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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
DOI 10.1179/1440991714Z.00000000027
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CHRISTOPHE DEJOURS
J-P. Deranty, Travail et experience de la domination dans le neoliberalisme contemporain, Actuel Marx 49 (2011):
7389.
117
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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CHRISTOPHE DEJOURS
119
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.
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
121
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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CHRISTOPHE DEJOURS
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
123
J. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (New York: Holt, 1927).
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CHRISTOPHE DEJOURS
organization modified along managerial lines were introduced into the work
environment in order to supplant the value system based on work.
10
C. Dejours, Travail, usure mentale: Essai de psychopathologie du travail (Paris: Bayard, 1993).
125
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.
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
A. Hochschild, The Sociology of Feeling and Emotion: Selected Possibilities, in M. Millman & R. M. Kanter
(eds), Another Voice (New York: Anchor, 1977).
127
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
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.
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
Arendt, H. 1951. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World Inc.
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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CHRISTOPHE DEJOURS
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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