A Psychoanalytic Approach to Mass Production

It is an unvarying part of medical training, in taking patients' histories, to note their occupations. The rationale, of course, is to detect such etiological factors as exposure to noxious fumes or to pathogenic bacteria and parasites as may be indigenous to a patient's environment. Psychoanalysts should be especially alert to consider their patients' jobs as possibly contributing to their sicknesses.

Freud showed the reciprocal relationship between the precipitating cause and the neurotic predisposition of the individual in the development of psychic imbalance.1 Can work itself ever be a precipitant, a trauma? Freud stated, 'Laying stress upon the importance of work has a greater effect than any other technique of living in the direction of binding the individual more closely to reality. In his work he is at least securely attached to a part of reality—the human community. Work is no less valuable for the opportunity it and the human relations connected with it provide for a very considerable discharge of libidinal component impulses, narcissistic, aggressive and erotic, than because it is indispensable to subsistence and justifies existence in a society. The daily work of earning a livelihood affords peculiar satisfaction when it has been selected by free choice, i.e., when through sublimations it enables use to be made of existing inclinations or instinctual impulses that have retained their strength or are more intense than usual for constitutional reasons.'2

Róheim observes, 'The life of our European and American