Hello, my name is Roberta. I am a psychologist and professor of the psychology course at UFES. In the previous video, we saw how some factors present in the processes and contexts of work can affect workers’ mental health.
We focused on how the organization of work affects this process. In this video, we will go a little deeper into the relationship between work organization and workers. We will address notions of pleasure, suffering, and illness at work, and we will understand the dynamics through which work can produce pleasure and health or produce suffering and mental illness.
We will start with a model proposed by a physician and psychoanalyst called Christophe Dejours. Initially, we must review some of the content from previous videos in this course that talk about the centrality of work, both in social and individual lives. In this context, we can say that work fulfills at least two vital functions.
First, work has a utilitarian function, that is, work is a means by which we support ourselves financially. It is a means of economic subsistence. But work is not just that, although this function is certainly very important in people's lives.
Work is more than just a means of supporting oneself financially. It also fulfills a second extremely important function that we call the symbolic or expressive function. What does this mean?
This means that work makes an essential contribution to building who we are. And how does work do that? First of all, work is a means of social insertion.
It is from my work activity that I relate to other people, and from these relationships I build a sense of belonging, of being part of a group, a work collective, and this work collective shares values and norms. It collectively produces ways of thinking, being, and existing. Work also builds our identity at the same time.
How so? Through one’s work activity, based on recognition, whether from peers, management, or potential users of the fruit and product of the labor, an image is formed that contributes to the construction of the workers' self-identity. And finally, through work, we can develop our potential and creativity.
It is an activity, which perhaps much more than others, allows us to express ourselves and express our know-how, our inventiveness, and our potential. How does this expressive or symbolic function of work take place? When we are working we can say that every work activity and task requires adjustments.
There are previous prescriptions, planning, and requirements for the worker on how to do it, when to do it, and how much to do the work activity. It turns out that while workers are performing an activity, they are faced with a series of unforeseen events, anomalies, and obstacles in the development of the task that requires some mobilization to promote certain adjustments and modifications to that initial prescription in order to guarantee that the task is carried out. This is done quite spontaneously, but not without cost.
When the worker is faced with these unforeseen events, with these small or large problems, not necessarily so small in their day-to-day work, this will certainly cause suffering. What am I calling suffering here? Some level of anguish, tension, and anxiety.
But this will mobilize workers to try to solve these problems, obstacles, and unpredictability that occur in their daily life. And what happens when they mobilize? They use their knowledge and experience in the development of the task.
They use their creativity and inventiveness to solve the problem. They do this to ensure that the task gets done, and they understand this mobilization as their contribution to the job. It is certainly a great contribution to getting the job done.
And, it is clear that in exchange for this contribution, the worker will expect retribution. More specifically, a symbolic retribution. This symbolic retribution is what Dejours calls recognition.
This recognition is what allows that initial suffering, anguish, and anxiety to make sense and be transformed into pleasure. It is this recognition that confers meaning and significance to the worker about the activity being performed. From this point of view, recognition contributes to the construction of identity by the worker, i.
e. , the worker’s self-image, and when there is recognition, this image is positive because the job performed was valued. And so, this construction of identity, which we talked about earlier, is conferred, according to Dejours, through this mechanism, which is, recognition.
However, we need to make an important observation about what we are referring to as recognition, because in general, when we talk about recognition we immediately think of a compliment or monetary retribution in the form of a bonus, a benefit, or a salary increase. Of course, this is part of what we are calling recognition here. Of course, this can be considered important retribution, but for Dejours, the recognition that matters most is not just praise or monetary gratification.
He essentially talks about a recognition mechanism whose main objective is to value and legitimize the know-how of the worker, their accumulated experience, effort, and contribution made to the improvement of the work processes. This recognition is given by peers, managers, and also by those who enjoy the product of the work, and, as I said earlier, it is this mechanism, which recognizes the autonomy and mobilization of the worker, that will confer meaning to the job, and will produce pleasure instead of suffering. Well, now we are going to talk about the dimension of suffering.
First, we need to make an important distinction between suffering and mental illness. These two situations are not identical nor synonymous. When we talk about mental illness, we are talking about those conditions in which there is already a pathological process installed.
Suffering is another dimension. According to Dejours, psychic suffering is an intermediate subjective experience between uncompensated mental illness and comfort or psychic well-being in which the subject uses regulatory mechanisms to maintain psychic balance. So, the dimension of suffering concerns the discomfort that we feel at work; of situations that are stressful and destabilize us, but that somehow, based on regulation mechanisms, whether on the part of the worker or due to that recognition mechanism that I spoke about just now, the worker manages to deal with this suffering.
However, when work situations mobilize a worker and trigger discomforts and tensions, what we observe is that this suffering can take two different forms. The first is the one I already mentioned. It means that you are facing destabilizing situations, but you somehow manage to intervene in this activity, this work process, and implement the modifications and changes that you consider important for carrying out the task while at the same time providing some comfort and well-being in that job.
For this, the work organization must allow maneuver space for this worker. This worker must have a considerable degree of autonomy to be able to make these changes. If this happens, this worker mobilizes and solves the issues of suffering and this produces health.
On the other hand, the other form is what we call pathogenic suffering, which is the opposite of what I just said. This happens when destabilizing situations occur and the workers have their autonomy and power to act reduced. This demobilizes them and they start to use defense mechanisms to deal with that suffering that does not find more adequate forms of outlet.
Over a period of time, this can trigger a pathological process if it is not resolved. We can compare this process, in which the destabilizing situations that generate suffering trigger an illness process, to the image of a bucket of water that fills up until it overflows. That is, this bucket can no longer hold the amount of water being poured into it.
This is more or less how it happens with work-related mental illness. In work-related mental illness, these destabilizing situations accumulate until they reach a point where the workers, even with the use of the defense mechanisms available to them, can no longer cope with the suffering. In this case, we can already observe a pathological process taking place.
Well, we've reached the end of this video and I hope that you've managed to understand a little better how this dynamic of pleasure, suffering, and illness related to work takes place.
