Pathologization and depathologization of the “free worker” in terms of the psycho-social risk

Abstract

Recently, there have been a series of transformations in the configuration of the “psi complex” at work (Ingleby, 1985; Rose, 1985). From being concerned with aspects of the workers’ health in mainstream psychology, there has been a shift towards looking into the existing relationship between health, work, and psychology, in which a series of perspectives that prescribe work as risk, and the risks of work as psychosocial problems, have become a main concern. In this interplay between those psychological perspectives, new processes of pathologization and dephatologization of work and workers are produced. Taking as a point of departure the fiction of the "free worker" as the figure of subjectivity that conventional psychology takes for itself, this article aims at discussing three ways in which “psi complex” is recomposed to constitute the healthy worker according to the radical changes taking place in labour organization.