ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the working conditions at a public health geriatric hospital and the distress caused by such conditions to the professionals working there. Such dissatisfaction stems from the abuse of power perceived by health professionals at the hospital and in the Chilean public health system in general. Abuse has devastating effects on mental health, as it causes persistent suffering in workers, fear of the competition existent at the workplace, unhappiness originated by eventual unemployment, and the overall abusive treatment and injustices. The paranoid–schizoid position is the prototype of psychotic functioning, mobilized by persecutory anxieties and the use of primitive defences such as splitting, projective identification, and idealization. In contraposition, the depressive position corresponds to a non-psychotic mental way of functioning that enables the integration of objects, learning from experience, and the development of abstract thought, thus facilitating collaboration and transcendence in interests beyond the ego’s own survival and protection.
