by Hannah Proctor Watching the current University and College Union (UCU) picket lines from afar – I’m a postdoctoral fellow based in Germany – I was trying to think if I’d ever come across any psychological writings on striking, and, more specifically on picket lines. Of course, as Chris Millard has pointed out already in this series, strikes are not primarily expressions of feeling; they are withdrawals of labour. Indeed, references to strikers’ ‘deep’ or ‘strong’ feelings in letters by university Vice-Chancellors seem to downplay the material demands being made by striking workers. I was nonetheless interested in finding out whether theorisations of the psychological experience of picket lines – as specific spatial, temporal and interpersonal phenomena – already exist. Perhaps unsurprisingly a search of the multiple psychoanalytic journals included in the Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing database for ‘picket line’ yielded just fourteen results.  I looked at the two earliest examples that appeared on this list and in both cases

the picket line appeared as a fraught symbol for individual bourgeois analysands. In a discussion of compulsive hand-washing from 1938 a female patient writes a short story whose protagonist is based on her hotel maid’s participation in an elevator operator strike. The patient took up the workers’ cause, organising meetings in support of their actions. In this period of political involvement, the analyst reports, that patient's hand-washing stopped. As soon as her involvement with the strike ceased (interpreted by the analyst as a form of sublimation), her ‘compulsive’ behaviour resumed.[ref]George S. Goldman, ‘A Case of Compulsive Handwashing’, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 7 (1938), 96-121.[/ref] In an article from 1943 a ‘frigid hysteric’ patient dreams of a bus trip being cancelled due to a transport strike. In the subsequent interpretation of the dream, which includes a long cutting from a newspaper article on a strike of charwomen the patient had read, the analyst interprets her reaction to the story as relating to her ‘desperately…

by Chris Millard Strikes stir the emotions. The solidarity of picketing, the anxiety of students missing classes, the anger of those who feel wronged enough to withdraw their labour. There are doubtless strong feelings behind the current University and College Union (UCU) industrial action to defend ‘defined benefit’ pensions. These varied feelings have been mobilized in a number of ways over the past few weeks, and this short post (building on some tweets here and here is an attempt to analyse a bit further the emotional politics of striking. There are a number of distinct parts (both core and peripheral) of the strike action at play at any one time: the picket line, supportive demonstrations and rallies, teach-outs, the implied dissent, and the withdrawal of labour itself. A key aspect of the emotional politics of this strike can be seen in the confusion (both deliberate and unwitting) between a number of these elements.The Vice-Chancellor of The University of Sheffield, Professor Sir Keith Burnett, sent an email

to staff where those on strike were characterized as ‘communicat[ing] the strength of their feelings through strike action’ (you can see an extract from that email in this tweet from Sheffield historian, Simon Stevens). This was not a hostile characterization, but it was a serious misunderstanding. It crystallised out some of the issues I’ve had with the strike and on the picket. As others have pointed out in response to that communication, the point of a strike is not an expression of feeling, it is to disrupt the operations of the employer to force them back to the negotiating table. As Simon Stevens himself put it on Twitter: ‘A strike is an effort to rebalance the material interests shaping the employer's behaviour by shutting down production and/or operations.’ But this material intervention seems lost, forgotten or at the very least undersold in the current dispute. The idea (often tacit) that ‘so long as you don’t cross the…

by Rhodri Hayward Six days into the current Universities and Colleges Union (UCU) strike against pension cuts, Universities UK (UUK), the representative body for British higher education management, launched a series of tweets and videos in support of University Mental Health Day. In a move that is now pretty familiar, the presentations shifted attention from a toxic environment in which staff and students now experience unprecedented levels of mental distress, to a series of tips for self care - joining a club, eating well, pursuing a hobby - in which much of the responsibility for well-being is placed back upon the shoulders of the individual sufferer. As the UUK Mental Health Policy Officer advised in a Twitter video, ‘Don’t be afraid to take time for yourself.' I guess to many of the viewers, this advice must have seemed spectacularly mistimed. At the precise moment that the UUK was outlining its commitment to ending anxiety and depression in higher education, the wider organisation was working to significantly

change pension conditions, undermining the secure livelihood once promised to university staff. It would be foolish, however, to dismiss the advice out of hand. The idea of ‘making time for oneself’ has been a central part of the labour struggle for the last three centuries. As E. P. Thompson argued many years ago, once employers had hammered into modern workers the idea that ‘time is money’, employees’ struggle shifted from the preservation of traditional rights to the recovery of lost time.[ref]E.P. Thompson. ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’, Past & Present 38 (1967):56-97; (4), p. 34. [/ref] The attack on future pensions, and the different analyses offered by UUK and by EP Thompson, all point to ways that different notions of temporality are caught up in academic work: not simply in the way it is organised but also in the way that it is experienced. The unremitting busyness of academic life, mostly complained of but occasionally worn as…