Drives and their vicissitudes in the management of human resources

Abstract

Human drives are well and truly present in organizations and undergo different vicissitudes. In the management of human resources, these vicissitudes emblematically take the form of modes of primary defence against the drives solicited by an increasingly restrictive labour market. Neither the fact that cases of abuse (guilt) do occur, nor the connivance that can exist amongst employees, diminishes the responsibility of directors of human resources (DHR) and researchers in this domain. Information, decision, arbitration and implementation can be seen here to define the fourfold process of inversion by which drives are transformed into their opposite. In the shift from activity to passivity, the repressed is never far away. Indeed, the return of the repressed implies a certain detour of the unconscious: namely an acting out that takes the form of a reversal onto the person’s own self. A good DHR is one that must disappear! Which furnishes us with a fine example of sadism turned upon the self, as in the self‐punishing of the obsessional neurotic.