ABSTRACT
Chapter Eleven looks at developments in French psychiatry of the workplace up to the early 1960s, when it was being sidelined by la sectorisation, the growing psychoanalytic movement, and changes in the cultural climate. Among the generation of psychiatrists rising to influence after Liberation, there were prominent voices, among them Paul Sivadon, Louis Le Guillant, and François Tosquelles, who, in different ways, were calling for a closer study of work related effects on mental health and personal levels of energy. If jobs did not perform a sufficiently re-vitalising function, one of the consequences that seemed to resist the effects of short time rest was pervasive fatigue, a mental and bodily state that had risen in prominence in contemporary discourse but irritatingly bedevilled theoretical understanding. The ground they covered in the study of the challenges and rhythms of the workplace, as well as the effects of alienating identification, had to be rediscovered, when French psychoanalysts returned to the matter of the workplace at a later stage, left unattended for some time because smacking too much of the 'real'.
