In clinical practice, patients' work experiences regularly come under analytic scrutiny as the daily conflicts and vicissitudes of more primitive drives and conflicts are acted out upon the stage of life. From the beginning of psychoanalytic thinking work experience was considered central to the functioning of the human species. Erikson, when asked what Freud considered mental health, reported that Freud viewed mental health as working and loving well. Much has been said about impairments of the love function. Inhibitions in relation