Doing Business in a Temporary State of Mind: War, Displacement and Containment in a Small Service Organisation

This paper explores how war, forced displacement, and government turbulence enter a small service organisation, not merely as background context, but as emotional and relational forces that disturb task, role, boundary, authority, and containment. Drawing on systems psychodynamic thinking and an interpretive observational process, the paper asks: How does war enter a small service organisation as an emotional and relational force, carried through bodies, speech, and dependency, and what forms of containment remain possible when the workplace begins to function as a temporary refuge?

The setting is a small massage and bodywork business in the United States, owned by a person from a country positioned on one side of the ongoing Russia–Ukraine conflict, and staffed by workers from the other side of that conflict. The owner, who is pregnant, runs the business in a space where clients enter expecting relaxation, bodily relief, and care. Yet this apparently ordinary commercial arrangement becomes, under closer examination, a site where global conflict, displacement, dependency, and survival anxiety converge in one of the most intimate places of work: the massage room.

The paper does not aim to analyse war politically, but to explore how war may be carried into work as an emotional and relational force. The owner seemed to be doing business from a temporary state of mind — not because the business itself was temporary, but because the future felt provisional and difficult to imagine clearly under the emotional pressure of war, pregnancy, and dependency. In this state of mind, the workplace may become not only a business, but also a shelter, a waiting room, and a place where the present must be continuously performed.

Using a systems psychodynamic lens, I will explore how the primary task of the massage business — to offer bodily care and relaxation — may become disturbed when workers are unable to find containment elsewhere. The client, who pays to receive care, may become a receiver of unprocessed anxiety, trauma narratives, and projections. The massage room then becomes an ambiguous space: part service, part refuge, part emotional evacuation, and part unconscious enactment of the wider conflict.

The paper moves through four interlocking themes: war as a wider system entering the workplace through anxiety, mistrust, dependency, guilt, national identity, and the body itself; the disturbed primary task and the blurred boundaries between worker, client, owner, and container; pregnancy, dependency, and emotional labour, where the bodies of owner, workers, and clients each carry symbolic and relational weight beyond the transactional frame of the service business; and finally, doing business in a temporary state of mind, where survival in the present becomes the dominant psychological orientation and the organisation risks becoming a refuge rather than a working system.

This paper contributes an interpretive reading of how a very small workplace can be drawn into carrying what the wider world cannot contain, and how systems psychodynamic thinking may help notice when the primary task has been quietly replaced by the work of emotional survival.