The effort to reconcile work and subjectivity is a source of wear for workers which affects their quality of life. The search for psycho-affective equilibrium within this contradictory "world" has repercussions on daily living, creating self-aggravating systems of coping which were studied in the present investigation with the participation of 16 professionals of the Ribeirão Preto Campus of the University of São Paulo. Feed - back interviews were held about the perception of quality of life as evaluated by the WHOQOL-100 questionnaire. Semi-structured interviews complemented the evaluation by dealing with the meanings, of work and the characterization of the life context. Studies related to the qualifications of the professionals detected differences in the mode of coping and in the search for psycho-affective equilibrium, indicating a dissociation between the job universe and the basic needs of life quality among the more qualified subjects, whereas the job represented an undissociated part of survival among the less qualified subjects.
work; subjectivity; quality of life
