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This article’s first part places kulturarbeit at the center of human life. The Symbolic is defined here as the system of cultural artifacts the subject uses to recreate and sustain the individual libidinal propping and structural bond to their gender. Trauma and work are considered to be structurally linked to human incompetence. This association defines the ethical relation between work and the human condition, and the broad relation that trauma maintains with the spectrum of subjectification processes. The second part of the article is clinical. It explores traumas at work, based mainly on two observations. One concerns a young man, victim of sexual abuse, confronted with power relations at work. The other considers a train driver whose conscious and unconscious guilt in relation to a suicide on the tracks has a catastrophic outcome in a catachrestic operation where the “acknowledgement” of a signal becomes a justification of the inner guilt from the previous accident. Two other clinical cases are mentioned in this reflection, which touches also on the conditions for the accumulation of successive traumas, and on the dynamic relations between traumas belonging to the same system of trauma-inducing events.