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critical horizons, Vol. 15 No.

2, July, 2014, 115130

Work and Self-Development: The Point


of View of the Psychodynamics of Work
Christophe Dejours
Psychoanalysis, Health, Work, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers,
Paris, France

A subjects relationship with work is by no means neutral as regards selfdevelopment. What becomes of the psychical (or subjective) relationship
with work does not depend solely on the individuals particular characteristics as a person, in particular their gender; it depends also on the nature
and organization of work. In order to analyse the importance of work in the
development of the psychic erotic economics, I refer to the psychotherapy of
a young woman that took place towards the end of her adolescence. This will
enable me to show how work can have a positive impact on mental
development. Then, in order to illustrate how work may destroy mental
functioning, I briefly analyse examples taken from investigations I undertook
in France in companies where several workplace suicides had taken place.
keywords work, psychodynamics, sexuality, gender domination, suicide, Freud

Introduction
Contrary to what common sense would have us believe work is not simply a decor
against which individual mental functioning takes place. The clinical study of
work and its psychodynamics show that work quite definitely goes to the very core
of the life of the mind Seelenleben, to use the term that Freud himself often
employed. From childhood on, work makes its way into mental development via
the psychical relationship that adults, including the childs parents, have with their
work. Subsequently, the interweaving of work and mental life is so close-knit that
the psychical destiny of ones adult existence depends on it.
And this, for better or for worse because ones relationship with work is by no
means neutral as regards self-development. What becomes of the psychical (or
subjective) relationship with work does not depend solely on the individuals

Critical Horizons Pty Ltd 2014

DOI 10.1179/1440991714Z.00000000027

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CHRISTOPHE DEJOURS

particular characteristics as a person; it depends also on the nature and


organization of work.1
In order to illustrate the importance of work in the development of the psychical
economics of eroticism, I shall give some examples from the psychotherapy of a
young woman that took place towards the end of her adolescence. This will enable
me to show how work can have a positive impact on mental development. Then, in
order to illustrate how work may destroy mental functioning, I shall give some
examples taken from investigations that I undertook, in France, in companies
where several workplace suicides had taken place.

From the patients initial request to the psychoanalytic construction


of a neurotic problem complex that was sexual in nature
The patient was barely twenty years old when she came into my consulting-room
for the first time. She wanted psychotherapy so as to analyse her behaviour, she
said! Why? Because for several years she had suffered from abdominal and pelvic
pains and she was wondering whether this might have something to do with what
was going on inside her head.
She lived with her parents. Her relationship with them was marked by endless
quarrels, in particular with her mother. Her mother was irritable, especially ever
since the time that she began to have problems in her professional career she had
had to leave the company she worked for and had been unemployed for a while.
She found another job it was less skilled than her previous one, but she was
obliged to accept it because nothing better was on offer. In her work as a secretary,
she never stopped complaining about the misogyny that reigned in her work
environment.
The patients father was a technical salesman. Sometime before, he had suffered
from a gastric ulcer and had thought about having psychotherapy, but in the end
did not go through with the idea. He encouraged his daughter, however, in her
wish to have psychotherapy.
Miss Mulvir had a job. Her relationships with her male colleagues were
experienced as a kind of rivalry. She had noticed that when conflicts with her boss
worsened, she would feel herself getting angrier and angrier, but she would repress
her anger with the result that she felt acute pains in her stomach. These stomachaches were very painful, and occurred whenever she felt frustrated or anxious.
When she sat her A-levels, for example, she could only actually take part in the
exams for one hour out of every four the other three were spent in the toilet,
because she was doubled up in pain.
She told me about her outbursts of anger, during which she felt that she wanted
to lash out violently at everybody in the vicinity. All the same, she appeared to be
physically so frail and feminine that it was difficult to see her being changed into a
brute.

J-P. Deranty, Travail et experience de la domination dans le neoliberalisme contemporain, Actuel Marx 49 (2011):
7389.

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In her second session, she absolutely wanted to tell me about something that
could be important. The other day she had been watching a TV programme about
dreams. That made her think of the dreams that she had often had as a child. She
would imagine that she had a brother an older brother, who possessed every
quality imaginable. He was physically strong and intelligent, he knew a lot about
many things, he was knowledgeable also as regards all the problems that people
are unsure about in their everyday life, and he was emotionally and mentally very
stable. A Superman, she added, just in case I had not understood. She smiled as
she recalled her dreams.
Issues concerning identification with men were also a feature of her professional
relationships and of what was important to her outside of her work environment.
For example, she had decided to take a course in muscle-development not bodybuilding, as she was careful to point out that gave her some degree of physical
strength as well as self-confidence. And she was very pleased whenever someone
asked for her help in loosening a bolt or unscrewing a lid on a jar, for example. As
we can see, already in her second session her free associations had to do with
sexual identity.
Miss Mulvir liked to go out a lot; every Saturday evening she would go to one or
other of the discotheques in the surrounding area. She would dance, chat up the
young men and sleep with a new guy each time. On each occasion, however, she
was disappointed. Sexual intercourse was painful for her. Her vaginal secretions
were insufficient and penetration often led to vaginal bleeding, with the mucous
membrane being torn. She never felt that she was in love or at most only for a
very short time. In such a case, she would build far-fetched plans for the future,
which had nothing to do with the actual state of the situation that she found
herself in. Built up entirely on rational calculations, her projects left almost no
room for fantasy or romance.
In spite of what she had said at the very beginning, sometimes she did dream of
being with a woman partner, especially when she masturbated. She asked me, in a
very sincere and truly puzzled way, whether, deep down, she was homosexual or
not.
If we restrict ourselves to analysing the connection between her sexual
frustration and the identificatory dynamics of her relationship with her parents,
the situation seems clear enough. She refused to identify with her mother, and she
took upon her shoulders her fathers life-project. When he began working, he was
a technician she was too. He managed to advance his career towards becoming a
technical salesman that was her dream too at that point. Although her
identification with her father was clear enough, it was not accompanied by any
idealization of him. Quite the contrary: Miss Mulvir felt that her parents life-style
was appalling their faithfulness to each other as husband and wife, their weekly
sexual intercourse followed by her mothers ritual going to the bathroom, and so
on.

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Resistance with respect to the analysis or a struggle against


acquiescence? The social sphere cannot be reduced to its sexual
counterpart
All the same, the work of psychotherapy came almost to a standstill. It was only by
displacing the centre of gravity of the analytical focus that new perspectives
opened up. Miss Mulvir did not see her mother as an appropriate figure for her to
identify with, but this was not because her mother did not love her enough. It had
more to do with the fact that the patient steadfastly refused to resign herself to
being the kind of woman-in-life that her mother exemplified: faithful, no panache,
a secretary-typist unhappy in her work, aggressive towards her husband and her
children, frustrated in her social life, and disappointed by the fact that her
retirement would offer no perspective of emancipation. Being that kind of woman
held no attraction for the patient, whatever way she looked at it, and in particular
on the professional and social levels.
Miss Mulvir, however, had real ambitions as far as her work was concerned.
She had passed her A-levels in technical subjects a difficult course and had gone
on to do an advanced vocational training certificate. She was working in an
electronics workshop, where she did prototype assembly, often in a clean room
environment. She had by then progressed to being an electronics technician in the
thick-layer department. She wanted to continue in that field and then move on
to become a sales engineer. But in her work situation, that project seemed to be
incompatible with the social model of women. In fact, in her work environment
she was the only woman.
In her relationship with men, given what she called her sexual needs and her
inability to tolerate sexual abstinence in spite of all the difficulties that sexual
intercourse caused her and the lack of erotic pleasure she had in it the partners
whom she usually encountered embodied everything that she hated: machismo,
lack of emotional concern, a tendency to drink too much and to be rude and
uncouth.
With men like that, she seemed to be searching for her identity to be
acknowledged in the sense of equality. She felt no affection for those men they
were merely one-night stands. She was not interested in them, and she was in no
mood for compromise. These encounters were absolutely self-centred.
Above all, she wanted to force these men and in particular those who were real
male chauvinists to show some consideration and respect for her. It sometimes
happened that the situation was less clear-cut: the relationship was reversed, and
she was the one who became contemptuous whenever she spoke of them.
What she wanted was to set up with them an erotic relationship that took into
account the otherness that each sex represented for the other but a relationship
based on equality, not on a system of dominating/dominated. Seen from the point
of view of her quest for her sexual identity, that conflict did not work out properly,
because the tone of the social relationships of domination and her struggle against
them forced her almost always to behave like a man and that did not help her in
the least to emphasize her identity as a woman. In that kind of social environment,

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in fact, no woman can ever be the equal of a man she must accept the fact that
she is destined to be dominated.
In short, the patient wanted both to have a promising professional career and to
be a woman. However, her professional environment and her social milieu were
both an obstacle to this, so that all that remained open to her was to give up the
whole idea, accept disappointment and see her future as dreary. That is a classic
situation, one which is very different from that of men. In the case of men, it is
obvious that self-fulfilment in their erotic and emotional life goes hand-in-hand
with their self-fulfilment in the professional and social fields indeed, the one
reinforces the other.
The conflict situation in which Miss Mulvir found herself can be analysed with
reference to the concept of social relationships of sex and other research which
has demonstrated the indissociable connection between, on the one hand, social
relationships of sex and social relationships of work and, on the other, social
relationships of work and relationships of domination.2 These could also be
described as relationships of production and relationships of reproduction.3
Bringing together the sociological concepts of social relationships of sex and
those of the social and sexual division of labour gives to what Miss Mulvir said to
me a meaning that differs somewhat from the conventional interpretation that a
psychoanalyst might put on her words. Until that point, her sexual psychopathology had been looked upon as having to do with the wish for a penis and a fairly
typical refusal of castration (the conventional interpretation), but henceforth it
could be understood as the ill-fated struggle against what, in a social construct,
could function as an obstacle to her project of being a woman and being looked
upon as equal to men with respect to her professional skills which is not at all the
same thing as being a man. The patients quest could be seen as a struggle against
muliebrity. Muliebrity is the status conferred on women by the social
relationships of sex. It is a more or less stereotyped social construct Miss
Mulvirs mother, when all is said and done, was a typical example of this within
her own milieu. The patients wanting-to-be-a-woman became meaningful in the
sense of a process through which she attempted to undermine the social
determinants that lead to a repetition of muliebrity.4
When, in what Miss Mulvir said to the analyst, it became possible to
acknowledge both her wish for self-fulfilment in her work as a technician and
her desire to be a woman, she met somebody and that encounter put an end to
the kind of repetitive adventures that she had had until then.
Whom did she meet? A student doing a Ph.D. in engineering who came into the
factory to work on the same technology as she did. She taught him some tricks of
the trade that she had discovered as she was doing her work. Then, one Saturday
evening, he asked her out. Surprise! On their first date, they did not end up in bed
together more or less at once. So, what happened? He had a car, they went out for
2

H. Hirata & D. Kergoat, Rapports sociaux de sexe et psychopathologie du travail, in C. Dejours (ed.), Plaisir et
souffrance dans le travail (Paris: CNAM, 1988), vol.II, 131176.
D. Kergoat, Les ouvrie`res (Paris: Editions du Sycomore, 1982) and Plaidoyer pour une sociologie des rapports
sociaux, in D. Kergoat, Se battre, disent-elles. (Paris: La Dispute), 85100.
4
C. Dejours, Souffrance en France. La banalisation de linjustice sociale (Paris: Le Seuil, 1988).
3

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CHRISTOPHE DEJOURS

a drive, but then had an accident. The evening did not work out as planned. Earlier
that day, the young man had had a celebration lunch with some friends, so that he
did not feel hungry. He took Miss Mulvir back to his place and prepared a pizza
for her. It was a frozen one, so that it was not all that great. But all the same ! He
did the cooking himself, set the table, served up the food to her and did not himself
have anything to eat. They chatted together.
For the first time in her life, she felt fondness stirring up inside her, which
immediately exploded into feelings of love. In her session, she cried out: Thats it,
I think Ive met my Prince Charming!
On their next date, she knew that she would not be able to have sex with him
because she had a vaginal infection. She was at his place, it was getting very late
and she could not get back home. He told her to sleep in his bed, and he would
sleep on the sofa. That really amazed her! She suggested that he sleep in the bed
too, although she asked him not to touch her. He refused. She insisted. They had
unprotected sex, although she said nothing to him about why she had been
reticent.
In spite of that difficult psychological situation, it was the first time in almost
three years that she had had an enjoyable sexual experience. With that young man,
she was both a woman and acknowledged as such, valued as a person and
respected. That experience, however, became possible only because of the different
social context.

Collective defence strategy against suffering in the workplace and


the risk of virilization
Some sessions later, the patient again spoke about her past and about what had
happened when she was at high school, at the start of her vocational diploma
course. She was the only girl in the class, and all the other students pestered her
right from the start. She was made fun of all the time and on any pretext, and was
told that she would never pass the exams especially by her teachers, who rained
sarcasm down on her constantly.
At the very beginning, there were two other girls. All the boys were between sixteen
and eighteen years old, and all they talked about were dirty sex stories, especially in
front of the girls. Those other two girls were immediately eliminated because they
refused to take part in that system.

The patient, however, had set up a different strategy, a trick of the trade, as it
were. It took her three months to work it out. It consisted in saying the same kinds
of thing as the boys, speaking in a vulgar and coarse way about sex and women,
and putting on a display of machismo indeed, on that particular point, she put
herself forward as even more of a male chauvinist than the boys were.
All of this was part of a typical collective defence strategy that men and boys
build up to ensure group solidarity between pupils and teachers, based on a
socially-constructed masculinity that we often encounter in jobs which expose
workers to dangers of one kind or another (building and civil engineering, nuclear
production, fishermen, fighter pilots, etc.). Given that Miss Mulvir, who was

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sixteen at the time, did not want to abandon her studies in electronics she really
had a great passion for the subject she had to cope with a virile strategy and do
this in such a way as to make the boys acknowledge her as their equal; if she did
not manage to do that, she would be subjected to all kinds of attack aimed at
excluding her and making her capitulate, in the way that she describes.5
I did not attempt to conceal my interest in what the patient was telling me (she
was saying that it was when she was sixteen that her problems began). She
responded by reporting a critical moment that had just come back into her mind:
It was a kind of initiation ceremony, she said, a rite of passage.
In her class, one of the students was a bit intellectually disabled; his grades were
poor, he was not well-integrated and indeed he should not have been allowed to
stay on in that class at all. But his father had come to the school in order to support
his son. The whole class was brought together for that purpose, and he explained
to the students that his son had had a difficult birth, with forceps, and so on.
having to be used; as a result, his head and his face were left deformed. One day,
that poor boy fell in love with one of the girls in the high school. He wanted others
to pass along little notes to her that he had scribbled down because he did not dare
give them to her directly and it was Miss Mulvir who agreed to act as
intermediary. In accomplishing her mission, she did everything she could to
reassure the other girl and tell her that the boy was not at all dangerous. One day,
the boy told his fellow students that he was going to kiss the girl and that as a
result they would have children.
They all burst out laughing, jeering at him and making sarcastic jokes. Bloody
idiot! Thats not how you make babies. Youve got to get a hard on. He had no
idea what that meant.
That was a propitious situation for exercising the power of domination by men
over women: they forced Miss Mulvir to explain to that boy what it meant.
The group shut her up in the classroom with the boy, and waited behind the
door. She realized that, if she was to have some chance of extricating herself from
that situation, she would in fact have to tell him. She succeeded in explaining it to
him. On leaving the room, the boy had to prove to the others that he had
understood. So he said to them: Yes, its when your thingmy gets all stiff.
Various studies on the clinical aspects and psychopathology of work have
demonstrated that there is a high psychological price to pay when adhering to
collective defence strategies. In the majority of cases, that adherence and it is
required if one is to feel that one belongs to a work-group necessitates not only
passive consent but also some demonstration, whenever the circumstances demand
it, of ones capacity to contribute in an enthusiastic and determined way to that
virile strategy. Almost all collective defence strategies in the world of work have
been drawn up by men; they are marked by a value system that evokes the external
signs of virility.6
5

C. Cockburn, Machinery of Dominance: Women, Men and Technical Know-how, Les cahiers APRE-IRESCOCNRS, no 7 (1988): 9399.
6
C. Dejours, From the Psychopathology to the Psychodynamics of Work, in N. Smith and J.-P. Deranty (eds), New
Philosophies of Labour. Work and the Social Bond (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2012), 209250.

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For women, therefore, the collective strategies devised by men are an obstacle to
their advancement in their work, because the higher one gets up the ladder of
qualifications, the more the career opportunities are collectively considered to be
the exclusive preserve of men. This means that if women are to have any chance of
being in a situation that favours recognition of their professional qualities and
encourages self-fulfilment in their work, they often have to conform to male
behaviour or adopt a masculine profile. And since they are women, the ordeals,
taunting and other kinds of challenges are even more frequent and demanding than
those applied to men.
It is therefore not exceptional that, in order to be given responsibility and some
interesting work, women who succeed in their integration have to behave in a
manner that is even more virile than that of their male colleagues. Many women
fail in that struggle, which tears them apart internally between their sexual identity
as women and their socially-determined identity. Many of those who refuse to
capitulate have to virilize themselves not only outwardly but also deep within
themselves, that is they lose part of their femininity. It quite often happens that, for
these women, social and professional advancement brings in its wake problems in
their relationships with men, destabilization of their married life, divorce or
separation, and so on.7
This, then, is how I understand the development of Miss Mulvirs conflict
psychodynamics. Initially, she wanted to have an interesting and skilled job that
she would find fascinating, one that represented access to the social status of
technician this would be more promising than that of secretary-typist, and would
open up real possibilities for sublimation and cathexis. In order to have an
opportunity of getting that kind of job, she would first of all have to learn how to
do it. Given that it was done almost exclusively by men, she could stay in that field
only if she agreed to accept the collective defence strategies and the mocking
attitude of those men; this was a sine qua non condition of her social integration.
Learning masculine behaviour brought her to the point of having to adopt a
masculine profile (learning not by heart but by body).8 Maintaining that
position implied having to seek out masculine models with which she could
identify in order to defend herself (i.e. not for reasons of idealization). Virilization
had by then indeed begun. That resulted in a crisis situation concerning her sexual
identity, which led to problems in making use of her erotic body and hesitations
concerning her sexual orientation (homo- or heterosexuality).
In the opposite sense, there was initially her request for psychoanalysis, triggered
by her sexual symptoms. The acknowledgement by the analyst of the conjunction
between her wish to gain access to a social situation that would facilitate
sublimation and her wish to be a woman enabled the patient to re-establish a
distinction between these two elements: desire in the erotic field, and wish for
recognition in the social domain (the encounter with the trainee engineer).
The analysis of her recourse to male-chauvinistic language enabled her to recall
the first stage when that virilization process was triggered during her
7
8

Hirata & Kergoat, Rapports sociaux de sexe.


P. Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990).

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adolescence, in order to resist the pressures of social relationships marked by male


domination of women. Thereafter, it became possible for her to envisage the
advent of femininity in a reconstituted social world.
Taking that observation as a basis, I have tried to show that the relationship to
work has consequences that go far into the depths of subjectivity, to the extent,
indeed, of impacting upon the psychical economy of eroticism. In certain
circumstances, work can act as a powerful mediator in the construction of selfidentity and in self-fulfilment both in the erotic sphere and in the social domain.
The processes involved can go on developing in spite of class or gender
domination. That kind of process depends on the development of psychological
traits that enable gender domination to be undermined; these traits play a
fundamental role in the formation of the sense of self or, as Dewey (1920) puts it
personal growth or the formation of individuality.9

Self-development doomed to failure by work organization


Although the experience of work can be in the service of what is best, it may also
give rise to the worst. When we speak of the centrality of work as regards selfidentity, individuality and mental health, we must not forget, a contrario, those
situations in which the individual finds themself in a psychological dead-end such
that mental ill-health may well result.
For a more in-depth study of this particular aspect of the relationship between
subjectivity and work, I shall not base my comments on the longitudinal analysis
of an individual clinical observation. My intention here is rather to highlight the
decisive influence that work organization has on the way in which the relationship
between subjectivity and work is oriented towards self-fulfilment or, on the other
hand, self-estrangement. In order to do this, I shall report some clinical
investigations that have been carried out on suicides occurring in the workplace.
Since the beginning of the 1980s, the link between workplace organization and
mental well-being has been amply demonstrated in research studies concerning the
psychodynamics of work. The specific nature of that relationship is quite distinct
from that which governs working conditions (physical, chemical and biological)
and bodily or physical health (industrial accidents, occupational diseases).
Work-related psychopathology is at present on the increase, to such an extent,
indeed, that men and women have reached the point of actually committing
suicide in the workplace. One of the reasons for this is that the organization of
work has been radically altered. How can we describe the changes that have been
brought about in workplace organization?

Emphasis placed on management to the detriment of work


The managerial turning-point
The first wind of change fell upon the world of work towards the end of the 1980s.
It made use of management science as its central instrument. New methods of
9

J. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (New York: Holt, 1927).

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organization modified along managerial lines were introduced into the work
environment in order to supplant the value system based on work.

The psychodynamics of recognition destabilized by managerial criteria


The discrediting of any allusion to doing ones work well with its reference to
rules of work and professional criteria, to the experience and skills acquired
through ones working life was a shock wave that many workers found
intolerable because it represented an attack not only on their work environment
but also on one of the fundamental mainsprings of mental well-being in the
workplace.
In order to understand the damage wrought by that managerial turning-point,
we have to take a look at the psychodynamics behind recognition in the
workplace, as described and highlighted almost twenty years ago now.10 From a
clinical point of view, recognition is a symbolic reward granted to the person doing
the work, in exchange for the contribution they make to the company and,
through it, to society as a whole. That moral or symbolic reward should be
differentiated from material rewards such as an increase in salary, bonuses or
promotion indeed, it can be demonstrated that the psychological impact of the
latter depends not on the actual increase in these awards but fundamentally on the
symbolic gratification that accompanies them.
Recognition is a qualitative judgement related to the work done. There are two
main tests that are applied to this: judgement as to usefulness and judgement as to
beauty.
Judgement as to usefulness concerns the economic, technical or social usefulness
of the contribution that the employee makes to the company. That judgement is
usually made by their superiors, but in some cases by subordinates who may be in
a position to give their reasoned appreciation of what their line manager has done
for them.
Judgement as to beauty has to do with whether the work done conforms to
professional criteria and is carried out according to the rulebook. It can be granted
only by ones peers, by those who have a good knowledge of the job that the
person whose work is being judged is doing. Here, the words used belong to the
vocabulary of beauty: nice piece of work, fine way of doing things, well done,
elegant demonstration, and so on. Peer judgement is simultaneously the most
precise, the most subtle, the most severe and the most precious. Over and beyond
the judgement of beauty referring to conformity, another level of judgement may
be made this presupposes that the work to be appraised has already been judged
satisfactory as to its conformity. This level of judgement pertains to the style of the
work done, such that the person carrying it out is seen to have some originality
with respect to how their colleagues do it.
The first judgement, of usefulness means that the activity is acknowledged as
being work in the narrow sense of the term, that is it is neither a leisure activity
nor a hobby.

10

C. Dejours, Travail, usure mentale: Essai de psychopathologie du travail (Paris: Bayard, 1993).

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The second judgement of beauty has a major impact on the individuals sense of
identity. When this kind of judgement is awarded to a worker, they become, de
jure or de facto, a member of a given community, of a team, of a work-group, and
perhaps even of a craft or profession. A true self-employed carpenter, fighter pilot,
research worker acknowledged by other research groups, a wine-producer
recognized as such by other wine-producers and when their work is judged to
be original, that confers a distinction with respect to other people, a distinction
that is accorded by those same other people.
It has to be emphasized that recognition does not apply to the worker as a
person. What the worker wants is for their work and the quality of it to be
appraised. It is only thereafter that the person whose work has been acknowledged
in this way can bring what applied to the doing dimension into the being
sphere, to his sense of self. From acknowledgement to acknowledgement, the
individual concerned can feel their sense of identity growing and becoming
stronger and more solid. Working does not imply simply producing something, it
also means transforming oneself. In this way, the psychodynamics of recognition
is in a position to transform suffering in the workplace into pleasure at the
enhancement of the sense of self.
Self-identity is the backbone of mental health. This means that when a worker is
given recognition, the benefit that they take from this involves also their mental
well-being. On the other hand, if they are not given recognition or if it is taken
away from them, the risk is that their self-identity might be weakened and the
pleasure that they take in their sense of self, in their self-love (narcissism) might be
shaken. Work is not neutral as far as self-identity and mental well-being is
concerned. The relationship that people have with their work may bring out the
best in them but it can also bring out the worst: an identity crisis and
psychopathological breakdown.

A new method of work organization: individualized assessment of


performance
A new method of organization, closely related to the managerial doctrine, has been
brought into most private companies and also into the public sector: individualized
assessment of performance. That method is presented as being an objective way
of assessing the work done by each individual and of enabling it to be compared
with that of the other employees. Individualized assessment is based on the
principle of a quantitative and objective analysis of the work being done, and is
carried out by measuring what is actually produced.
I shall not go into any detail here about the highly-critical analyses that have
been made of the scientific foundations of performance assessment.11 I shall simply
discuss those parts of the analysis that will help us to understand its harmful effect
on mental well-being.

11
C. Dejours, LEvaluation du travail a` lepreuve du reel. Critique des fondements de levaluation (Paris: INRA
Editions, 2003).

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CHRISTOPHE DEJOURS

Work assessment by objective and quantitative methods of measurement is


based on scientific principles that are false. It can be shown that, given our present
knowledge in work sciences, it is impossible to measure work as such. As we saw
in Miss Mulvirs case, although we may know where work begins, it is impossible
to determine, by criteria that can be applied generally, the way in which work is
still in the individuals mind above and beyond the actual time spent in the
workplace (the inseparability of at-work/not-at-work). We still do not know how
to measure the mental and intellectual time that an employee gives to their work in
order to acquire the skills and abilities required for reaching the prescribed
objectives and satisfying performance criteria. This is even more the case in the
service sector, which has increased considerably here, work basically involves
human relations skills, so that it is difficult to objectivize and almost impossible to
measure the psychological input of the work actually done.12
In fact, individualized assessment does not measure work at all. At best, it may
perhaps assess the outcome of work done. But the whole point is that there is no
proportionality between work and the outcome of work. If I treat elderly people
who suffer simultaneously from several disorders, my work will be more difficult
than with young patients who have a single pathology. And, of course, the
outcome will be less positive than those that I can obtain with younger patients.
Similarly, it is easier for a bank in a wealthy area to have an adequate turnover
than it is for one in a poorer area. There is no proportionality between the turnover
and the work that is actually being done.
This quantitative method of assessment is therefore erroneous, and thus gives
rise to feelings of injustice that also have deleterious effects on mental health. The
most serious impact, however, is probably what this method does to teamwork, to
cooperation, and to togetherness/living together.
Individualized assessment of performance gives rise to competition between
services, departments and branches and between employees themselves. If the
outcome of individualized assessment of performance is coupled with a bonus
system (promotion, pay bonuses, increase in salary), the atmosphere between
rivals quickly deteriorates. And if individualized assessment of performance is
linked to the threat of being put on the sidelines, automatically transferred
elsewhere, falling into disgrace or being fired, the method generates not only an
every man for himself mentality but also, after a short time, behaviours that
exceed a healthy spirit of emulation, and are instead marked by a kind of
competitiveness and rivalry that results in unfair competition: holding back
information, false rumours, setting people up, and so on. Loyalty and trust decline
and are replaced by suspicion and the need to keep an eye on what ones colleagues
who will soon be treated as adversaries are doing.
Cooperation suffers as a result of this, of course and, in addition, relationships
of respect for other people, loyalty, trust, consideration, mutual aid, and so on fall
apart. In the end, solidarity itself collapses, and eventually disappears. Where once
there was friendliness and good manners, double-dealing and dishonesty take over.
12

A. Hochschild, The Sociology of Feeling and Emotion: Selected Possibilities, in M. Millman & R. M. Kanter
(eds), Another Voice (New York: Anchor, 1977).

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Each person is alone in the midst of a crowd, in a human and social environment
that quickly takes on an air of hostility. Loneliness and isolation bear down upon
the world of work, and give rise to a whole new state of affairs regarding the
subjective relationship between work and mental well-being.
Contrary to what some have written, harassment in the workplace is not a new
phenomenon. But if, as does seem to be the case, the number of those subjected to
harassment is very much on the increase, this is not due to harassment as such but
to the loneliness that people are experiencing. Faced with harassment, with
injustice and, on a more mundane level, with the ordinary difficulties of work and
the failures that we all come up against in our working life, dealing with such
situations with the help and solidarity of others is not at all the same thing as
trying to cope on ones own, isolated, and in a potentially hostile human
environment.
The present increase in the number of workplace suicides is not simply due to
injustice, falling into disgrace, or harassment. The main cause is the horrifying
experience that arises from the silence of other people, their disregard, their refusal
to bear witness, their cowardliness. Where formerly injustice or harassment would
have been a painful or distressing experience, the result nowadays may well be an
identity crisis.
Betrayal by ones colleagues or friends is more painful than harassment itself.
The reason for this is that, if the victim is on their own in the face of such attacks,
they do not know whether to interpret the cowardliness of their colleagues as a
betrayal or as a pejorative judgement shared by everyone, including their friends,
on the quality of their work. Doubtful of their own qualities, they work even
harder, with the mistaken belief that by doing so they will be able to win back the
respect and trust of their superiors. They will wear themself out, lose sleep over
it until they come to the point where they will make mistakes and these will
only worsen the harassment and convince them that they are at fault and deserve
to be disgraced.
It is then that the downward spiral of depression, with feelings of deception, of
fault, of moral decline, and so on may take hold of the employee with such
brutality that they commit suicide.
The silence of others when one of their colleagues is being harassed precipitates
the break-up of any shared sense of justice, dignity and solidarity the common
foundations on which the world is built, the world that we inhabit together in
the plurality of human beings.13 When that common ground gives way, there
arises what Hannah Arendt called loneliness.14

The problem of ethical suffering


When other people remain silent, it not only affects the victim of harassment
indeed, it is often carried out in public and is employed as a kind of warning to
13

H. Arendt, Introduction into Politics, in The Promise of Politics, (trans. J. Kohn.) (New York: Schocken, 2005), 93
199.
14
H. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World Inc, 1951).

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CHRISTOPHE DEJOURS

those who witness it. As a consequence, they are likely to withdraw into
themselves and keep their mouths shut in the hope that they may avoid being
publicly humiliated. In so doing, however, they become themselves a party to the
harassment and unfair treatment of their colleague. Moreover, the lack of
solidarity they show to their colleague is experienced as a betrayal. Even worse,
they experience their own cowardliness and self-betrayal.
This is where the idea of ethical suffering comes into the picture the
suffering that arises when we agree to behaviour that runs counter to our own
moral code, thereby damaging our self-esteem.
In order to demonstrate their willingness to serve and prove their loyalty to the
company in the hope that they will keep their job, workers feel obliged to betray
their colleagues who are having problems, to betray themselves and to experience
their own cowardliness. From a psychological point of view, this is indeed a
dangerous situation.

Breach of moral contract


Paradoxically, the risk is all the greater when the person applies themself even
more to their work and put their skills generously at the disposal of the company
for which they work. It can happen, for example, that they find themself suddenly
disqualified not because of any drop in their performance but purely and simply
because they are being discredited as a result of a policy change in the company or
in one of its branches: a merger and acquisition or a structural reform in which
changes in strategy (which have nothing to do with the work dimension as such
but merely with managerial objectives) mean that their bosses order various brutal
changes in the management of human resources. These give rise to disloyal
behaviour towards some employees, in the form of discredit soon followed by
harassment, with the aim of destabilizing those who have to be got rid of.
Caught up in the turmoil, the employee who has fallen out of favour draws up
a balance sheet: for the firm, they had accepted horrendous working hours that
created problems for them in their family life and may even have led to separation
from their spouse and children. The work overload exhausted them, and may even
already have brought about physical health problems (high blood pressure,
cardiovascular disorders, insomnia, stomach ulcers ). In addition, for the good
of the company, they agreed to betray themself and to experience their own
cowardliness.
To whom can they talk about their ethical suffering? Certainly not to their
colleagues, who are in the same position as they are and tend to avoid them. Nor
to their family or friends, because they would not dare to admit to them just how
compromised they feel.
And so, after an individual interview with their manager which made it clear to
them that henceforth it was their turn to be persecuted, they may well fall abruptly
into despair and try to kill themself. This kind of situation has occurred many
times in France in the series of workplace suicides that I have studied.
There is one important point that must be emphasized. A certain number of
those who commit suicide do not present any previous history of psychiatric

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129

disorder. Contrary to what one might think, it is not the no-hopers who commit
suicide; more often, it is those who gave themselves body and soul to their work
and their company, sparing no effort, who turn out to be most vulnerable when
their contract of loyalty with the firm is breached. Those who do not involve
themselves, those who do the legal minimum, do not commit suicide when their
company acts in a disloyal manner towards them.
These cases raise new theoretical issues. For conventional psychiatry, suicide is
always the outcome of a psychopathological process the origin of which is
neurotic, psychotic, drug-related or hereditary. Suicides that occur in people who
are well-integrated socially and who sometimes have a comfortable material and
emotional environment cannot be explained without taking into consideration
some specific findings concerning the interconnections between work and
subjectivity. With respect to clinical situations in the workplace, psychiatry has
to broaden, as it were, its theoretical references.
On another level, the findings of these clinical studies challenge the sociological
conceptions of the social determinism of individual behaviour. Contrary to what
Durkheim argued in his writings on suicide and what Marcuse said in Eros and
Civilization about social repression (surplus repression),15 these findings suggest
that there is never any direct internalization of social constraints in the
construction of the superego. The constraints of social domination and work
organization do not directly determine a persons behaviour. Between social
relationships and individual behaviour there lies the intractable complexity of
mental functioning.
As to Miss Mulvir, class and gender domination did not determine her sexual
habitus. On the contrary, she was more inclined towards emancipation thanks to
the mobilization of her subversive intelligence and skills; she had to go through a
lengthy phase of processing that took her from her painful abdominal and pelvic
symptoms to her discovery of a new kind of erotic economy. In employees who
commit suicide, it is their ethical suffering, linked to their intense subjective
involvement in their work, which directs the outcome of the conflict towards selfdestruction. In both cases, however, it is because every kind of work demands the
commitment of ones entire subjectivity or because no production (poiesis) is
possible without living work. That subjectivity, put to the test by the work of
production, cannot avoid undertaking some mental work (Arbeit) on the self
(Arbeitsanforderung, demand for work, is the term used by Freud) this may be
beneficial for self-development, but if it is interrupted, the individual may well find
themself on the brink of an abyss.16

References
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Arendt, H. 2005. Introduction into Politics, in The Promise of Politics (trans. J. Kohn.). New York: Schocken,
93199.

15
16

H. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization. An Inquiry into Freud (London: Routledge, 1987), 38.
S. Freud, Instincts and Their Vicissitudes, in Standard Edition vol. 14 (London: Vintage, 2001), 122.

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Notes on contributor
Christophe Dejours is Chair Professor (Psychoanalysis, Health, Work) at the
Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris. He is the author of many books
on psychoanalytic theory, psychosomatics, pathologies of modern work and the
social impact of work pathologies. In 2009, he published Travail Vivant (Paris:
Payot), a two-volume monograph presenting the main aspects of the psychodynamics of work. Other recent publications include: Suicide et travail. Que faire?
(with F. Be`gue, Paris: PUF, 2010); and, as editor, Observations cliniques en
psychopathologie du travail (Paris: PUF, 2010), and Conjurer la violence : Travail,
violence et sante (Paris : Payot, 2011). In 2012 a series of interviews with Beatrice
Bouniol was published titled La Panne. Repenser le travail et changer la vie (Paris :
Bayard, 2012).
Correspondence to: christophe.dejours@cnam.fr.

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