Psychoanalytic Approach to Destructive Leader's Behavior

The aim of the work is to identify the key types of leadership psychopathology from the point of view of the psychoanalytic approach. The study of destructive leadership from the point of view of a psychoanalytic approach is impossible without understanding the foundations of personality psychopathology - the reasons that lead to various personality disorders, patterns of relationships in the process of human development, key defense mechanisms that a person uses so as not to come into contact with intolerable feelings and emotions. All these factors are reflected in the behavioral patterns that are used by managers in the process of professional activity in the organization. In this paper, we will trace how the factors of psychopathology of personality development lead to pathological consequences in the business environment and highlight the main types of destructive leadership, based on a clinical psychoanalytic approach. The purpose of the work is concretized by setting the following theoretical problems: 1. To make a brief overview of the views of leadership among the classics of psychoanalytic thought from the point of view of group psychology. 2. Review psychoanalytic views on the formation and manifestation of various pathologies of leadership. The empirical tasks of this work will be to analyze the organizational case of a large insurance organization, within which we will trace how the internal dynamics of an obsessive-compulsive leader was strengthened by the peculiarities of interpersonal relationships with top management and the organizational context, which led the leader to internal regression, the manifestation of psychotic traits. strengthening of personal pathology, which, in turn, had a destructive effect on the team, individual employees and the leader's personality and his career as a whole. The results of the studies carried out within the framework of the analysis of the organizational case allow us to conclude that leaders can demonstrate different degrees of manifestation of their pathology in the organization and can function on a scale from conditionally normal, neurotic, to the borderline level with possible regression to the psychotic level. As a result of the study of the organizational case, it was found that critical incidents that arise in the organizational environment can cause serious regression of the leader, which leads to increased psychological defenses, activation of destructive drives, the formation of various kinds of projections, retraumatization of childhood experience, and in the case of borderline personality organization to the leader's temporary regression to the psychotic level of functioning. We also came to the conclusion that important factors in the analysis of the causes of the emergence of destructive tendencies in the leader's behavior are the leader's personal history, patterns of his development, protective mechanisms to which the personality turns, and internal conflicts.