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Working on the basis of the concepts of psychoanalytic analysis of institutions and a clinical example, it is shown how the institutional crisis caused by a new Director being appointed to run the establishment tends to work itself out through setting the scene of the myth of origins (appealing to the founding father). Changes release archaic anxieties that are deposited on invariants, while recourse to the founding myths restores the institution’s continuity and reorganises it in a differentiated manner (here of the oedipal type), thereby regulating psychotic anxieties.