ABSTRACT
Psychoanalytic treatment requires the clinician’s day-to-day attention to her patient’s work-related problems. The concept of work disturbance encompasses typical modes of task functioning, and core psychodynamic factors. The concept of work disturbance presumes that work is represented in relatively enduring ways that can be inferred from work-related behavior and associations to that behavior in clinical interviews. Work disturbance is a more encompassing phenomenon than the specific workplace transferences frequently addressed in psychoanalytic treatment. Work disturbance entails a disruption of a person’s overall relationship to work life. In the most general sense, all forms of work disturbance entail some impairment in the capacity for satisfaction and pleasure in work life. Work disturbance typically entails the substitution of some form of fantasized or neurotic satisfaction for the real satisfactions work life can bring. A work disturbance consists of a patterning of the self in relation to work life that is expressed in a typical configuration of drive, defense, affect, and interpersonal relationships.
