Psychological analysis of work

This paper holds that Work Psychology can improve the understanding of the problems in its field if it brings to the foreground the work itself. Developments in such direction are discussed, mainly those from Christophe Dejours, Yves Clot, and Elliott Jaques. Since its inception Work Psychology has been understood as the application of psychological concepts to the study of people's performance in the context of their employment work. The work itself was seen as something given and objectifiable. The tradition of the School of Human Relations puts the social interaction as the main content and leaves the work itself as context. For Zaleznik this approach led managers to concentrate on what he called "psychopolitics", neglecting the actual work, the role of aggression in it, and the conflict between the individual and the organization. Dejours called his approach "Psychodynamics of Work", and focused on the subjective and intersubjective processes aroused by work, whose dynamics are activated by conflicts. He underlined the difference between work as prescribed and actual work. Trying to achieve the prescribed goal, the person collides with everything that resists his efforts in reality, both physical and social, and even unconscious. The first experience of work is that of suffering. Dejours highlights the centrality of the body in this suffering and in the whole work process. Suffering is also the starting point for the deployment of subjectivity in the construction of the task in order to overcome obstacles by going beyond the prescriptions. If a person finds space in the organization for this deployment, dissemination of topics of the specialty; to ground applications on concrete analysis of the organization, and to pay attention to the uniqueness of the case rather than to the application of a given scheme.