The Vocational Hazards of Psycho-Analysis

For some persons the choice of a career follows easily from the various inner and outer circumstances of their lives which have a bearing on the matter. For others, divided within and driven to find a vocation which will resolve an inner conflict, the decision is made with difficulty and is not elective. Often not one but many conflicts are involved. The more numerous the conflicts the more difficult the choice becomes, and the less likely is it that any one career can resolve them all. The choice proves successful when the vocation makes possible a partial sublimated discharge of the impulses and a corresponding reduction in the warding-off activities of the ego.

It comes about at times, however, that the very conflict which has led one into a certain profession is aggravated by the practice of that profession. The vocation misleads. It proves to be different in practice from what it was taken to be when viewed from the outside. The young man discovers only gradually that his vocation is not what he expected and, because of inner conflict, needed. A long time may elapse before he learns this, so long a time, in fact, that he may no longer be a young man, but at the midpoint of life and deeply committed. Indeed, he may never realize his mistake; for there are powerful forces opposed to such awareness if one has made certain crucial and irreversible decisions.

Many vocations are, in quality of experience, easily known: the nature of work in carpentry and chemistry, for example, may be correctly perceived by those whose acquaintance with these fields is relatively slight. There are a few vocations, however, which are truly knowable only after long experience. Those which mislead belong to this group. They have a quality which cannot be fully communicated in words. One has to find out for one's self. The most painful states of inner turmoil, the severest tests of integrity, arise in those professions which have these combined characteristics: