The experience of Work in Neoliberalism: Competition, Intensification and Changes in the Understanding of Suffering

Abstract

This article considers the contemporary experience of work as a source of harm in the light of discussions on work-related suffering, research on the intensification of work and the debate around the understanding of psychic suffering, whose grammar has changed in recent decades in parallel to the changes introduced by neoliberalism in the forms of governance of work and the shaping of subjectivities. The contributions of the psychodynamics of work to the understanding of the relationship between work and subjectivity are presented in the broader context of the relationship between critical theory and psychoanalysis and the difficulties of an interdisciplinary approach to the variants of suffering.