Know No Limits: The Destruction of Self-knowledge in Organizations

David P. Levine
Graduate School of International Studies
University of Denver
Denver, CO 80208

e-mail: dlevine@du.edu

Psychoanalytic Studies 3,2: 237-45 (June 2001), Carfax Publishing (www.tandf.co.uk)

Abstract

Organizations sometimes set goals for themselves and make demands on their employees that require levels and types of competence they do not possess.  Doing so can constitute an attack on the employees’ self-boundaries and self-knowledge.  While directly motivated by the organization’s grandiose fantasy, this attack may also be indirectly motivated by envy and hate.  In such cases, the organization’s goal is to mobilize aggression to secure against the self-integration expressed in self-knowledge.  In educational institutions, the attack on self-knowledge can also be considered an instance of what Bion refers to as the hatred of a process of development.  When faculty and administration deny students’ limits, this may express projection onto students of their own wish to have no limits, especially to deny those limits associated with old age and death.

Know No Limits: The Destruction of Self-Knowledge in Organizations

A man's got to know his limitations.

                   Harry Callaghan

Limits

	Recently, while walking across campus, I noticed a series of banners had been hung in the student center exhorting our students to "Know No Limits."   As I passed beneath them, I wondered why we were encouraging our students not to know their limits.  Did we believe, contrary to the evidence offered each day in the classroom, that they had no limits?  Did we believe that limits could be made to disappear by acts of will, such as the act that refuses to know them?  Or, did we believe that self-knowledge is the enemy of learning, and, therefore, that the object of learning should be not to know the self and its limits, but to suppress that knowledge?  Why, at a time in their lives when they are struggling to discover their limits, are we telling students that they do not have limits, or should not know them?
To be sure, we discover our limits in part by testing them, so we might interpret the banners as encouraging students to discover their limits.  Encouraging students to test their limits expresses our desire not to impose limits on them from outside, but to foster a process of self-discovery.  I do not doubt that, for some, the banners express something like this sentiment.  But, of course, if that were all those who hung the banners had in mind, the banners would have read, "discover your limits," or, in a more positive spirit, "discover your capabilities," perhaps even, "discover yourself."  Evidently, whether consciously or not, something more was intended than the discovery of limits by the testing of limits.
That there might be something more going on here gains support when we turn to the University's attitude toward limit setting by faculty.  To see this, consider the following exchange between faculty member and administrator concerning supervision of graduate students:

Administrator:  We need you to supervise a Ph.D. dissertation on the topic “European Integration and the Post-Soviet Transition.”
Faculty: This is not my field and I am not competent to supervise work in it.
Administrator: We think you are competent, and, in any case, this year we are short people in this field, so we need you to supervise the thesis.

This conversation was not an isolated event.  A similar exchange, this time on the subject of grading exams, ended with another administrator commenting that the faculty member's lack of competence should not be a problem since the student to be examined did not know much about the subject either.
	Exchanges such as this could only take place, of course, in a setting where incompetence does not lead to immediate, obvious, and dramatic adverse consequences.  We do not imagine a hospital administrator asking a psychiatrist to perform bypass surgery because the cardiovascular surgeon is on vacation, which does not mean, of course, that we will not find variations on this theme in hospital settings.  
	Because of its separation from the concrete work of the organization, administration provides an especially suitable setting for the sort of behavior exemplified by the anecdotes reported above.  After all, administrative incompetence does not lead, as the incompetence of the surgeon might, to the death of the patient.  At least, it does not do so in a time frame that makes it relatively easy to know that it caused the patient's death, which also does not imply that hospital administrators cannot, through their incompetence, cause substantial harm to patients.

The Grandiose Fantasy
	We can easily expand our list of examples to include such things as the call for employees and organizations to "reinvent themselves," or the imposition of goals on an organization that, at least from outside, appear totally unreasonable, goals such as creating a master race, or achieving greatness.  The idea that an organization and its employees could "reinvent themselves" not only presumes that they invented themselves in the first place, it also suggests that they can simply decide to be something other than what they are.  This suggestion flies in the face of reality, which involves specific histories, identities, and competencies built up over time that are not subject to radical revision by simple acts of will.  Like the exhortation to know no limits, the call to reinvent your self makes constraints a matter of subjective choice and not objective reality.  Doing so turns reality into the product of an act of will, thereby subsuming it into fantasy life.
Know no limits and reinvent yourself demand that individuals take on tasks they cannot reasonably be expected to accomplish.  Why do organizations seek to impose such tasks on their employees?  And, why do employees often take on such tasks when they know or suspect they may not be competent to perform them?  Several answers to these questions immediately come to mind.  First, the administrators involved may be acting out of expedience.  The denial of incompetence then becomes a way an administrator can do his or her job, or at least appear to do that job.  Situations in which the appearance of doing the job may prove adequate, while the job itself may be impossible, offer considerable temptation to do what is expedient rather than what is needed.
	This means that, if we look beneath matters of expedience, we will sometimes find the effort to transfer the task of accomplishing the impossible, or at least unlikely, from administrator to employee.  The question then becomes why the administrator takes on the job of doing what cannot be done.  Presumably, administrators find themselves in the dilemma of doing the impossible when the organization adopts a self-image disconnected from reality.  This may happen when the organization has a grandiose fantasy about itself expressed as a refusal to know and act on its limits, a refusal that, not surprisingly, takes the form of a denial that those associated with it have limits.  It may also happen when the organization’s task poses intrinsic problems for it, at least in the setting in which it finds itself.
	The grandiose fantasy operates in organizations suffering from what, in individuals, would be referred to as a narcissistic disorder (Kernberg 1970, Kohut 1977).  The fantasy compensates for profound feelings of inadequacy associated with the presence of a devalued self.  We might, therefore, expect to find the fantasy operating where organizational identity and self-esteem are fragile, for example, where the presence of more successful competitors highlights organizational weaknesses, or where those in leadership positions within the organization suffer from difficulties with self-esteem regulation.
	The explanation just offered carries weight since, in the absence of a grandiose fantasy, we would not expect the organization to pursue goals it can at best only appear to have accomplished.  In settings where the grandiose fantasy operates, appearance takes over from reality.  Incompetence must be reinterpreted as competence, competence as excellence, excellence as greatness.  The more appearance replaces reality, the less members of the organization can be allowed to know what it is and what it does. 

Self-knowledge
	Consider, for a moment, a more literal interpretation of the messages telling students to know no limits or faculty to take on tasks for which they are not competent.  That is, assume for a moment that the organizational intent is what it seems to be, which is to get the student or faculty member to take on a task he is not, and knows he is not, competent to do.   One justification for doing so consistent with the grandiose fantasy just considered takes the form of insistence that, contrary to the individual’s own perception, he or she is competent to do the task requested.  When the justification for the request takes the form of insisting that the individual is competent where he is not, the request tells the individual something about himself that he knows is not true.  This places pressure on the individual to lose track of what he or she knows about his or her self, since to hold onto that knowledge will likely result in job failure, at least in the view of the employer.  We can say, then, that the purpose of the request is to foster this losing track of the self. 
	To assure this result, the organization places the employee into a double bind.  Success in the job now means doing the job badly, since it means taking on a task the individual is not competent to do.  And, doing the job well means refusing to do it at all.  To cope with the double bind means either to sever connection with the organization or to sever connection with the self, which in this case means to destroy self-knowledge.  Thus, taking the intent of the request literally leads us to conclude that its goal is the destruction of self-knowledge.
	We should not underestimate the power of organizations to accomplish this goal, especially when they target individuals with uncertain self-boundaries and associated problems of self-esteem regulation.  Such individuals are vulnerable on two counts.  First, they share the organization's desire to replace reality with a grandiose fantasy.  And, second, their uncertainty about their capacities and limits makes them vulnerable to self-interpretations offered by, or imposed from, outside.
	We can, then, interpret the request as a test of the employee's self-boundaries aimed at uncovering their weaknesses.  The test facilitates exploitation of those weaknesses toward a specific end: replacing the employee's definition of reality with that of the organization.  We might imagine that imposing the corporate interpretation of reality on the employee serves to protect and advance an organizational fantasy as an alternative reality, which, of course, it does.  However, the purpose of testing self-boundaries can also be understood on another level, one where undermining self-knowledge not only achieves organizational ends associated with a grandiose fantasy, but becomes an end in itself.
	To understand how the destruction of self-knowledge can become an end in itself, it will help to consider the role of envy.  We envy those who have self-knowledge and maintain secure self-boundaries when we do not.  If we perceive that others have secure self-boundaries while we do not, any encounter with those boundaries undermines our self-esteem.  To protect our self-esteem, we must make sure that such encounters will not occur, a goal most readily accomplished by purging our world of those capable of self-knowledge and limit setting.  The destruction of self-knowledge in others serves to protect against awareness of our own lost connection with our selves.  We envy those who maintain that connection, and seek to deal with our envy by destroying their self-knowledge, thereby securing an environment where there is nothing to envy.  If we bear in mind that what underlies the grandiose organizational fantasy is its opposite, which is the need to compensate for feelings of inadequacy and low self-esteem, then we will not be surprised to discover envy underlying the attack on self-knowledge.
	Envy appears here in an interesting light, since, in a way, it is envy of incompetence, and expresses a wish to be incompetent, or at least to be comfortable with incompetence, a wish frustrated by the grandiose fantasy.  That fantasy, then, for all the benefits it offers, also heightens anxiety and assures that individuals will find that their inner worlds afford no comfortable resting place.

Self-Interest
	Typically, the sort of exchange between employee and employer summarized at the outset of this paper carries an additional significance, which involves the attribution of hidden motives.  Where the denial of incompetence is powerful enough, those dominated by it cannot allow themselves to credit the idea that someone could be and know he is incompetent.  After all, to acknowledge that you are not competent to perform a specific task means to assert your competence in a substantially more significant area, which is that of self-knowledge.  Those who admit incompetence, thereby prove themselves competent.  Thus, the evidence of competence offered by the refusal to deny incompetence seems to undermine the claim of incompetence and suggest ulterior motives.  Things cannot be what they seem; the reason for refusal to cooperate cannot be the stated reason.  There must be hidden reasons.
	The search for hidden reasons readily arrives at its desired goal. First, it uncovers those reasons having to do with refusal to take on a burden.  Here, others interpret denial of competence as a strategy employed to avoid a task, and shift it onto more responsible and civic-minded colleagues.  In this interpretation, the specific task also acts as a metaphor for a larger burden that has also been shifted onto colleagues, which is the burden of protecting and maintaining the organization’s grandiose fantasy.   
Issues sometimes formulated in the language of the “team” can express the sharing and shifting of the burden of protecting an organizational fantasy.  Those who refuse the burden, then, lack “team spirit” and are not “team players.”   Use of language such as this suggests that the issues have been organized around a presumed opposition between self-interest and service to the group.  Those who take on the burden of sustaining the fantasy place the organization above self-interest; those who refuse the burden place their self-interest ahead of larger corporate ends.  Thus, when the request for Ph.D. supervision reported above was refused by one faculty member, another agreed to take it on, knowing that he was no more qualified than the faculty member who had rejected it.  Rather than acknowledge his incompetence, however, he insisted that the needed competence could be acquired in a short period of time, and that the refusal to take on the task simply represented a refusal to shift the time required to do so away from private ends and toward serving organizational needs; in other words, it simply expressed a lack of civic-mindedness. 	There is a certain truth in the claim that self-interest plays a role here.  Those who refuse the burden do so, in part, to protect their selves against an attack, and in this they act in self-interest.  Since the destruction of self-knowledge constitutes an attack on the pursuit of interests originating in, and constitutive of, the self, any defense against that destruction appears as, and in a sense is, the pursuit of self-interest.  

Hate
A second goal of the search for hidden motives is achieved by interpreting the denial of competence not as an attack on the self but as an attack on others.  This happens when a statement of incompetence becomes an implied judgment of others, who interpret refusing to do the task as a judgment either that the task is in some respect unworthy in itself, or that they are also incompetent to do it and thus that their acceptance of it constitutes a character flaw.  
As I have already suggested, in the example considered here, the faculty member who did take on the task was no more competent than the one who rejected it, so the rejection of the task was quickly interpreted as an attack.  Bearing in mind that adherence to the organizational fantasy helps sustain the member’s grandiose fantasy, those who refuse to support the organization’s fantasy will thereby be interpreted as also refusing to support the member’s.  By not supporting the member’s fantasy, they validate the situation that would prevail in its absence, which is his identification with a denigrated self.  The primary source of the denigration of the self is internal and unconscious: a hostile internal object.  For the member who has taken on the burden of supporting the grandiose fantasy, there develops, then, an identification between a hostile and sadistic internal object, and an external force represented in the colleague who has refused the task of supporting the fantasy.   This identification allows the individual to experience self-hatred as an attack coming from outside.
Since, as we have seen, the original request was essentially an attack (on self-boundaries and self-knowledge), interpreting resistance to that request as an attack reverses the source of the aggression.  By interpreting refusal as an attack, those responsible for the original attack project their aggression onto its object.  Aggression needs to be dealt with in this way when it has taken on a particularly destructive quality, specifically, when it has turned toward hate.  Now, the entire interaction appears in a different light, not only as a means for dealing with envy, but also as a means for dealing with hate.
	While hate is a form of, or use of, aggression, it differs from the more moderate, even creative, uses of aggression due to its involvement with splitting and projection.  Hatred directs aggression at unacceptable parts of the self that have been split off and projected onto others, where they can be treated as altogether bad.  The pure badness of hate's object reflects itself in the intensity of the aggression directed toward it.  Thus, we have the phenomena typical of hate, which involve an intensification of aggression and a sharpening of its focus onto a single bad object with the implied need to control or destroy that object.
	In hate, the goal is to maintain a divided self, and especially to assure that those unacceptable parts of the self that have been split off remain separate and outside.  Other uses of aggression serve the opposite purpose in that their intent is to protect self-boundaries, and therefore the integrity of the self.  Unlike the use of aggression to protect self-boundaries, hatred uses aggression to protect a fragile self against the danger posed by connection, especially connection with the self, or self-integration.  Since self-knowledge is an expression of this connection, it will not be surprising to discover that an attack on self-knowledge expresses the presence of a measure of hate, here directed at those who retain self-knowledge, acceptance of the self, and especially acceptance of its limitations.
The link between hate and the destruction of self-knowledge implies that telling students to "know no limits" expresses hatred.  A likely target of this hatred is the student’s aspiration to become, through education and development, something specific and finite.  If this is the case, then the hatred expressed here is an instance of what Wilfred Bion refers to as the hatred of a process of development (Bion, 1961, p. 89).  For an educational institution to hate development is for it to hate what Bion terms its primary task, and thus to replace that task with an alternative, which is also its opposite.  In Bion's language, the organization ceases to be involved with a reality-based task that connects it to the outside world, and becomes a basic assumption group.

Competence
Bion suggests that in basic assumption groups the group becomes an end in itself.  Its ostensible purpose (primary task) acts only as a vehicle for the protection and preservation of the group and its constituting fantasy.  It follows that issues of competence cannot mean very much since the only competence that really matters is the ability to give up autonomy, especially autonomous judgment, and to submerge the self into the group.  The result of this is what I refer to above as expedience.  Expedient is what serves to protect the group fantasy.  Of course, to the extent that competence at a real task (a task defined outside the fantasy) is subject to objective judgment, the group will not long survive if it loses sight of its primary task.  But, those groups whose job performance cannot be so easily judged have the opportunity to replace competence with expedience.
The vital competence under attack in groups such as those considered here manifests itself as the ability to perform specific tasks.  The question of competence would seem, then, to direct our attention to a wide variety of tasks, and to the specific skills needed to do them well.  Yet, all such specific skills only represent or embody a more basic and general competence, which is the competence to be a person: a separate and well-defined center of autonomous reason and judgment.  Then, hatred of the process of development means hatred of self-boundaries, self-integration, autonomy, and reason.
	Real competence is born not in the denial of limits, but in recognition of incompetence, since only the recognition of the absence of competence can stimulate a process through which competence emerges as a result.   To know no limits also means to preempt this process, to assure that competence will not emerge, and that something else must take its place, specifically the grandiose fantasy and the idea that the goal of development can be achieved in the absence of a development process.  If we know no limits, we have no need to undergo the arduous process of development, with the frustrations and uncertainties associated with it.  Basic assumption groups know no limits in reality because they define their own reality in accordance with the needs defined by their constituting fantasies.  It is, after all, in the realm of fantasy that we can exert omnipotent control, whereas in reality we need knowledge and skill to accomplish our ends.  Knowing no limits, then, means replacing reality with fantasy.  So far as the idea of competence implies an involvement with reality, knowing no limits exhorts us to sacrifice our relationship with reality.
	The faculty member who insisted that competence to supervise the Ph.D. thesis could be easily acquired in a short period of time had clearly replaced reality with fantasy.  In doing so, he had rejected out of hand the demands associated with development.  We will not quickly or easily develop competence in a complex and difficult subject, so it cannot be competence that is called upon here, but something else.  This something else is adherence to the group and support for the appearance of doing the job for which the group has ostensibly been organized.  Collusion on the part of the student can play a role in this.  To the extent that the student has not developed the competence demanded of the thesis topic, and is unwilling or unable to develop the needed competence, the limited competence of the faculty constitutes a benefit rather than a limitation.  Together, student and faculty collude in denying incompetence and refusing the demands of a development process.  For the collusion to succeed, they must agree that they are competent where they are not, thus replacing competence with the appearance of competence, reality with fantasy.

Presuppose No Limits
	Knowing our limits also means knowing our capabilities.  In more traditional settings than those with which I am here concerned, capabilities are known for us as attributes of our social condition, especially our social position.  In other words, limits are imposed on us from outside.  Such limits are, from the modern point of view, arbitrary, depending as they do on matters of gender, rank, and ethnicity.  Because of this, we have come to see them as forms of oppression.  To refuse to know such limits means to free oneself from arbitrary determination by external forces, and to seek instead an internal determination consistent with original talents and interests, that internal determination Heinz Kohut refers to as the "self" (Kohut 1977).  But, to seek self-determination does not mean to know no limits, but rather to accept no arbitrary limits, which means to presuppose no limits.  Limits are discovered in the same process by which we discover possibilities, capabilities, and interests.
	Organizations such as those considered above place pressure on members to know no limits, which taken literally means to give up self-knowledge.  Since we gain self-knowledge through the process of discovery just considered, to know no limits means to abort that process.  Those who give in to the pressure to do so, when faced with the unavoidable reality of limits, may become cynical about themselves and the organizations in which they work.  But, they may also accept that they have no limits and can perform whatever tasks are assigned them stemming from the needs--practical, strategic, and emotional--of the groups and organizations with which they are associated.  The sense of self-alienation implied in this situation can provoke aggression that can also take the form of hatred.  Indeed, the implied repression of the self feeds the hate that binds the member to the organization and its ends, hate sometimes aimed at forcing others to submit to the same conditions to which those who give in to the organization have submitted themselves.  In this respect, the exhortation to know no limits becomes a demand for submission.
	The health of the organization, so far as that is associated with its competent performance of a reality-based task, requires that it know its possibilities and limitations.  This also means the discovery of real organizational capabilities.  Such organizations do not presuppose limits, since to do so is to give up creativity; but they also know that they have limits, and they know what those limits are.

The Finite Self
	The denial of limits expresses a fear of finitude and mortality.  We might then consider the exhortation to know no limits an aspect of the process by which the older faculty and administration treat students as repositories for their own wished for and lost youth, for a time when possibilities were still open, alternatives still available.  Then, the ideal expressed in the banner is that we might stay "forever young."   Students may not resist being used in this way, especially given their own vulnerability.  On the contrary, students may be highly resistant to knowing their limits, even were the institution to take seriously its responsibility to guide them in that direction.
	Using students as repositories for adult fantasy denies the real consequences of the decisions students must make.  Contrary to the fantasy, and to the wish it contains, decisions students make express the real limits under which they must operate, while shaping, and therefore limiting, their future possibilities in important ways.  The formation of a finite identity linked to a specific vocation that expresses talents and interests closes off options, thereby setting limits whose reality we might deny but cannot avoid.  Know no limits expresses the wish of those dissatisfied with what their decisions have brought them, possibly because no decision could possibly get them where they most wished to go, which is the place that has no limits.  Rather than accepting the satisfactions living in reality can bring, they live for the return of the good object that satisfies all their wants and demands nothing of them in return (Potamianou, 1997, p. 57).  The alternative is that we replace hope to live without limits with acceptance of the finite self, that we move from the manic denial of limits to tolerating the narrowing of possibilities that is an inevitable part of life.  This means that we give up the hope for what cannot be, and replace it with knowledge of the possibilities afforded by what is and can be. 

References
Bion, W. (1961) Experiences in Groups. London: Tavistock.
Kernberg, O. (1970) Factors in the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personalities, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (18), pp.51-85.
Kohut, H. (1977) The Restoration of the Self. New York: International Universities Press.
Potamianou, A. (1997) Hope: A Shield in the Economy of Borderline States. London: Routledge.
Stein, M. (2000) After Eden: Envy and the Defences Against Anxiety Paradigm, Human Relations (53), pp. 193-211.
Steiner, J. (1993) Psychic Retreats. London: Routledge.