Commentary by Jonathan Williams 

For the final session of Fall CPOS Reading Group, Psychopathology of Work, we sat with a disturbing but necessary question, what does it mean when the workplace becomes the scene through which suffering is communicated?

Rather than treating suicide as a purely individual act or work as a purely external stressor, these texts pushed us toward a harder question, what kind of social world has a workplace become when death at work begins to function as a message?

That question shaped our discussion of Christophe Dejours’ chapter on political stakes of work-related suffering, alongside Jean-Philippe Deranty’s reading of Dejours’ broader psychodynamics of work.

This Week’s Signal

One of the clearest signals from the discussion was the significance of the location for workplace suicides. In Dejours’ account, the fact that the act occurs at, or in relation to, the workplace is not incidental. It suggests that work has become more than a site of employment; it has become the scene where humiliation, submission, and abandonment are organized and experienced.

The discussion stayed with that difficulty. Workplace suicide was understood not as something with a single cause, but as overdetermined — shaped by psychic history, organizational life, and social relations all at once. Even so, Dejours insists that when such an act takes place in the orbit of work, it reveals something about the collapse of social bonds. Deranty helps sharpen that point by locating these suicides within a broader deterioration of collective life at work and the denial of the forms of recognition that are tied to the actual doing of work.

The big idea

The big idea in these readings is not simply that work can be stressful. It is that contemporary workplaces can produce a specific kind of suffering: affective solitude in the middle of the crowd.

Dejours describes workplace suicide as emerging not only from pressure, but from a breakdown in the bonds that should make work bearable. A person may remain surrounded by colleagues, still employed, still functional, still apparently “in” the organization – and yet be psychically abandoned. That image stayed with our group because it names a distinctly modern condition, not isolation outside the workplace, but isolation inside an environment that still looks organized, social, and operational.

This is also where Dejours’ idea of strategic conviviality becomes so powerful. A workplace may appear warm, social, and well-integrated on the surface while underneath it is organized by fear, humiliation, competition, and silence. In that setting, people may still attend the meeting, join the lunch, smile in the hallway, and perform the rituals of belonging. But conviviality is not the same as solidarity. A crowd is not the same thing as a collective.

The chapter’s central case makes this painfully concrete. The woman at the center of Dejours’ account is not described as incompetent or failing. On the contrary, she had been valued, accomplished, and successful. The turning point comes when she requests part-time work in order to care for her adopted child. From that moment forward, the organization appears to interpret her not as a good worker with a life, but as someone whose priorities are no longer sufficiently aligned with the total demands of the firm. The reprisals that follow – demotion, humiliation, symbolic downgrading, impossible expectations – are not simply about performance. They are about submission.

That is what makes “servitude” the stronger word here. The problem is not only that she is hurt by work. It is that the organization cannot tolerate a limit on its claim over her, thus promoting a pseudoperformative submissiveness.

A simple example

One thread from our discussion helped make this idea easier to grasp: Severance.

The fantasy behind Severance is that work life and personal life can be cleanly split apart. But the conversation kept returning to how unrealistic that fantasy is. These readings assume continuity: psychic life does not stop at the office door. People bring unmet needs, loyalties, fears, and identifications across domains, and work in turn reaches beyond the workplace into how life is organized, interpreted, and endured.

That continuity matters here. The issue in Dejours’ case is not merely that someone had “work stress.” It is that the workplace had come to reorganize the meaning of care, ambition, usefulness, and self-respect. When an organization treats emotional sensitivity as signs of inadequacy, it is no longer simply coordinating labor. It is defining what kinds of life are acceptable.

Key takeaway

Workplace suicide, in this framework, is not only a personal tragedy. It is also a social symptom.

It points to a workplace where collective protections have thinned, where humiliation can be administered symbolically and repeatedly, where people are asked to remain cheerful and compliant while solidarity erodes underneath, and where refusal or inability to fully submit can become intolerable to the organization.

Recognition matters in this picture, but not as the main headline. It matters because its denial helps reveal the larger pathology: a world in which work still demands commitment while offering less and less collective holding in return.

From Theory to Practice

For Managers: Look beyond performance language

• Look for signs that “culture” is functioning as pressure rather than support. For example, if employees feel they must say yes to extra demands, stay visibly enthusiastic, or avoid naming exhaustion in order to seem committed, then culture may be operating as pressure.
• Reflect on times when the organization punishes limits. Requests related to care, health, time, or life outside work can become flashpoints when work expects total priority.
• Pay attention to symbolic humiliations, not just formal sanctions. Demotions, exclusions, withheld information, impossible assignments, and public ambiguity can do profound damage even when no one says anything overtly cruel.
• Ask what happens when someone is struggling, sets a boundary, or cannot give work absolute priority. If coworkers are nearby but no one can safely speak up, offer protection, or interrupt humiliation, then the workplace may have proximity without solidarity.

For Consultants and clinicians: Keep the social bond in view

• Resist reducing workplace suffering to individual fragility. A person’s distress may be intensified by an organizational world that has become isolating or punitive.
• Attend to where the act or symptom is located. In Dejours’ analysis, the workplace itself can become part of the message.
• Distinguish stress from servitude. The question is not only “Is this person overwhelmed?” but also “What kind of submission is this workplace demanding?”
• Be cautious about surface functioning. Someone may appear integrated, competent, and composed while living in profound affective solitude.

What we want to keep exploring

Our discussion opened several lines we want to keep thinking along.

One is whether workplaces today increasingly rely on forms of belonging that simulate connection without actually producing solidarity. Another is how contemporary organizations blur the boundary between work and non-work, while still punishing workers for having commitments outside the firm. We also stayed with the possibility that some workplaces are structured by sadomasochistic dynamics – not only in obvious cruelty, but in the repeated offering and withdrawal of recognition, opportunity, and belonging.

And there is still a live theoretical tension worth holding onto: how far should work be placed at the center of these stories? The discussion resisted easy answers. Work may not explain everything, but these readings make a strong case that it explains more than many organizations are willing to admit.

One question to bring into your week

What kinds of belonging at work are actually protective – and which ones only make isolation look more social?

What’s next at CPOS?

Next up: Spring Reading Group, Psychosocial Organization Studies: What’s New?

Join us every third Thursday of the month at 11am CST (September to June).