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On approaching a review of this book, I felt a temporary wave of work inhibition myself. Reviewing an entire book on work felt like too much work, and not enough pleasure. I anticipated a book about the failure of neutralization or sublimation, and of identifications, especially around superego conflicts regarding oedipal struggles and castration issues. I was pleasantly surprised to find it is much, much more—a truly updated look, circa the 1990s, at the vicissitudes of work inhibitions, using all of the many paradigms currently available. Excellent clinical vignettes bring the effort to life. There is even an exceptionally powerful and poignant autobiographical paper by Lucy Daniels Inman that recounts her own work inhibition and personal analysis with practically no holds barred. Her attempt to avoid the conflicts of confidentiality is a gift to the reader.
Freud's famous dictum “lieben und arbeiten,” to love and to work, taken as a single criterion for psychic health, is the book's basic premise, to which most of the contributors adhere. That is, all but John Gedo, of course, but who better to play the devil's advocate, arguing that play without work, in the right circumstances, can in fact be very healthy—especially if one is fortunate enough to be in that special category, a status he himself now enjoys, of the “rentier,” or the category of those born into wealth and lineage whose class-dictated activity is leisure marked by refinement and decorum. Gedo's gritty-eyed, if not tongue-in-cheek, observations suggest that people in these categories don't necessarily suffer if they fail to abide by Freud's dictum. Perhaps if we all had careers as distinguished as Gedo's behind us, we could afford to rest on our laurels.
Many of the contributors here compare the components of work to play, which may be considered a developmental antecedent of work.