Unemployment: a psychoanalytic approach to families of unemployed workers

Abstract

The author carried out a psychosocial study on the repercussions of unemployment in poor workers and their families, which involved psychoanalytically based observations and interventions with unemployed population attended at a Reference Center for Workers’ Health in a lower middle class neighbourhood in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. After an initial discussion on unemployment as one of the drastic results of the contemporary forms of worldwide capitalism, and a presentation of some ideas concerning the contemporary debate on the relations between unemployment and psychic life, she shows some findings of the research, through which she sustains that the immediate experience with the unemployed worker and his/her family adds to the theoretical conceptions on unemployment an organic dimension, the active aspect of each of the implicated ones. The findings suggest that in face of the trauma provoked by the unemployment experience, the family tends to be the central nucleus of elaboration, the remaining territory for a personal re-organization of the new situational reality that unemployment generates, although it cannot meet the material and emotional demands that were previously supplied, even though precariously, by the insertion in the work world.