‘My soul stands now planted’ – Rooting, re-rooting and self-constitution in Organizational Role-Taking
‘My soul stands now planted’ – Rooting, re-rooting and self-constitution in Organizational Role-Taking
Lunchtime Talk with Dr Shely Halachmi Sussman, offering a framework for understanding the process of constituting oneself in role.
No charge for this talk: all welcome
No charge for this talk: all welcome
The title draws on an autobiographical account by early twentieth-century American philosopher and psychologist William James, reflecting on his experience of taking up the role of ‘teacher of philosophy’ at the Gifford lectureship in Scotland.
‘I remember, that one evening when I was a youth, my father read aloud from a Boston newspaper, that part of Lord Gifford’s will, which founded these four lectureships.
At that time I did not think of being a teacher of philosophy: and what I listened to was as remote from my own life as if it related to the planet Mars.
Yet here I am, with the Gifford system part and parcel of my very self, and all my energies, for the time being, devoted to successfully identifying myself with it.
My soul stands now planted in what once was for it a practically unreal object, and speaks from it as from its proper habitat and centre.’
William James, Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study In Human Nature, p. 182
Taking up a role in an organization is commonly framed as ‘following a job description’: expected deliverables, areas of responsibility, allocated resources to get the job done.
But drawing on James’s description, active role-taking often entails an inner movement experienced as ‘rooting of self’ in role; movement from an alien ‘planet Mars’ towards ‘habitat and centre’; identifying a role as ‘part and parcel of my very self’; as well as the opposite movement experienced as up-rooting, withdrawal, detachment of self from role.
This talk introduces the idea of organizational role-taking as a process of constituting oneself in role. It offers a framework, a language, for engaging with our lived experience of self, a central yet underexplored dimension of organizational life, and illuminates its pragmatic function in how we take up, shift between, and leave organisational roles.
Designed to resonate across professional contexts, roles and organizations, this session invites reflection on questions relevant to our own role-taking and that of others we support in our work:
- When do we feel alive, fully present and at our best in role? When do we experience the opposite? What shapes these different experiences?
- How do early and recent experiences (such as James’s childhood recollections), that resurface in the present, contribute to self-constitution in role?
- How do different forms of experience - such as rooting/re-rooting, fullness/emptiness - contribute to taking up a role and finding one’s place within a system?
The talk draws on Shely’s research and professional experience, stemming from a longstanding curiosity about the place of the individual, of human subjectivity, within organizational life. Through an interdisciplinary dialogue between pragmatic philosophy and psychoanalytic thinking, it offers a framework for understanding self-constitution in organizational role-taking and approaching organizational life from the perspective of lived experience.
In doing so, it highlights three modalities of experience and their distinctive contributions to role-taking: the experience of transition, the experience of containing and being contained, and the experience of space, both internal and external.
Expect stories, reflection, and space to think about your own role-taking experiences and how you might support others’ self-constitution in role.
About Dr. Shely Halachmi Sussman
Shely is an organizational psychologist and psychotherapist. For more than 25 years, she held senior HR and organizational development roles in hi-tech, non-profit & public sectors. Over the past five years, she has been working in private practice with individuals and teams from a wide range of roles and organizations.
As her interest in human experience expanded beyond the organizational setting, Shely undertook clinical training and now works as a psychotherapist in both the public mental health system and private practice.
Her work is grounded in systems psychodynamics, and her doctoral research, completed in the Program for Psychoanalysis & Hermeneutics at Bar-Ilan University, explored the process of self-constitution in organizational role-taking. She is a member and former board member of OFEK, the Israeli Group-Relations Association, teaches at TouchOFEK centre for professional development in systems psychodynamics, and serves on the editorial board of kavOFEK, the association’s digital journal.
Fun fact
A fan of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Shely loves rabbits and shares her home garden with two pet rabbits.
No charge for this talk: all welcome
