This study tries to define suffering, drawing on Freud’s perspectives, and to circumscribe its destines after its manifestation in work. Open interviews were made with workers, managers, health professionals, and also with their families, all of them from a big public company in the services sector, which is in restructuration process, in the metropolitan area of Belo Horizonte. To underpin the data analysis the Hermeneutic-Dialectical Method were used. As a result this study shows the existence of a transformation process of suffering into illness in working management. The somatization, psychiatrization, medicalization, medical license, hospital internment, and the invalidity retirement constitute some of the suffering destines. Considering that suffering involves an interlocution with the other, we conclude that this transformation is a political process of braking resistance.
Psychic suffering; Worker’s health; Work management; Organizational psychology