Une clinique du « travail émotionnel » chez les directeurs d’hôpital français, entre contrainte et élaboration psychique

The preprint deals with emotional work as performed by French hospital administrators. We conducted a longitudinal exploratory study on hospital administrators' lived experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, using a qualitative research methodology combining semi-directed interviews, focus groups sessions and observations. We propose HA have to deal with both emotional labor, i.e. emotional constraints, and emotional work, which consists in an elaboration of other people's feelings and their own. Our focus group sessions seem to point that, contrary to how the highly concurrential nature of their profession might lead to see them (mainly as individualists), group sessions prove useful to help them maintain their emotional work, and detoxify their psychic life by elaborating on the guilt, shame and agressivity they feel in a great affective solitude.