From meaning to symptom.
- Psicotepec
- Aug 22
- 1 min read
Updated: Sep 5
Work no longer sublimates: it reproduces. The modern office is the new couch where the symptoms of the 21st century unfold.
From meaning to symptom. Work once promised to be the stage where the subject would fulfill itself, where the drive would find its civilizatory channel. Today, offices have become involuntary consulting rooms where each employee displays their own gallery of symptoms. Sublimation has yielded ground to compulsive repetition. Where once there was creation, now there is automation of malaise.
The paradox is revealing: the more work processes become technified, the more archaic psychic suffering becomes. Burnout is nothing but the contemporary version of melancholia, yet stripped of its poetic dimension. Alienated work produces subjects alienated from themselves, trapped in the illusion of productivity while consuming themselves internally.
Contemporary clinical practice receives patients who speak of work as of a toxic relationship from which they cannot escape. The work symptom has become the new hysterical symptom: expression of a malaise that finds no words, only failed acts disguised as efficiency.
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