What immediately comes to my mind when I hear the term psychic prison is the phrase, "Well, we've always done it this way!" While I perceive the phrase as the battle cry for organizations confined to fixed-mindset behaviors, here is what others had to say about psychic prison and its relationship with the organization. Vong (2014) explained when organizations are seen through the metaphorical psychic prison lens; it lends to the understanding that the people inside them are trapped (imprisoned) in their ways of thinking. Rooted in the allegory of the cave from Plato's The Republic, the metaphor of organizations as psychic prisons joins the idea that organizations are ultimately created and sustained by conscious and unconscious processes, with the notion that people can actually become imprisoned in or confined by the images, ideas, thoughts, and actions to which these processes give rise (Vong, 2014).

To further explain, groupthink is a phenomenon within the psychic prison realm in which groups of people in an organizational setting develop shared illusions due to their organization's rather than individual thinking processes (Russel et al., 2015). Valine (2018) emphasized that cultures fail when group thinking is at the core of decision-making. Group thinking gives rise to Veldman's power of the fish in water metaphor. Veldman (2015) explained that every organization (fish) is embedded in a strategically chosen environment (water), and because the two entities are interdependent on one another, organizations have the capability to enhance or destroy their settings. In this case, group thinking (fish) gets its life from the water (organization). The antidote to this type of environment is an authentizotic organization. Kets de Vries (2017) explained that an authentizotic organization is one that is conscious of the psychodynamic principles (i.e., unconscious processes such as groupthink) within their cultures. Therefore, rather than supporting group thinking, AO allows members of an organization to use their individual unique skills and perspectives to promote values and achieve organizational goals leading to a genuine sense of belonging, commitment, and satisfaction among employees (Kets de Vries (2017). The idea of an authentizotic organization helps us to understand why consciousness is one of the strengths of the psychic prison metaphor. However, a major limitation of the metaphor is its overemphasis on the cognitive processes in creating, sustaining, and changing organizations and social.

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