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The Comedy of Command: The Absurdities of Leadership
Hardcover
Business GeneralManagementGeneral Psychology
ISBN13: 9781041405542
Publisher: Routledge
Published: Apr 27 2027
Pages: 344
Language: English
This is no ordinary book about leadership. The Comedy of Command: The Absurdities of Leadership is not a manual, a manifesto, or a cure. It is a diagnostic text, written by the foremost psychoanalyst and management professor, Manfred Kets de Vries, in an ironic register appropriate to a phenomenon that is at once ridiculous and potentially devastating.
Leadership claims reason while being driven by impulse, speaks of the future while reenacting the past, and insists on order while quietly feeding on chaos. From a psychoanalytic perspective, command is never neutral. It is saturated with unconscious material like early longings, unresolved rivalries, narcissistic wounds, primitive anxieties, dressed up as policy, vision, or principle. Power does not silence the unconscious; it amplifies it. It gives it a microphone, a stage, and often an audience. The ironic tone of this book follows directly from this insight. Leadership is tragic because it produces real suffering, frequently on a massive scale. It is also comic because its pretensions so often exceed its psychological capacities. Leaders present themselves as sovereign agents while being driven by forces they barely recognize. Followers demand strength while rewarding illusion. Institutions proclaim rationality while behaving like anxious families. To describe these dynamics without irony would be unbearable; to describe them only humorously would be obscene. Between these extremes lies a form of clarity.
For leaders, coaches, consultants, and scholars willing to abandon reassuring narratives, it provides the psychological realism necessary to understand why leadership so consistently fails to live up to its own mythology.
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