Facing Human Workload: the Resilient Ego: a Psychoanalytic Point of View

The paper aims to show new connections among Human Factors, Human Workload and Resilience. We intend: 1) to highlight the role of subject in facing the human workload, inflected as demanding tasks and emergency situations; 2) to show how psychoanalysis can provide novel insights, not only into human errors, but also into human resilience. They have a common denominator, at least in part: the role of subjective contributions even in demanding situations. Human workload includes a work for satisfaction. We recall also the case study of US Airways Flight 1549 water landing (the so called “Miracle on the Hudson”), which shows how the resilient Ego never works alone, but as a part of a team. Finally, A case study report will also be presented, including the first hypotheses of a pilot study on the mental life of firefighters. The resilience, supported by subjective mental work, could confirm the role of the resilient Ego as a promoter of Human Factors. Most of analysis and researches call in cause the Ego only like a source of errors. Our contribution can introduce and analyze the subject as a source of adaptive solutions and even successes also within the harder missions. The role of psychoanalysis in interpreting human performance, particularly in the emergency situations, could open new interpretative into a so very important field of Human Factors.