Occupational distress in nursing: a psychoanalytic reading of the literature

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Evans, Alicia, Pereira, David and Parker, Judith (2008) Occupational distress in nursing: a psychoanalytic reading of the literature. Nursing Philosophy (2008), 9 (3). pp. 195-204. ISSN 1466-769X

Abstract

Occupational stress in nursing has attracted considerable attention as a focus for research and as a consequence multiple objects of nurses’ stress, or ‘stressors’, have been identified. This paper puts into question the dominant conceptual and methodological approach to occupational stress in nursing research by both foregrounding the notion of anxiety and juxtaposing it with the notion of ‘stress’. It is argued that the notion of ‘stress’ and the domination of the questionnaire have produced a narrow reading of the topic. Some of the literature on occupational stress/anxiety in nursing is reviewed and our analysis illustrates how the identified objects of stress have a tendency to multiply contingent on the number of studies undertaken. Thus definitive objects of nurses’ stress remain elusive. We argue that a return to the notion of ‘anxiety’ and methodological approaches other than empirical ones can bring both depth and breadth to the consideration of occupational distress in nursing. Further,we argue that the object of ‘anxiety’ is unconscious, thus unknown, and given this, a more informative approach is to map nurses’ response to anxiety, the discursive formations arising out of anxiety, rather than attempt to define those objects of anxiety.

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Item type Article
URI https://vuir.vu.edu.au/id/eprint/3656
DOI 10.1111/j.1466-769X.2008.00356.x
Official URL http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nup.200...
Subjects Historical > Faculty/School/Research Centre/Department > School of Nursing and Midwifery
Historical > FOR Classification > 1110 Nursing
Historical > SEO Classification > 9299 Other Health
Keywords ResPubID15212. nursing, psychoanalysis, anxiety, occupational stress, literature review.
Citations in Scopus 11 - View on Scopus
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