Handbook of Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management, Second Edition

Transference, Anxiety, and Defenses

If defense mechanisms generally inhibit learning, then learning (both individually and collectively) requires a certain type of psychological work in identifying, accepting, and tolerating the anxieties that it creates. Some of these anxieties may be triggered by earlier experiences of failure and disappointment or by threatening feelings of uncertainty, dependency, and vulnerability. Thus, learning is no spontaneous unleashing of potential but involves overcoming resistances to learning, many of which operate in unconscious and unacknowledged ways. One particular source of unconscious resistance to learning lies in each individual’s narcissistic belief that he or she is already perfect and therefore needs no development or change (Freud, 1914/1984). Another source of resistance lies in the conviction that the individual knows what he/she needs to learn and nothing beyond it is necessary or desirable. Learning represents a challenge and a threat to all of us, endangering some valued ideas, habits, and beliefs about self and others and generating an unavoidable degree of discomfort or even pain.

For these reasons, psychodynamic writers pay great attention to early life learning experiences, its excitements and disappointments, which color subsequent learning in schools, universities, and, more generally, organizations. Learning is facilitated by an agent of learning, a parent, an older sibling, a teacher, who represents a figure of authority; ...