Betrayed by Work

It is painful for Perry-Pastor, now remarried and with a new baby, to talk about how little of herself she gave to her children back then. "They were never allowed to be sick," she says. "If they were ill and couldn't go to school, I'd run out for medicine and bring them to a backup baby-sitter." she remembers. When her eldest child had trouble learning to read, she hired a tutor rather than spend time reading with her. At least five times in two years, she says, she chose to cancel vacations -- sometimes the day before her family was supposed to leave -- because of an "emergency" at work. "We had airplane tickets, hotel reservations, everything," she says. Usually, she would pay another mother to take both her own and the other mother's children to a local amusement park. "I would pay for baby-sitters, lessons, tutors, whatever they needed," she says. "I thought they were taken care of, and the people at work needed me."

A few years ago, Arlie Hochschild, a sociologist and author of "The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work" (New York Metropolitan Books, 1997), suggested that dual-income couples were working long days not because their jobs required it, but because they wanted to escape their hectic home lives. Stories like Perry-Pastor's have led Philipson to a more radical conclusion: Many are working hard not to escape the emotional entanglements of home but to find the emotional pull that they're lacking at home.

In fact, although most of the work-family research talks about home as the focus of people's emotional lives and work as an unfortunate intrusion, Philipson suggests that for increasing numbers of us, work is where our hearts lie. Seeing coworkers every day, trading office gossip, celebrating birthdays, getting promoted, she says, all make work seem like a "vibrant, exciting" place, filled with "intrigue and gossip, friendships and jealousies, comfort and hurt."

As they become increasingly riveted to work, they learn to get along without their families and friends. Some consider their home to be a well-oiled machine that operates smoothly without them. And they just can't imagine receiving the same kind of emotional sustenance that they get at work anywhere else. As Hanson puts it: "At home, you don't always get a pat on the back. In your office, you can hear, 'Hey, good work.' "

These Women, Ourselves

Having spent the last six years talking to women who had been betrayed by work has turned Philipson into something of a crusader on the topic. Speaking at conferences across the country as well as attending weekly academic seminars at the Center for Working Families, a research group affiliated with the University of California at Berkeley, she wants the work-family pundits and the psychological establishment to take her patients and their health problems seriously.

"They aren't just patients with particular pathologies," she says. "They're saying something important about all of our lives."

But while her talk was politely received at a major work-family conference last year, many experts clearly haven't quite known what to make of her research. "One person told me it sounded like a cult," Philipson says. A psychology journal invited her to submit a major article on her research after hearing her speak at a conference sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health. But the journal's editors rejected the paper, pronouncing her thesis absurd. "They wrote back something to the effect of, 'What the hell is this woman talking about?' " she says with a laugh.

Philipson doesn't blame them. She admits that she herself reached her conclusions slowly -- and even reluctantly. Like most psychologists, she says that she was trained to investigate what she calls the "inner workings of family life" to see how people replay childhood dramas in their adult lives. "Insofar as work had any psychological meaning," she wrote in her unpublished paper on the subject, "it was as an empty or blank arena in which people could play out unresolved family conflicts." And although she earned a doctorate in sociology in 1981 from the University of California at Santa Cruz, her research focused on using psychoanalytic theory to look at the sociology of the family.

As Philipson became more and more immersed in her patients' worlds, however, she came to see the signs of their affliction just about everywhere -- including in her own life. There were her friends -- "with excellent coping skills, highly functioning people" -- who became so consumed with petty squabbles and ego clashes in their offices that they too became deeply depressed. "They could have been in my group," she says.

And then she looked at her own life, and saw that she too could "go down that road" if she were not more careful. After her 18-year marriage ended in 1991, she joined Pathmakers, eager -- perhaps too eager -- to become part of a large community of psychologists.