ABSTRACT
The defensive structure required to buffer these experiences can emerge from the person’s adaptive capacity and self-concept. Clinical attempts to foster conscious and critical understanding of job loss minimize the development of such defensive responses. The therapist needs to help the displaced worker to identify these self-defeating attitudes so that the experience of job loss is not allowed to be absorbed by the individual as a psychologically injurious event. From a developmental perspective, having a job had been traditionally viewed by working-class women as a temporary phase, either prior to marriage or to supplement the family income. The requirements of public entitlement programs reduce all applicants to a common level. This leveling of workers from all skills categories to a universal state of powerlessness and dependence creates frustration, anger, and humiliation. A woman who is ambivalent about working, therefore, faces a crisis when she loses both her job and the security attributed to the longer-term occupational tenure.
