Editorial note:
This panel of the Symposium, under the collective title "Between Psychoanalysis and Democracy: Why Make a Place for Living Work (« Travail Vivant »)?", consists of the following papers by Christophe Dejours and Christos Zervis, and will form the basis of their dialogue within the Symposium.
Another paper by Christos Zervis appears further down this page.
PSYCHOANALYSIS, WORK, AND DEMOCRACY
By Christophe Dejours
Introduction
In this presentation, I would like to consider how psychoanalysis might contribute to democracy, to justice and the rule of law. It is an unusual question. More commonly, we ask the reverse: what political conditions are favorable or unfavorable to the practice of psychoanalysis? Nevertheless, I will argue a twofold proposition:
- First, that psychoanalysis can make a full-fledged contribution to the theory of democracy;
- Second, that psychoanalysis can also contribute to the practice of democracy.
From this perspective, democracy and the conditions that make it possible would be a legitimate concern for psychoanalysis. At first glance, however, in the conventional conception, the political system of government belongs to the material and concrete reality of the world. Yet, by its very framework, the practice of psychoanalysis requires us to firmly exclude this reality from the couch-chair setting, as this is a sine qua non condition for providing a space devoted exclusively to psychic reality. Freud, however, did make incursions into the realm of material and concrete social reality. These are the works often referred to as his “sociological writings”: “Civilized Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness,” “The Future of an Illusion,” “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,” “Why War?”, “Reflections on War and Death,” and “Civilization and Its Discontents.” In these writings, Freud showed interest in the masses, religion, war, and culture - but not in democracy.
If I nonetheless believe it is possible to address the question of democracy from within psychoanalysis, it is only on the condition that we clarify the meaning of the term. Democracy is not merely a theory of the government of people. If that were the case, we would have to engage in a confrontation between Freud’s works and those of Aristotle or Plato.
From my perspective, democracy is not just a theory. It is perhaps first and foremost the potential result of concrete social practices carried out by men and women aiming to build and sustain it against the risks of drifting toward tyranny or war.
The most developed conception of democratic practice we know comes from the American philosopher John Dewey, who tirelessly defended democracy against the anti-democratic tendencies of liberalism, particularly through his ongoing debates with Lippmann1.
Why, in the title of this presentation, did I insert a third term - work - between psychoanalysis and democracy? Although Dewey was interested in work2, he mainly located the key to learning “democratic habits” necessary for democratic practice in education3. As for me, I argue that alongside schools, work plays a major role in learning democracy - or, conversely, in learning anti-democratic practices. I defend the thesis of the "political centrality of work," or in other words: work is never value-neutral, neither ethically nor politically. In work, one either learns the best - democracy - or the worst - domination and submission.
From Drive to the Formation of Democratic Skills
From the perspective I am putting forward, work would be a fundamental mediation for building a democracy. Fair enough! But in what way is psychoanalysis concerned with work? The question is inevitable, because Freud himself did not show much interest in the issue of work in the strict sense. Nor did the post-Freudians. Again, we must clarify what we mean by work, as there are multiple definitions depending on the disciplinary approach (economics, sociology, anthropology, history, law, engineering, ergonomics, psychology)4. However, within psychoanalysis, a specific approach to work has been developed over the past fifty years under the name of 'psychodynamics of work.'
The Individual Dimension of Living Work
According to this approach, work is not reducible to employment, nor to the social relations of work (professional relationships), nor to law (the labor contract). Production work (poiésis)—and more broadly, the production of value—first and foremost involves 'living work.'5 No matter how well-organized it may be (the 'prescribed work organization'), work inevitably confronts the worker with the unexpected: malfunctions, incidents, breakdowns, bugs. This is referred to as the 'real of work.' The real of work is what becomes known to the worker through its resistance to mastery. And the real that puts the worker in failure almost always makes itself known affectively, as suffering. When this resistance persists, the worker must first and foremost show endurance in the face of suffering, until they discover on their own the knack, the trick, or operational method that enables them to overcome the obstacle posed by the real. This often requires a long struggle. For example, to acquire the skills necessary to negotiate with a patient’s resistance in analysis, one must endure for weeks, months, and often years of training.
Clinical analysis of the psychic process necessary to acquire such skills shows that it always begins with a kind of wrestling match with the real, during which the body becomes familiar with it, until the body and the real are almost one. At the origin of professional skills, bodily intelligence is always primary. It is through bodily intelligence that the clinician learns to sense a patient's anxiety or aggressiveness. The same goes for a nuclear plant operators : it is thanks to bodily intelligence that they can sense the status and operational mode of the reactor they control. This process of bodily intelligence at work is analyzed by philosophers through the concept of 'bodypropriation' (Michel Henry)6 - the appropriation of matter, tools, or technical objects through the body.
Pushing the analysis further, we find that in order to produce quality work (*poiésis*), the individual must allow themselves to be deeply permeated- down to the core of their subjectivity - by this bodypropriation of the real, well beyond the time of actual production. The psychoanalyst thinks about their patients even in private life, in mood fluctuations, in insomnia. Likewise, the nuclear engineer thinks about the plant to the point of sleeplessness, even dreaming about it. Otherwise, they will never acquire the skills necessary for mastering the nuclear production process.
We must therefore recognize that actual work involves, beyond the time of production (poiésis), a second phase - Arbeit: "Arbeit", as used in Freud's formulations such as Erinnerungsarbeit, Durcharbeitung, Arbeitsanforderung - a labor upon the self, a transformation of the self. This requires developing new ways of inhabiting and mobilizing the body. Hence the phrase: 'To work is not only to produce, it is also to transform oneself.'
Newly acquired skills also reveal previously unknown registers of sensitivity in the individual. Thus, living work carries a promise of increased subjectivity—a unique source of pleasure. This pleasure is part of a process of self-realization: one is more intelligent after working than before, a major source of self-love and narcissistic development through living work. What I’ve just described, albeit briefly, constitutes a sort of microphysics of sublimation - an essential condition for producing quality work, in any profession.
The Collective Dimension of Living Work (continued)
But this constitutes only the first level of sublimation.
In practice, living work is almost never purely individual or solipsistic. One always works for another - indeed, more often for several others. For example, when I work in a healthcare team, the way I work always affects the work of my colleagues. This opens the realm of horizontal cooperation among peers.
But the way I work also, nolens volens, impacts the work of my supervisor, even of the hierarchy, and likewise the work of my subordinates or teams if I am in a leadership position. This is the domain of vertical cooperation. It is a vast and fascinating clinical domain. Because the quality of my individual work alone is not enough to ensure the quality of the final outcome. To achieve this, one must succeed in articulating all individual intelligences to produce a collective work. The clinical analysis of these two dimensions of cooperation is well established. It involves many intermediary links, which I don’t have time to develop here. I will focus only on one: the creation of a deliberative space in which all colleagues participate - not only peers, but also supervisors.
In this space, everyone is invited to share their work with others: to explain, to make visible how they use their skills, and to speak of their difficulties - what they have not yet mastered. The deliberative space requires everyone’s involvement and contribution to collective work. But speaking sincerely about one's work involves risk—the risk that others might disagree. Speaking therefore implies attempting to justify one’s point of view in the face of others’ possible objections. And in this effort of speaking and justification, I may find myself articulating arguments I had never considered before. The deliberative space at work is conducive to the working through (Durcharbeitung) of practical knowledge - particularly valuable because the intelligence expressed in living work often precedes awareness of it, and precedes its verbal symbolization, since the experience of living work originates in bodily intelligence.
But this miracle of speech can only occur if those being addressed take a risk equivalent to the one who speaks. This is the condition for fairness between speaking and listening. What is the risk of listening? The risk is in hearing. That is, discovering that what I believed to be true and just, may be mistaken - and it is because I have heard it that my own knowledge is unsettled.
Clinical analysis of the arguments developed by participants in the deliberative space shows that they are not guided solely by efficiency - that is, by instrumental rationality. The arguments are generally mixed: they refer also to what is good or bad, just or unjust - that is, moral - practical or axiological rationality. And finally, they may invoke elements related to health, age, stature, gender, etc.- that is, considerations that fall under subjective rationality (in relation to self-protection and self-realization).
In action theory, following Aristotle, these mixed arguments are called opinions.
Thus, the internal deliberative space of a work team is an arena for the confrontation of opinions about how to work together. In the ' theory of action ', this space is referred to, as the public space (agora).
When the deliberative space functions properly, as it often does within a 'healthcare team', discussions are casuistic - that is, based on specific patient cases. At the conclusion of such deliberation, the team usually reaches agreement on how to proceed with a specific patient: this agreement is called a 'normative agreement' - meaning it applies to all team members. When several such agreements - especially significant ones - are adopted and stabilized, they form what is known as a 'work rule.'
A healthcare team thus develops its own work rules, adapted to its particular composition. That is why rules may differ from one team to another.
This rule-making activity within a deliberative space is called deontic activity. It can be shown that all work rules and professional norms created through this process are not only geared toward efficiency (e.g., of care), but also toward the formation of living-together. This is possible whenever deliberation is oriented toward mutual understanding on the one hand, and toward concord on the other. Hence the saying: 'To work is not only to produce, but also to live together.'
Deontic activity is therefore at the very foundation of democracy - that is, the bottom-up construction of work rules and ways of living together. Thus, living work can serve as a crucial crucible for democracy - as I explained earlier- understood not as a theory, but as the practice of democracy. That is why, along with several philosophers around the world7, we defend the idea that work is central to the future of democracy. This is the thesis of 'the centrality of work for the polis.'
When the deliberative space oriented toward mutual understanding functions well, individuals who cooperate may access what La Boétie8 called 'franchise'—that is, liberty or emancipation from servitude, but also the power to speak authentically to others. From this movement springs 'brotherly friendship' or 'fraternal companionship,' in which everyone looks out for each other, and where mutual aid, respect, and friendship are cultivated. This is an essential dimension of self-realization - one that arises from the shared experience of the real, on the one hand, and participation in a common task, on the other.
Within the deliberative space oriented toward mutual understanding, another psychological dynamic plays out: the psychodynamics of recognition. Why, indeed, does the working individual take the risk of speaking and listening, instead of withdrawing into private silence? Because, in exchange for their contribution to the collective task, they hope for a form of compensation. It can be shown that the expected compensation is symbolic or moral. This does not mean that material compensation (salary, promotion, bonuses) is irrelevant - but what most strongly drives engagement in the deliberative process and workplace democracy is symbolic recognition.
This recognition takes two primary forms:
- The judgment of utility, which grants one's activity the status of real productive work (as opposed to mere leisure). This judgment is typically made by the hierarchy.
- The judgment of beauty, offered by those most familiar with the task—colleagues, peers. One says that a piece of work is beautiful, well-crafted, elegantly done. This judgment includes both conformity (to professional rules or standards) and originality, when the beauty of the work reflects a distinctive personal style.
Recognition thus acts as a form of validation by others. This validation is necessary to complete the process of sublimation and to confer, back upon living work, its narcissistic potential.
This dimension of self-realization - through deliberation, recognition, and friendship -defines the second level of sublimation.
However, we must draw attention to the axiological ambiguity of these first two levels of sublimation. Individual and collective intelligence, along with all the structuring effects of sublimation on drive economy and mental health, can indeed be at work within living work that nonetheless, serves the worst: for example, the production of weapons of mass destruction, the systematic destruction of the Amazon rainforest, or the efficient operation of rail networks, used to transport deportees to extermination camps.
Transversal Cooperation
To attempt to resolve the axiological and political ambiguity of sublimation, we must turn to the analysis of a third dimension of cooperation: transversal cooperation.
This refers to cooperation between the producer and the beneficiary. It is particularly relevant in service professions such as medicine, education, research, justice, banking, and commerce, where, on one side, there is a service provider, and on the other, a recipient. (But it can be shown that this also applies to most activities, including industrial ones).
The quality of a service does not depend solely on the provider’s professional competence. If you are treating an insulin-dependent diabetic, the quality of blood sugar control does not depend only on the diabetologist. It also depends on how the patient understands the prescribed treatment, and on their socio-economic condition. Upon closer analysis - which I won’t fully detail here - it becomes clear that service quality also depends on the effort of the beneficiary. Ultimately, it hinges on the quality of the relationship between provider and recipient.
This time, however, the responsibility for cooperation falls primarily on the provider. That the patient in analysis is doing psychological work is certain. But the setup of the analytic framework, trust-building, and relevance of interventions—all these fall squarely within the responsibility of the analyst and the institution within which they operate.
The most important axiological point regarding transversal cooperation is that the provider must carry out their action within a framework of rules supported not only by themselves, but also by the institution - and that this framework be constantly revisited and subjected to discussion.
And this orientation is precisely that of aligning one’s work with the cause of culture -that is, joining the collective human endeavor across history, aimed at honoring life.
The 'other,' the beneficiary, presents themselves to workers mainly in three forms:
- The other as an individual recipient of a service;
- The other as environment, in the sense of ecology and biodiversity. For example, a forest ranger’s primary responsibility may indeed be to fellow humans, but their immediate focus is on the forest, the waterways, and biodiversity. In fact, environmental concerns pertain to every professional activity, without exception;
- The other as society, that is, as the structure for living together and civility in the polis. When, through deliberation and deontic activity, one learns democratic practices at work, we can show that people are far more likely to engage in political, cultural, and civic action within society.
When transversal cooperation is carried out collectively, and work is deliberately oriented toward honoring life, we reach the third level of sublimation - one that transcends individual intelligence and the extraordinary power of deontic activity.
Democracy, Sublimation, and Living Work
From what I have attempted to express thus far, I hope it is clear that I am trying to demonstrate the existence of an inseparable link between democracy, sublimation, and living work.
Moreover, sublimation, as revealed under the lens of psychodynamic analysis of living work, proves to be a vital component of mental health - a point Freud does not mention, as he did not study living work.
There are, in fact, two fundamental destinies of the sexual drive. The first is sexual satisfaction, which occupies a central place in psychoanalytic theory. The second is sublimation, which involves renouncing sexual satisfaction in favor of a socially valued activity. Consequently, there are only two spheres of self-realization:
- Self-realization in the erotic domain, which involves love;
- Self-realization in the social domain, which involves living work.
In practice, when patients encounter major, sometimes insurmountable psychoneurotic difficulties in love, there remains a second chance for the drive economy: sublimation. However, even when erotic self-realization occurs favorably, it can be shown clinically that the portion of the drive invested in sublimation plays an important role in erotic success - because it relieves pressure on the erotic economy and also brings narcissistic benefit.
In short, all human beings—and all our patients—are concerned by sublimation. And their mental health depends strongly on it.
The Managerial Turn
Taking all this into account, it becomes clear that sublimation does not depend solely on the individual, contrary to conventional interpretations. It also depends on cooperation, on participation in a common task and in culture, and on transversal cooperation. The analyst’s professional sublimation does not rely solely on their personal talent. It also hinges on the cooperation they manage to establish (or fail to establish) with their patients, as well as recognition from fellow analysts, institutions, and even legal frameworks.
All these complex relations are not under individual control. Ultimately, they depend on how work is organized - in schools, universities, hospitals, courts, commerce, forests, livestock farming, agriculture.
Today, work organization is undergoing vast transformations on a global scale, posing a serious threat to the very conditions that make sublimation, culture, and democracy possible. This transformation is known as the 'managerial turn.'
Previously, work organization was conceived and led by professionals: engineers in industry, doctors in hospitals, professors in universities - experts in their respective fields. Now, these leaders have largely been displaced by managers who know nothing about living work - and do not wish to. Only numbers matter to them. This is a major shift: they focus solely on upstream metrics (quantitative objectives) and downstream metrics (performance outcomes). This is called 'governance by numbers.'9 And they relentlessly increase quantitative pressure on workers. Beyond a certain threshold, this pressure harms quality - and inevitably, especially in service professions, quality declines.
This degradation of quality through work organization primarily stems from systems such as individualized performance evaluation (among others), which systematically suppress deliberative spaces - branding them as unproductive, idle chatter. The result is not only a surge in overload-related pathologies (MSDs, burnout, sudden death (karōshi), doping), but also new forms of suffering, which I’ll return to, shortly.
The Problem of Voluntary Servitude
But then, why does governance by numbers - which destroys workers' health and degrades the quality of work - continue to prevail?
It’s not solely because managers have increased their domination over individuals. Domination alone is not sufficient. Because of the real, work organization cannot succeed unless individual intelligence is voluntarily and continuously mobilized by workers to overcome obstacles.
If governance by numbers prevails, it is because many workers voluntarily submit to the new managerial regime and invest their full intelligence in a system that ultimately grinds them down. This paradox - of engaging one’s freedom and will in service of an organization that is tyrannical and destructive - is known, since La Boétie (1548), as 'voluntary servitude.'
Thus, domination is not exercised only by new managerial elites. Those who collaborate with them - who eagerly support their agenda - also participate in the domination of those who would resist the neoliberal work organization.
This is a major clinical issue confronting psychoanalysts. Freud’s work contains some embryonic responses to this paradox, but they are insufficient to fully explain the psychological mechanisms behind voluntary servitude. Today, the analysis and metapsychology of voluntary servitude are fairly well developed, though I cannot go into them in detail here.
What matters is that governance by numbers systematically destroys all the components necessary for quality work and for sublimation.
Ethical Suffering
In truth, most of our patients face a dilemma: resist to preserve the mechanisms of sublimation and the quality of work, or give in and become collaborators in this neoliberal organization of work that threatens the mental health of those who work and also threatens culture. Many of our patients suffer from this conflict between resisting and submitting. Under the pressure of the race for quantity over quality, some individuals, and many of our patients, are led to botch their work, to betray professional rules, the rules of art, and even professional ethics. To the point that they are pushed by managers to become abusive toward patients, students, forests, farm animals, and those subject to justice: this opens up the realm of "ethical suffering." This suffering is directly linked to the ethical dimension of work and to the ethical underpinnings of sublimation. Ethical suffering begins when an individual consents to contribute to acts or practices that morality condemns.
This ethical suffering is very harmful to the psychological economy because it gradually leads, from the betrayal of professional rules, to self-betrayal. It is primarily (though not exclusively) because of ethical suffering that workplace suicides have arisen10.
Conclusion
Due to the rise in ethical suffering and other forms of distress linked to work overload, harassment, and violence against personnel in the line of duty, psychoanalysts today hold unique knowledge of suffering at work - knowledge that only psychoanalytic theory can account for, as it alone offers insight into the etiology of this suffering and the resulting psychopathological and psychosomatic breakdowns.
Without the theory of sublimation, it is impossible to trace the causal path from the degradation of living work to illness.
As custodians of this unique understanding of contemporary workplace suffering, we psychoanalysts are in a position to affirm that mental pathologies at work are indeed symptoms of the neoliberal reorganization of labor - governance by numbers - which dismantles the very conditions that make sublimation possible.
Why is this a political issue? Because sublimation cannot occur unless we preserve and maintain deliberative spaces within the world of work - spaces necessary for crafting work rules and professional standards. These spaces, where deontic activity takes place, are at the core of democracy - not just democracy within the workplace or institutions, but, due to the political centrality of work, democracy in the public sphere and civil society at large.
Psychoanalysis, as such, cannot ignore that its practice is implicated in democracy -provided, however, that we firmly assert that democracy, as we understand it, is not limited to representative democracy nor to democracy as a theory of government, but is first and foremost a practice: namely, the practice of deliberation oriented toward mutual understanding in the world of work, where the learning, implementation, and transmission of democratic practice are at stake - beyond the world of work, extending into the life of the public sphere (polis).
Notes
1 Le colloque Lippmann, Paris, Librairie de Médicis, 1939 [Abrégé Col. Lipp., 1939].
Serge Audier, Aux origines du néo-libéralisme : le colloque Walter Lippmann, Éditions du Bord de l'eau, 2008 (contient la réédition intégrale de l'édition de 1939).
2 Renault E. (2022) : « « Le travail et ses problèmes. Biologie, sociologie et politique chez John Dewey» », Paris, Librairie philosophique J. Vrin.
3 Dewey J. (1916) : « Démocratie et Education », Paris, Armand Colin, 2011
4 DESMAREZ P, FREYSSENET M (dir.) (1994) : « Les énigmes du travail », (numéro spécial hors série/94), Sociologie du travail, 36, 125 pages
5 DEJOURS C (2009) : «Travail Vivant », tome 1 : « sexualité et travail » ; tome 2 : « Travail et émancipation », Paris, Editions Payot
6 Henry M. (1987) : “La barbarie”, Paris, Grasset, p 80-94.
7 Cavallo G (2023) « : « Moral Injustice. How an Unfair Distribution of Moral Burdens Harms the Individual and Our Society as a whole », Biblioteca della libertà, 58 : 238 (Doi 10.23827/BDL_2023_13 Nuova serie www.centroeinaudi.it
CUKIER A (2018) : « Le travail démocratique », Paris, Presses universitaires de France.
Deranty J-P. (2013) : « Cartographie critique des objections à la centralité du travail », Travailler, 30 : 17-47.
Deranty JP. (2016) : « En quel sens le travail vivant est-il une catégorie politique ? », Travailler, 36 : 59-74 ;
Deranty JP (2016) : « Travail, vie, pouvoir : le travail vivant face aux théories de la biopolitique » in A Cukier (dir.) (2016) : « Travail vivant et théorie critique », Paris, PUF, p 187-220.
DONAGGIO E (2019) : « Souffrance en France en Italie », Travailler, 42 : 93-102, p 97
DONAGGIO Enrico, ROSE José, CAIRO Mariagrazia, « Introduction », dans : Travail e(s)t liberté ?sous la direction de DONAGGIO Enrico, ROSE José, CAIRO Mariagrazia. Toulouse, Érès, « Clinique du travail », 2022, p. 7-17. URL : https://www.cairn.info/travail-e-s-t-liberte--9782749273327-page-7.htm
Dejours C, Deranty J-P, Renault E, Smith N (2018) : « The return of work in critical theory. Self, society, politics », Columbia University Press, 248 pages.
Fischbach N. (2015) : « le sens du social - Les puissances de la coopération », Québec, Lux Editeur, p 12.
Genel K. (2016) : “Ecole de Francfort et freudo-marxisme : sur la pluralité des articulations entre psychanalyse et théorie de la société”, Actuel Marx, 59 : 10-25
Genel K. (2022) : “Travail, nécessité et émancipation chez Arendt et dans l’Ecole de Francfort : la différence de la psychanalyse », in : Cukier A, Genel K, Rolo D : « Le sujet du travail. Théorie critique, psychanalyse et politique », Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, p 125-142
HONNETH A. (1980) : « Arbeit und instrumentales Handeln. Kategoriale problème einer kritischen Gesellschaftstheorie », S. 185-233 in Honneth A., Jaeggi, Urs, Arbeit, Handlung, Normativität. Theorien des Historischen Materialismus 2. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt/M. 1980. Trad. Fr : « Travail et agir instrumental. A propos des problèmes catégoriels d’une théorie critique de la société », Travailler, 18 : 17-57, 2007.
Messer J. (2013) : « Reconceptualizing Maternal Work : Dejours, Ruddick and Lionel Schriver’s We need to talk about Kevin », Women Studies International Forum, 38 : 11-20.
PAGÈS C (2022) : « L’explication psychique des consentements problématiques. Cadre et ambiguïté » in Cukier A, Genel K, Rolo D : « Le sujet du travail. Théorie critique, psychanalyse et politique », Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, p 143-158
PEREZ G, MASSIP F (2024) : « A la fin du monde il fera beau. Essai sur l’inaction climatique », Paris, Editions de l’Atelier, 188 pages
RENAULT E. (2008) : « Souffrances sociales », (Philosophie, psychologie et politique), Editions La Découverte, Paris.
Renault E. (2012) : « Dewey et la centralité du travail », Travailler, 28 : 125-148
Smith N. (2021) : « Work as a realm of social freedom » in Breen K. and Deranty JP. : “The Politics and Ethics of Contemporary Work, Wither Work?”, London and New York, Routledge, p 16-30.
8 LA BOETIE. E de (1574) : "Le discours de la servitude volontaire". Payot. 1976
9 SUPIOT A. (2017) : « La gouvernance par les nombres », Fayard, Paris, 520 pages.
10 Dejours C. (2019) : “France Telecom Orange, Déposition au procès, 10 mai 2019”. Travailler, 42 : 193-212
Work, Democracy and Psychoanalysis: From Freud to Dejours and the EPF as a Deliberative Space
By Christos Zervis
ABSTRACT
Introduction
Christophe Dejours offers us a remarkably rich paper, bringing into dialogue three fields that we are not used to associating: psychoanalysis, work, and democracy. One of his fundamental points is that work is not simply productive activity, but a subjective, relational, ethical, and political experience engaging the psychic core of the subject. Its psychic and social effects are therefore not predetermined: work may become a space of self-transformation, creativity, sublimation, recognition, cooperation, and democratic living, but it may also be organised in ways that foster domination, submission, ethical suffering, and authoritarian forms of living together. This ambivalence of work, and the conditions allowing either possibility to prevail, make Dejours’ argument especially fertile for psychoanalytic reflection.
Here, psychoanalysis has the double status of a medium that allows the investigation of democratic living and of a field of thought that is itself profoundly closely identified with it.
This question acquires particular historical resonance in the European context: the rebirth of psychoanalysis and the creation of the EPF after the devastation provoked by totalitarian ideologies during the 2nd World War suggest, as stated in the Symposium argument, that freedom of psychoanalytic thought and democracy in a broad sense are closely related.
Forced labor, work, creative work
The semantic history of the Greek terms douleia (slavery), douleia (the same word stressed differently, meaning work as activity), and ergasia (work as creation) may be read psychoanalytically as revealing a psychic process both of transforming an activity from slavery to creation and of a linguistic operation of concealment of the semantic origin.
In classical Greek, douleia explicitly named subjection. It is the condition of belonging to, serving, or being governed by a master. As work gradually shifted from forced labor to “voluntary” activity, this origin became progressively obscured, although the common etymological root has continued to remind us of its past.
The semantic transition may also be conceived as a psychic transformation of external constraint into internal obligation. The master no longer needs to stand outside the subject; he may become internalised as part of the superegoic economy. The formulation that apparently demonstrates autonomy, “I must do my work,” is thus ambiguous. It may express responsibility and recognition of reality, but the impersonal “must” may also reproduce an internal structure of command and obedience, thus revealing a characteristically Freudian paradox: the subject becomes the agent of his own subjection, simultaneously occupying the position of master and servant.
Ergasia, deriving from ergon (the thing created), suggests a further transformation. Work may now be represented less as obedience to a command than as investment in an idealised aim. The internalised demand moves from obligation toward aspiration: the master may become an ego ideal calling on the subject to produce something valuable, meaningful, or beautiful. Here lies both the creative potential and the possible illusion of work. Sublimation, craftsmanship, intellectual production, and commitment to an ergon may transform constraint into pleasure, recognition, and psychic expansion, yet may also disguise the coercive demand from which they partly originate. Analogous transitions between obligation, neutral work, and vocation appear in several European languages.
Democracy as a psychic achievement: a metapsychological perspective
A fundamental prerequisite for the discussion question could be what democracy means for the psyche. What psychic work and forms of satisfaction make it libidinally investable? What does the subject gain by accepting a social order in which no one occupies absolute power?
We could say that democracy may be conceived as a mode of psychic and intersubjective organisation: a way of relating to authority, conflict, difference, law, sexuality, aggression, and the limits of omnipotence. Freud’s proposition that civilisation necessarily involves instinctual renunciation provides an important starting point. Democracy does not abolish prohibition, repression, or the conflict between individual desire and the demands of coexistence. Its specificity lies rather in the forms these assume and in the psychic destinies offered to drive excitation. Democratic conditions may favor articulating conflict through speech, disagreement, creation, and social action rather than massive repression or discharge through violence and acting out. Metapsychologically, democracy may thus be understood as favoring binding, representation, and symbolisation.
Authoritarian power may assume the psychic qualities of an archaic, persecutory Superego. Democratic institutions, by contrast, limit authority, submit it to law, and make appeal and contestation possible. We may therefore think of democratic culture as supporting a movement from command toward law, and from arbitrary prohibition toward a prohibition whose legitimacy can itself be questioned. Law does not disappear; it becomes separable from the omnipotence of the person who embodies it.
Democracy also seems to offer a specific narcissistic satisfaction. The subject receives the message that his or her voice matters, but only as one voice among others. Recognition can thus replace omnipotence as a basis of narcissistic gratification: “I matter, although I am not everything; I am recognised, although others are equally entitled to recognition”. In Kleinian terms, this implies something analogous to the achievements of the depressive position: tolerance of ambivalence and limitation of splitting. Following Winnicott, we could think of the potential space as an intermediate field in which meanings are found and created, while a Bionian perspective allows us to think of democratic institutions as containers for conflict, uncertainty, and frustration when their frame remains sufficiently reliable.
Authoritarian formations nevertheless offer powerful regressive satisfactions: fusion with the group, identification with an idealised leader, release from uncertainty, projection of aggression onto an enemy, and the fantasy of restored completeness. Democracy cannot easily compete at the level of such immediate gratification. What it may offer instead is recognition without omnipotence, belonging without fusion, authority without submission, aggression without destruction, and freedom without the abolition of law. Under such conditions, excitation may become thought, aggression argument, narcissistic need reciprocal recognition, and drive energy may find sublimatory destinations in work, culture, and collective creation.
The value of work: from Freud to Dejours
Although work occupies only a limited place in Freud’s writings, Civilisation and Its Discontents contains elements of a dense metapsychology of work. Freud situates work among the “techniques of living” through which human beings attempt to manage the unavoidable suffering of existence. Its psychic value lies in its capacity to bind the subject to reality, to give the individual a relatively secure place in the human community, and to permit the displacement of narcissistic, aggressive, and erotic libidinal components onto productive and creative activity and the human relations connected with it. Work can therefore be understood as a protection against suffering, though not as a defense mechanism in the narrow technical sense.
Freud nevertheless introduces an important qualification. Work becomes a source of “special satisfaction” when it is freely chosen and, through sublimation, allows the subject to make use of existing inclinations and persistent instinctual trends. Under these conditions, work does more than protect against unpleasure: it becomes a source of positive sublimatory satisfaction. Yet most people work under the pressure of necessity. Freud’s formulation thus leaves a tension between work as external constraint and work as a privileged medium of psychic investment and cultural achievement.
Dejours takes this Freudian intuition as a point of departure but expands it considerably. His decisive move is to ask what happens subjectively and intersubjectively in working, and under what social and organisational conditions it becomes transformative. At the center of his theory is the real of work: that dimension of the task which resists prescribed procedures, technical knowledge, and prior mastery. Work begins in the experience of resistance, inadequacy, and failure. The subject must mobilise bodily sensitivity, practical intelligence, ingenuity, and psychic resources to meet what known rules alone cannot solve. Working is therefore not only the production of an external result; it is also a process of subjective transformation.
Dejours extends sublimation beyond Freud to ordinary work, situating it in a far more systematic, embodied, intersubjective, and political place. He recognises sublimation as a potential dimension of everyday living work.
His most distinctive step, however, may be the shift from the intrapsychic economy of work to the collective and institutional conditions that sustain or destroy it. Living work is rarely solitary. It depends upon cooperation, recognition, and the possibility of participating in the construction of the rules governing common activity. Workers require spaces of deliberation in which they can describe what they actually do, expose uncertainty, justify practical choices, confront disagreement, and listen to others. Through such exchanges, they collectively elaborate professional norms and rules - a process Dejours calls deontic activity. The workplace may thereby become a “crucible of democracy,” where capacities are exercised through speaking, listening, arguing, accepting contradiction, and constructing shared rules. Recognition is equally decisive, supporting identity and narcissistic consolidation and helping to complete the sublimatory process.
Read in relation to Freud, Dejours shifts the question from whether work is freely chosen to whether a margin of subjective freedom can be preserved within its constraints - in other words, from freedom from necessity to freedom within necessity. This leads directly to his political contribution. Work is never politically neutral. Organisational systems based on quantitative evaluation, “governance by numbers,” and the destruction of collective deliberative spaces may undermine cooperation and recognition and produce ethical suffering when workers are forced to act against professional values or their own convictions. The destruction of living work therefore threatens not only mental health and sublimation but democratic life itself.
Extending Dejours’ argument into a broader psychoanalytic perspective, one might suggest that processes of desymbolisation may further contribute to this through a generalised erosion of symbolic and ethical reference points.
Freud shows what work can do for the psyche; Dejours asks what must happen within work for this psychic potential to become possible. Work thus becomes a mediating space between psyche and polis: a place where the encounter with reality may be transformed into creativity, identity, social bond, and, under favorable conditions, democratic experience.
The EPF as deliberative space and the economic aspect
The EPF foundation, grown out of the post-war reconstruction, as a space of collaboration and integration across national, linguistic, and theoretical differences in psychoanalysis, but also on the common ground of its Freudian origin, can therefore constitute a particularly privileged field in which to extend Dejours’ model of work. Jan Abram suggested this direction in discussions within the EPF’s Board of Directors. Bringing together psychoanalytic Societies through congresses, clinical and theoretical meetings, working groups, and institutional exchanges, the Federation creates a space in which psychoanalytic work becomes explicitly collective. Such work cannot be reduced to individual intellectual production; it emerges through encounters between different clinical traditions, theoretical perspectives, institutional histories, and forms of psychoanalytic culture.
Besides, this conception is particularly relevant to psychoanalytic practice, where no theoretical or technical framework can fully anticipate what will emerge in a singular clinical encounter. Dejours’ notion of the deliberative space is therefore especially pertinent. Collective meetings may become genuine spaces of work when participants can expose uncertainty, risk disagreement, and allow their own positions to be modified through listening to others. Democracy, in this sense, is not exhausted by representative structures or formal decision-making procedures; it is also a lived practice of confrontation, recognition, and collective elaboration.
In this sense, the EPF may be understood not simply as an organisation functioning within democratic Europe, but as one of the institutional spaces in which the relation between psychoanalytic freedom and democratic practice, the “interweaving of democracy and psychoanalysis”, as formulated in the Symposium argument, is continually put to work.
The Federation may thereby transform differences between persons and Societies from potential sources of rivalry or fragmentation into material for Durcharbeitung and the production of shared psychoanalytic thought.
The same perspective may illuminate the work of the Board itself. Rather than functioning merely as an executive body applying predefined rules, the Board can also be understood as a working collective in Dejours’ sense: a space in which different responsibilities, institutional perspectives, constraints, and uncertainties must be articulated through deliberation. Its democratic quality would therefore depend not only on its formal authority but on its capacity to sustain disagreement, make room for the experience of the real, and elaborate provisional solutions collectively rather than prematurely closing debates.
Within this democratic economy, the treasurer occupies a particularly sensitive place. Financial decisions determine not only expenditure but also possibilities of participation, while money carries symbolic meanings of recognition and value. The treasurer must therefore preserve a crucial distinction between cost and value, introducing the reality of finite resources into collective deliberation without allowing financial rationality to become the ultimate criterion of scientific worth. In Dejours’ terms, this means resisting a form of governance by numbers in which quantitative indicators replace evaluation of knowledge.
The treasurer’s task is thus not simply to safeguard financial discipline but to help ensure that economic constraints become objects of shared deliberation rather than instruments of unilateral limitation. In this sense, the treasurer participates in negotiating the material conditions and limits within which collective sublimatory work can take place. This is not only a question of money but also of investment in the economic sense of Freudian metapsychology, as members and constituent Societies invest time, thought, clinical experience, and creativity in a common psychoanalytic task.
August 22, 2026
References
Dejours, C. (2006). Subjectivity, work, and action. Critical Horizons, 7(1), 45–62.
Dejours, C., & Deranty, J.-P. (2010). The centrality of work. Critical Horizons, 11(2), 167– 180.
Freud, S. (1930). Civilization and its discontents. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 21, pp. 57–145). London: Hogarth Press.
Winnicott, D. W. (1950). Some thoughts on the meaning of the word democracy. Human Relations, 3(2), 175–186.