Love and work: The relationships between their unconscious choices and burnout

Ayala Malach Pines ‘One can live magnificently in this world if one knows how to work and how to love,' wrote Tolstoy in a letter to a friend in 1856. Freud is alleged to have also written that the abilities to love and to work are the evidence for psychological well-being. People’s choice of a career and an intimate partner tell us a great deal about who they are and have a major impact on their lives. The importance of both work and love for healthy functioning has been well documented empirically (for example Barnett, 1993; Baruch et al., 1983; Hazan and Shaver, 1990; Lee and Kanungo, 1984), yet studies of love generally ignore its relationship to work and studies of work ignore its relationship to love (Hazan and Shaver, 1990), adhering to what Kanter termed the ‘myth of separate worlds’ (Kanter, 1977). The relationship between work and love was noted in studies documenting the spillover of work stress to the family (for example Boles et al., 1997; Eckenrode and Gore, 1990; Golembiewski, 2000; Hochschild, 1999; Kanter, 1977; Kinnunen and Mauno, 1998; Pensa, 1999; Valtinson, 1998; Zedeck, 1992). It seems that satisfaction in one sphere of life is associated with satisfaction in the other and stress in one sphere is associated with stress in the other (Hazan and Shaver, 1990). An important question that seems worthy of an in-depth discussion is the reason for this relationship. The current chapter addresses this question in the context of the relationship….