Work has traditionally been the way for Finnish men to bring their feelings into balance and to meet other people without fear of being re-engulfed by their emotional requirements. The end of the full-employment society has obliged them to rebuild their self-systems afresh. This crisis in the regulation of self-feeling can cause one of two reactions: either it can increase a man's freedom to redefine his relation to his inner compulsions to repeat, or it can lead to a skinheadlike reaction of projective identification.

Matti Kortteinen, a Finnish sociologist, has studied the stories of unemployed white-collar workers and has found in them a fluctuation between destructive