Category: Contributors

Work, Isolation, and the Breakdown of Solidarity

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In our final session of the fall 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? 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.

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. 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?

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

Question of the week: What kinds of belonging at work are actually protective - and which ones only make isolation look more social?

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“Who’s actually on the hook?”: AI, expertise, and skin in the game

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A recent piece from The American Psychoanalyst (TAP) offers uncomfortable clarity on an increasingly ordinary AI practice. Messina opens with a familiar experience, asking an AI system to help her “find the right tone” for a letter to a long-time friend. The response is emotionally fluent and analytically impeccable yet her body recoils. Not because the machine did a poor job but because the letter is “perfect, and it felt like a lie”. Messina notes that patients describe these tools with “quiet gratitude” and “trust,” emphasizing that the system helps them feel less overwhelmed and less alone. This raises a critical question: What psychic work is being “bypassed—or perhaps displaced” when containment is outsourced to an AI? Real care isn’t just “getting it.” It’s taking in someone else’s mess, letting it affect you, and transforming it into something bearable. That costs attention, steadiness, and risk. Without cost, you get empathy cosplay.

Is AI the only place we see costless empathy?

Consulting is one of the cleanest institutional mirrors of costless empathy because the very act of being asked for help recruits the consultant into an expert position. In real relationships, we trust what’s costly because cost is hard to counterfeit: time, effort, awkward honesty, reputational risk, repair. Cheap empathy reads like spam because it can be mass-produced with no downside. That reframes the question from “Can AI be empathic?” to “Who’s actually on the hook?”

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Creative (and Cultural) Industry Entrepreneurship

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Creative (and Cultural) Industry Entrepreneurship in the 21st Century Vol: 18, Part A, co-edited by Sara R. S. T. A. Elias, is the first of two volumes dedicated to exploring the challenges faced by creative professionals, and the entrepreneurial solutions they have developed in response.

Creative and cultural industries are growing in almost every nation around the world and over the last two decades have contributed to global, national, and local economies significantly. Recently, policy makers and those who start these creative businesses have demonstrated a greater interest in how creative entrepreneurs create, sustain and market their services and products. And how contexts influence their ‘doing business’ is of increasing importance.

Both volumes of Creative (and Cultural) Industry Entrepreneurship in the 21st Century illuminate how social contexts and recent socio-economic disruptive challenges influence value creation from start-up to growth and exit. The chapter authors take a fresh look at creative micro-businesses and SMEs, the processes leading to their formation, development, and their founders.

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Writing Collaborative Poetry

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In this post Howard Stein explains the creative process through which he and Seth Allcorn developed the collaborative poetry in their forthcoming book – Whiteboardings: Creating Collaborative Poetry in a Third Space.

He begins by describing “proto-poems”, which are largely unconsciously-driven, mental associations evoked by memories of events that have emotional significance. They consist of narrative sentences, phrases, fragments of ideas, line breaks, stanza breaks, that at first sight appear to take the form of a poem. Proto-poems are not first drafts. They exist somewhere in the aesthetic space between fantasy, imagination, free association, narrative, and poem.

The collaborative poems in Whiteboardings: Creating Collaborative Poetry in a Third Space, began with proto-poems generated by Seth Allcorn – emerging from his “lived experience” - and transformed into poems by Howard Stein.

According to Stein, "Some of Seth’s proto-poems immediately resonated with me, my life experiences, my emotions, even my bodily sensations. I could practically walk into the scene the proto-poem conjured."

This post will introduce you to the process of collaborative poetry with three examples from the forthcoming book. You will be able to hear Howard Stein read these poems as you read along with the included text.

Allcorn describes these poems as coming from his "lived experience, “sticky” memories that he has "revisited throughout his life". According to Allcorn, "The poems hold meaning for me, some I am aware of and undoubtedly some that I am not although the poems suggest that there is yet another path, a third way to awareness."

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