The Unconscious at Work: Individual and Organizational Stress in the Human Services

Ed Anton Obholzer, Vega Zagier Roberts Routledge, £14.99, pp 224 ISBN 0 415 10206 5 Working with people who are ill has always been stressful. Organisations concerned with health care, because of the complexity of their aims and their structure, are stressful places in which to work. Uncertainty and change, prominent features of today's health service, are also acknowledged as important stressors. There are many publications on stress among health care workers, some of them focusing on fashionable concepts such as burnout, others attempting to identify people in the professions particularly vulnerable to the effects of stress. Yet it is undoubtedly feasible not only to sustain a career in medicine or one of its sister professions but also to gain much satisfaction from it. How …