Defences against anxiety in the law Jon Stokes The nature of work ork provides a sense of self-efficacy and self-worth, but it also entails anxiety. The anxiety may be personal, with roots in past personal experiences or in the personality. It may be collective, with its source in group dynamics or emotional contagion. FƌustƌatioŶs, ǁhiĐh ǁoƌk ;the tie to ƌealitLJ, as Fƌeud desĐƌiďedͿ ŶeĐ- essarily entail, generates anxiety. The work itself arouses feelings and may stimulate anxieties through contact with frightening experiences— for example, in nursing, contact with physically damaged individuals, or, in the police, contact with physically dangerous individuals, as a toxic element and against which defence is appropriate. All work entails some anxiety in the sense of something incomplete that needs to be completed and the exercise of decision and discretion in achieving this (Stokes, 1999). Even a task as simple as sweeping the floor involves choices. We each sweep a floor in our own way, expressing attitudes to cleanliness, order, and aesthetics. Working effectively is also an opportunity to master and repair the imagined or actual damage we have caused in our relations with others to our internal objects, or to ourselves. As a consequence, becoming unemployed deprives one of a significant opportunity for reparation and hence a central element in depressive breakdown. W