ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at some phantasies which come into operation in connection with paid work of various kinds. There is always a problem when it comes to writing about the relationship between people and their work. Each individual comes to their work with their own history, their own phantasies. The way people inside the building live and move about may relate to phantasies about their fathers, siblings and other people who happened to be important to analysts in infancy and who seemed to analysts to be moving about inside their mother's body. Such phantasies may sometimes explain apparently irrational, deeply emotional involvement with other people and objects or structures at work. Trying to make changes and discovering how hard they are may modify phantasies of total omnipotence which were left over from childhood. The phantasies of prison warders are affected by those of their prisoners; and the phantasies of teachers by those of their pupils.
