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Law in Contemporary Society
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Neurosis as a manifestation of inner conflictsCarl Jung’s quote, “Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering,” suggests that not addressing legitimate pain can spawn mental and emotional distress. Neurosis is a mostly outmoded term that was popularized in the mid-19th century, and used to refer to mental disorders characterized by depression, anxiety, and other feelings of distress. Although the term is not widely used anymore due to its lack of precision for diagnostic purposes, the concept provides insight into how general feelings of distress can impair a person’s ability to function in any area of life, albeit not seriously enough to be incapacitating. Perhaps the extent to which our psychological dysfunction or general feelings of unhappiness affect work, and how much of that dissatisfaction bleeds into other areas of life, is underestimated or dismissed. It is a curious thing: discussing mental health in connection to work feels almost like a luxury. Companies talk about how seriously they take mental health as if recognizing that we are perhaps complicated creatures with mushy feelings and a hint of madness is a discretionary act, as if we can choose not to bring our mental health to work. Work is where most people spend most of their time, and we can’t show up as disemboweled husks. There are three influential theories explaining neurosis. A view held by the psychoanalytical tradition was that neurosis was caused by “intrapsychic conflict,” conflict between different drives, impulses, and motives. Sigmund Freud, the father of this tradition, believed that thoughts, memories, and desires below the surface of awareness could often lead to psychological distress. Jung, another influential figure in psychoanalysis, believed that neurosis was a kind of self-division, caused by “the discrepancy between the conscious attitude and the trend of the unconscious.” While the psychoanalytic tradition remained influential, other prominent views associated with behavioral and cognitive psychology emphasized maladaptive behavior or thinking that can be unlearned.Inner conflicts and unresolved feelingsSome forms of mental and emotional distress may be tricky to identify and put a label on. The manifest symptoms may not reach the threshold of clinical diagnosis, and there might not be identifiable traumatic incidents to trace everything back to. It could be the case that you grew up in a slightly dysfunctional family or that you didn’t learn or teach yourself the proper response to emotional and physical stress. I didn’t have the language to talk about my childhood for a long time. I still don’t, although there are a few worn-out highlights that have been retold over the years. These stories are the centerpieces of my childhood narrative, cobbled together to provide a semblance of coherence. The harder I squint at the picture of my past, the clearer the clumsy brush strokes glaring back at my feeble attempt. The truth is an elusive creature, weaseling and slipping through the fingers the harder I grip. There are many things that I still don’t know how to talk about, other than in ways that would do injustice to their essence, many years after they transpired. Not knowing how to talk about things could mean a lack of interpretive frameworks that can give structure and meaning to the facts. And when things that happen lack meaning because you can’t connect the dots, they are incomprehensible. This is how I felt about many things that happened in life, and in my childhood to be more specific. I knew what happened without knowing what happened. I could describe the events but still be confused as to what to make of them. What partially helped was learning about psychopathology and feminism literature in college, which provided the interpretive frameworks I could use to understand my role and those of others in what had happened. The same facts I knew bore new meanings in the context of normative judgments and causal inferences.Applied to Lawyering: Making it personalLet’s start with the fact that lawyering is a demanding occupation that generally requires a hefty time investment. As a lawyer, I’ll be spending a good chunk of my life at work. A natural conclusion from this proposition is that I won’t be happy if I’m not happy at work by virtue of the amount of time I will be spending at work, if not for other more nuanced reasons. To be happy at work, the work has to feel personal. Spending so much time working on something you deeply know you don’t care about may cause cognitive dissonance—why would you give so much of yourself to a cause that you don’t value? But taking work personally would take a lot of unlearning. There’s the defense mechanism of not taking things too seriously that I’ve taught myself over the years. There’s also the lesson I learned working, that as much as companies love to encourage employees to take ownership of their work, you simply don’t own your work as a wage worker in a corporation owned by shareholders. Any effort that won’t be effectively put towards profitability and therefore won’t be noticeable to shareholders is discouraged, which wouldn’t be the case if you truly owned your work. Encouraging employees to take ownership is often a convenient management tactic to nudge them to work harder, but the effort will be guided towards whatever works for the shareholders and the survival of the company. If taking ownership of one’s own work and therefore making it personal is an oxymoron in a corporate environment, the next step would be to research alternative options that would allow me to take ownership of my work.You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines:
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