When The Desire of the Creative Class is Challenged by Defences Against Innovation

“Desire disappears under pleasure’s sway.” Lacan Ecrits

This paper examines the psychodynamic and organisational challenges facing professionals in the creative industries during a period of profound systemic disruption. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory — particularly the distinction between the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real — alongside systems psychodynamic frameworks and living systems theory, it argues that the creative industries are struggling with unconscious social defences that obstruct the very innovation they profess to pursue. The paper proposes that navigating toward genuine creative significance requires organisational conditions rarely sustained under contemporary capitalism.

Research problem

The demand for creative output has accelerated in tandem with the disruption of its traditional modes of production. Artificial intelligence, platform economies, and the collapse of stable professional boundaries have reshaped the conditions under which creative work occurs. Yet work of genuine cultural significance continues to depend on sustained, immersive, human-led creative processes.

A central paradox emerges: the abundance of possibility — technological, historical, and economic — may itself function as a defence against creative risk. When everything is accessible and everything is permissible, the move toward originality becomes harder to sustain.

Theoretical Framework

The paper integrates four bodies of literature:

Creative industries research - the relationship between neoliberal capitalism and the policies and professional requirements in the creative industries (Mould, 2018, Boltanski and Esquare, 2020 and Karpik, 2010)

Lacanian psychoanalysis — specifically the register of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real.

Systems psychodynamic theory — drawing on Hirschhorn's work on primary risk (1999) and the project based organisation (2017) and Petriglieri et al. 's analysis of professional identity in the gig economy (2018).

Philip Boxer's third-epoch framework — concerning the governmentalities of living systems under conditions of multiple, incommensurable demands (2026), the edge-role (2005, with Eigen) and the influence from being in relation to the radical unconscious (2022).

Central Argument

The paper argues that the creative industries, are susceptible to social defences against innovation — defences that are paradoxically enabled by the very openness and abundance that characterise the contemporary creative environment. The Lacanian Imaginary, ordinarily a necessary register for creative work, colludes with capitalism's instrumentalised concept of creativity (following Mould, 2018) to produce more of the same and can prevent the singular decision that is the only way to unique expressions.

Creative enterprises of cultural significance must therefore cultivate organisational conditions in which individuals and groups can move beyond the Imaginary — not only by providing containing structures to help process performance anxiety but by accepting the existential anxiety involved in genuine creative processes. This requires a rethinking of what it means to hold boundaries, authorise creative roles, and define primary task in professional creative environments.

Contribution

The paper offers a novel theoretical synthesis for understanding professional creativity under conditions of systemic disruption. It speaks to researchers and practitioners in organisational studies, psychoanalytic approaches to organisations, and the sociology of creative labour.