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Industry, with the social and economic pressures of its post-feudal organization, is one of the contemporary realities contributing to mental breakdowns. Thus, to the experimentally minded psychiatrist, industry provides an opportunity to study emotional reactions under controlled conditions. The authors of this book have twenty-six years of service with the E. I. duPont Company, during which they have studied the emotional reactions of workers to each other and to executives.
The book employs three approaches. There are psychodynamic formulations explaining and describing such phenomena as anxiety, fear, motivation, depression, schizophrenia, suicide. While the discussion here tends to be dilute, it is an attempt to bring up to date certain outmoded conceptions of the psyche among non-professional readers. The more analytically sophisticated reader should not carp at omissions and elisions; for a more frank and complex revelation of the Freudian unconscious would be inappropriate to industry management, for whom the book is apparently written. This potential readership also accounts for the slightly moralistic tone which pervades the book. One can see that in their employment the authors are used as counsellors and confessors, representing the more benevolent aspects of management, and it is this relationship to workers that we find mirrored here.
A second approach is the case history. These cases are brief but vivid and illuminate the dynamics of troublesome employees, job stress, women in industry, youth and alcoholism. This section aims to help the harassed executive and foreman to understand and tolerate problems among workers.
Last, there are graphic presentations, derived largely from the DuPont files of statistics on various employee problems—accidents, drug addiction, mental disorder, etc.
The book amply achieves its authors' designs.