Psychoanalysis and Workplace Mobbing

In the Introductory Lectures to Psychoanalysis Freud wrote: "You cannot be present as an audience at a psycho-analytic treatment.  You can only be told about it; and, in the strictest sense of the word, it is only by hearsay that you will get to know psycho-analysis. . . .  The talk of which psycho-analytic treatment consists brooks no listener."

A patient in analysis will see his analyst three or four times a week for several years.  In those hours the patient's communications and emotional reactions -- and silences -- create a context that will confer meaning to specific communications and emotional reactions that arise in the analysis.  There is no possible way a psychoanalyst can communicate to a third party the basis of his inferences about the unconscious meaning of  his patient's communications.  Each patient creates his own "currency" of meaning.

Psychoanalytic researchers such as Hartvig Dahl and Virginia Teller have subjected thousands of hours of analytic communications to linguistic analysis.  "Through intensive linguistic and logical analysis of the verbatim transcript of a patient's hour, Dahl and Teller have attempted to lay bare the mental processes of analysis as they listen to tape recordings of an analysis with 'closely hovering attention' to a patient's utterances and find themselves forming hypotheses about their unconscious meaning.  For embedded in the transcript, like a message written in invisible ink, are innumerable, unmistakable traces of the patient's unconscious motives.  Invisible to the naked eye as such, they come into glaring view under the special linguistic and logical microscopy devised by Dahl and Teller from their singular demonstration of the existence of the unconscious.  What every analyst implicitly 'knows' about his patient Dahl and Teller are attempting to explicitly show with their textual analysis."  Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession at 89 (New York: Vintage Books, 1982).

The difficulties that confront a psychoanalyst in trying to explain to an outsider the basis of his inferences about the meaning of his patient's communications will also confront the intelligent and sensitive victim of workplace mobbing, a subtle form of job harassment,  in attempting credibly to describe the basis of his conclusion that he is being victimized.  A victim of three years of subtle job harassment cannot credibly describe his logical perceptions in the span of a half-hour interview with an employer's managers.

As I explained  to the D.C. Department of Human Rights, in a discrimination analysis context is everything:

In the case of harassment based on a hostile work environment, the material issue is not the severity or effect of individual acts of harassment, but the pervasiveness of the harassment and the cumulative effect of hostile and intimidating behaviors. Robinson v. Jacksonville Shipyards, Inc., 760 F. Supp. 1486 (M.D. Fla. 1991).

"[A discrimination] analysis cannot carve the work environment into a series of discrete incidents and measure the harm adhering in each episode. Rather a holistic perspective is necessary, keeping in mind that each successive episode has its predecessors, that the impact of the separate incidents may accumulate, and that the work environment created thereby may exceed the sum of the individual episodes. 'A play cannot be understood on the basis of some of its scenes but only on its entire performance, and similarly, a discrimination analysis must concentrate not on individual incidents but on the overall scenario.' Andrews, 895 F.2d at 1484. It follows naturally from this proposition that the environment viewed as a whole may satisfy the legal definition of an abusive working environment although no single episode crosses the Title VII threshold." Robinson, 760 F. Supp. at 1524.

Incidentally, the psychoanalytic work of Dahl and Teller is based on the linguistic theories of MIT Professor Noam Chomsky.