ABSTRACT
There are mental pains to be borne in working at any task, and these have to be dealt with by us as individuals, each with a personal history of having developed ways of managing or evading situations of anxiety, pain, fear and depression. Collectively, in our institutions, we have also learned to do this, installing defences against the painful realities of the work into our ways of arranging our tasks, rules and procedures. It is incumbent on us to try in whatever way we can to explore these aspects of our working practices, in order that our ways of coping do not grossly interfere, subvert or even pervert our efforts.
