72

Suffering, collective defense strategies, and recognition are three key concepts of work psychodynamics. This paper studies how the social uses of these concepts are reconfigured in the context of the “rise of psychosocial risks at work” and the media coverage of work suicides in large French companies in 2007 and 2009. Clinical approaches to work show that preventive measures against health impairments in professional settings mainly depend on how heated the debates about work are. Today, suffering and recognition are most often mentioned in the public debate without any reference to the actual work and to defenses. This new discourse characterizes a transformation of collective defenses against the point of view of work: these have changed and their discourse now borrows from the vocabulary of suffering.