for the fact that this secret
episode contained the hidden motives of the daughter’s itinerary. After ‘fleeing’
overseas to take up a difficult position at the time when her father became
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president of the holding company responsible for the firm, she had returned home
when her mother died to take the latter’s place but had then suddenly felt the desire
to set up an industrial security company (even though this risked breaking up the
family firm). As we were to sort out with our client, these events in her life were
organized around the visible secret, which, in fact, aimed merely to reduce the risk
of an incest that was perceived as imminent and, indeed, as ineluctable, even though
lacking any real object in the present – other, at least, than in the form of a burden
inherited from the previous generation.
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