Contenu du sommaire : Travail et souffrance

Alienation system in a work environment
We will explore the issue of socio-professional alienation system based on a case study : the case of a driver-delivery man in a transportation company. With him, we try to dismantle the workings of alienation system at work as well as the social and subjective attack endured during this process.In an approach of clinical ethnography, on the one hand, downstream, we will explore the operating processes of violence and work alienation. On the other hand, upstream, we explore the vulnerabilities that have often weakened people subject to it. Components of a domination systems are often crystallised in dimension of existential relationship, from private life to socio-professional life.Finally, we will explore the processes of disengagement and (re)construction of a sustainable attitude to work.

Denying suffering at work, naturalizing social violence: A century-old psychotherapeutic stumbling blockThis article discusses some of the conceptual difficulties that clinicians dealing with the work-related suffering of their patients may face when they refer to psychoanalytic theory. Starting from the analysis of the texts relating to the founding entity of psychoanalytic work psychopathology, namely the war neurosis, the article shows that the Freudian conceptualization passed on to posterity, and considered today as classical, proceeds from a denial of work suffering, matches naturalization to social violence. It is clear that this psychoanalysis does not have the conceptual tools that make it possible to refer to the work, to listen, to understand, and to interpret it. The author proposes to take up some of Freud's original conceptual propositions, which have remained unfulfilled, and to reconsider them from the reference to the clinic of contemporary work. In conclusion, it will be a question of considering a psychoanalytic social theory that is an alternative to the canonical model, which would give a central place to the reference to work.

The Gender defines itself as a social relationship of domination between the sexes historically and socially situated and in the center of which arises as stake the question of work. This question concerns in lively media and political current events the clinicians of the psychic life and work as the researchers, companies and institutions, the politics. If this social relationship of domination is questioned for already several decades, but neither is it disappearing The argumentation of this article, based at the same time on the psychodynamics of work and psychoanalytic theory of Laplanche, proposes hypotheses allowing to think of the perpetuation of the social relationships, their transmission in the family and the way they participate in the subjective construction of children

The work such as it is necessary to consider it today,With his(her) organization, its distribution of the tasks and the functions(offices),With his management and its communication,With all the social advances whether it is the legislation, the safety, the insurances,With also all the diverse authorities, internal or external to the company,Does this work thus still offer to the people a place of sublimation, transfer or repetition(rehearsal) of their personal problems? And to what extent he(it) does not create them or does not he(it) deteriorate(does not aggravate) them?

Every society requires of their members to maintain themselves in a healthy situation, however, if they are unwell, they have to express their frame of mind in the most normal manner. Until recently the collective agreement was to express one's discomfort/malaise and ones psychique suffering basically through the frame of « depression ». A new frame is emerging and being outlined: one can now proclaim being in « burnout ». This expression which previously concerned worn-out professional conditions in the the welfare professions has now become common even in non-professional situations. To-day one talks about parental, maternal burnout... However, the extension of this term covers various situations. Are there common factors ? Are there different « burnouts »? How does one take care of these situations without creating a pathology or without normalizing/banalizing the situation.

The article contrasts empirical literature on the concept of burnout with the clinical complexities that arise when treating individuals who seek private outpatient counselling, citing professional exhaustion (“burnout syndrome”). In the view of the authors, contemporary literature is dominated by a determinist, linear and causally compartmentalized perspective on burnout syndrome. The authors' clinical experiences, in contrast, reveal a diversity of individual circumstances that can be loosely grouped as burnout situations, yet differ in significant ways. The patients are found to exhibit highly idiosyncratic psychological profiles, requiring strikingly different therapeutic modalities. This leads the authors to argue for a more comprehensive understanding of the syndrome, using the bioecological model of human development originally proposed by Bronfenbrenner (2009). The resulting enlarged framework places structural and relational elements into an integrated multi-systems structure better matched to the diversity of individual situations, and opens the door to a highly promising path for co-creation of therapeutic models with individualized treatments shaped to fit the patient's individual psychological circumstances.

Based on her experience, as a clinical psychologist in a university hospital structure, the author proposes a reflection, on the consequences of performance requirement, from corporate and societal standpoints, when dealing with the suffering of caregivers and care teams.

Just as the burnout of other social sectors professionals, the physicians' burnout is acquiring an epidemic proportion. After having described the pathology, this manuscript elaborates the multidisciplinary aspects of its clinical management. It describes the importance to the prevention of socially motivated, professionally oriented management of healthcare services, tribunals, universities and schools. It opposes such features to the characteristics of their industrial and commercial management.

This text raises the fundamental question of the suffering at work for “firefighters” who have become today, social workers. The construction of the identity of social worker has always been based on notions with values such as commitment, involvement, determination. What is happening today when social workers are confronted with unprecedented data, with the transformation of social work that has taken place in recent decades, with the diversification of audiences, regression or even destruction of the conditions of action, with the complexification of social relations with financiers and policies?

Hard work and work hardship
From clinical situations stemming from our research, we questioned the suffering carried by the voice of the psychologists working with traumatized patients. Our interest in what is experienced in these therapeutic relations led us to propose an infusion metaphor. Starting with tea ceremony as it practiced in Japan, we establish a parallel with the therapeutic frame in which the psychologist becomes the receptacle of disturbing infusions. In this context, the relationship between the therapist and his patient becomes a source of suffering, out of which emerges the necessity of finding a way out of this painful situation for the clinician.

Towards other doctorates between divergent worlds
Doctoral theses between divergent worlds are beautiful occasions for the doctoral candidates and the teams accompanying them to open themselves to other modes of developing knowledge and inventing new forms in adequation with alterity, interculturality and the unprecedented character of the phenomena studied. These occasions of overture and creation nevertheless run up against formidable obstacles occasioning rather closure and suffering. Such impasses, when they are recognized, worked through and overcome between the actors engaged, can lead to new paths and, if one learns collectively, blaze the trail and open the future. It is one thing to benefit from the difficulties faced in the course of a thesis and arrive, just the same, at a result which made it worthwhile. It is another thing to learn lessons from obstacles faced together to mark out future possible courses differently. Points of suffering which haunt intercultural doctoral journeys become benchmarks converging towards more open forms of construction of knowledge between divergent worlds.