Paper Session B

4. Toward a Self Psychological Social Psychology:
Work as Selfobject

Self Psychology Page | 23rd Conference Program

Overview

This paper focuses on a particular example of how self psychology can be used to understand our social world by examining the ways in which work---paid employment---provides intense, multifaceted, and potentially dangerous selfobject experiences and relationships. It is argued that as Americans are spending more hours at work, taking fewer vacations and remaining electronically connected to the workplace at all times, growing numbers of people are looking to their jobs for the satisfaction of psychological needs formerly filled by family, friends and neighbors.

Through a clinical case study, this paper demonstrates how the workplace is experienced, constructed and imagined as a richly layered environment filled with simultaneous selfobject relationships that allow a person to experience mirroring, idealization and kinship. However, there is significant danger in this psychological enterprise. Because the availability of environmental selfobjects often is hierarchically determined and subject to the whims of supervisors and managers over whom an employee has little control, the possibility for the sudden withdrawal of selfobject experience is enormous. The workplace can quickly become a domain of humiliation and shame that can precipitate a profound disruption of a person’s self-esteem, continuity, or coherence.

As increasing numbers of Americans turn to their jobs for the satisfaction of unmet emotional needs, understanding the intrapsychic dimension of out attachments to work seems increasingly relevant. The selfobject concept can facilitate this understanding and enrich not only our clinical work but the sociological imagination as well.

Self Psychology Page | 23rd Conference Program