The recent episode of This Isn’t Working, featuring HR commentator Tanya de Grunwald in conversation with clinical psychologist Jaco van Zyl, circles an issue that many organisations have been attempting to handle through policy alone: how should employers respond when a small number of activist staff members claim an outsized mandate to shape workplace culture, language, and institutional positioning on contested social questions.
The episode is framed as an employer problem, but its more revealing thread is psychological. The workplace is being treated, increasingly, as a theatre of moral meaning and personal repair.
That shift matters because work is not only an economic arrangement. It is also a place where personhood is performed, authority is negotiated, and belonging is sought and withdrawn. When those dynamics destabilise, the symptoms do not stay confined to HR. They manifest as collective anxiety, moral escalation, grievance rituals, and the erosion of ordinary trust. In that sense, the title is accurate. Something is not working, but it is not only the policy framework. It is the underlying symbolic ecology of modern identity.
One of the most useful observations in the episode is that what is often described as “political” activism has a strongly personal charge. The discussion explores how workplace sessions that slide into a quasi-therapeutic mode, where individuals offer intimate accounts of trauma, outsider status, and vulnerability in settings that were never designed for that level of disclosure.
The point is not to mock those disclosures. It is to recognise the category error. A workplace is a public institution with bounded roles and shared tasks. Therapy is a protected practice with clear norms of confidentiality, containment, and skilled facilitation.
When the workplace is repurposed as a confessional space without the ethical and professional architecture of therapy, the organisation becomes a stage for unresolved psychic material. That material does not become less powerful because it is shared in a meeting room or on a webinar. It becomes more contagious.
The group, according to Jaco, begins to function as a kind of improvised emotional authority, and the normal managerial boundary-setting that keeps work possible is reframed as “harm” or “invalidating lived experience.” The conflict escalates because each side believes it is defending the conditions of reality. One side believes it is defending organisational function. The other believes it is defending moral identity.
This is where Joseph Campbell’s language is unexpectedly clarifying. In Mythos, Campbell outlines what he calls the four functions of mythology:
- the mystical function that opens life to transcendence,
- the cosmological function that makes a coherent picture of the world,
- the sociological function that validates and maintains a social order,
- and the pedagogical function that guides individuals through life’s stages and crises.
His point is not nostalgia for old stories. It is the recognition that a functioning culture needs symbolic systems that can hold human experience at multiple levels at once. When those systems weaken, moral energy does not disappear. It migrates. It attaches itself to politics, institutions, and identity categories, which then have to carry burdens they were never designed to carry.
The workplace becomes one of the last remaining arenas where people expect a shared moral language, but where the rules are administrative rather than mythic. The result is a predictable mismatch: administrative instruments are asked to do mythic work, and they fail. People then experience that failure as betrayal rather than as a limit of the tool.
This is especially relevant to the gender identity controversy. One missing component in much public argument is the mythological aspect: the symbolic, archetypal, and narrative dimension of sexed life, role, and transformation. When mythos is absent, explanation tends to collapse into two narrow alternatives.
On one side there is ideology, in which identity becomes primarily a political claim that must be affirmed to secure moral standing. On the other side there is biological determinism, in which the body alone is treated as the final explanatory frame, as though the psyche is merely an echo of anatomy.
Both approaches reduce complexity. Both approach the human being as an object to be categorised, rather than as a subject living within a symbolic world. A mythological lens does not deny biology, and it need not endorse ideological capture. It insists, instead, that human identity also involves imagination, projection, longing, shame, initiation, and the struggle to find a liveable role in the world.
Jung’s concept of the persona is particularly helpful here, not because it offers an easy diagnosis, but because it provides a map for the kind of confusion now being enacted at scale. The persona, for Jung, is not the Self. It is the social mask, the adaptive interface between the inner person and the outer demands of a given culture.
The persona is necessary. Without it, we cannot participate in society. But it is also fragile. It can become too rigid, too compliant, too dependent on external approval. Or it can fracture under pressure, particularly when a culture’s role expectations shift faster than individuals can adapt.
From a depth psychological point of view, what is often called gender incongruence or dysphoria can, in some cases, be understood as a disruption of the persona: a breakdown in the felt fit between an individual’s social role and their inner experience of meaning, desire, and recognition.
That is not the same thing as evidence that the Self has changed sex, nor is it proof that the deeper architecture of psychological functions has been fundamentally rewritten. It suggests, rather, that the social mask is failing to mediate between inner life and outer form. The psyche then seeks a new organisation, often urgently, sometimes dramatically.
When organisations encounter this urgency, they may try to manage it as an individual accommodation issue. Yet, the discussion between Tanya and Jaco, implicitly raises a more difficult question: are we focusing too narrowly on the individual while ignoring collective dynamics that are shaping what individuals feel and demand?
Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious is relevant precisely because it is a theory of shared psychic patterns that exceed personal biography. Identity politics, and the contemporary reworking of traditional role-playing, may not only be a series of isolated personal stories. They may also be a sign of under-expressed or unexplored archetypal energies pressing for recognition.
If the culture lacks symbolic literacy, those energies will be interpreted literally, enacted politically, or solved medically.
Archetypes do not disappear when they are denied, and we fuck around with them at our peril. They erupt as compulsions, crusades, moral polarities, and social contagions. In that sense, some workplace conflicts may be less about individual “rights” in a narrow sense, and more about the return of mythic material in a society that has lost its formal mythic containers.
This is why the current emphasis on medicalisation and affirmative chemical intervention requires careful reflection. From a depth psychological standpoint, a rapid move to physical intervention can short-circuit exploration of the deeper psyche and the soul.
That exploration is not a luxury. It is the method by which a person learns what, exactly, is asking to be lived. If the psyche is signalling disruption, the signal may be multi-layered: personal history, relational wounds, cultural anxiety, imitation, aspiration, shame, erotic imagination, and the longing for a role that feels dignified.
A purely affirmative medical pathway can convert a symbolic problem into a technical procedure, not necessarily because the person is insincere, but because the culture has lost the patience and the language for symbolic work.
Something similar is visible in the workplace itself. Employers feel compelled to affirm, signal, or legislate meaning because meaning is being demanded in a space designed for tasks.
Network-based social media technology intensifies these pressures. It does not simply spread information. It spreads templates of identity, scripts of moral belonging, and ready-made narratives of harm and vindication. Furthermore, it connects individuals to a constant audience, and it makes the persona itself more performative, more surveilled, more easily destabilised.
In earlier eras, a person could experiment with role and self-concept within relatively local communities. Today, experimentation is often conducted in front of a networked moral public, and the feedback loops are faster, sharper, and more polarised. The result is that inner uncertainty can become collective certainty overnight, and the demand for recognition can harden into a demand for institutional compliance.
The workplace then becomes one of the main arenas where this compliance is demanded because it offers budgets, legitimacy, and managerial attention. The episode describes precisely this dynamic: small groups learning that they can leverage organisational guilt, ambiguity, and reputational fear to gain influence beyond their formal remit.
None of this requires cynicism about individual suffering. It requires seriousness about the psyche. A psychologically informed approach would begin by restoring boundaries and by distinguishing roles. A workplace can be humane without becoming a confessional. It can support staff without turning managerial authority into a surrogate parent.
It can respect lawful protections without outsourcing organisational governance to activist factions. But it also needs, at a cultural level, a renewed symbolic vocabulary. Campbell’s account of myth reminds us that societies need narratives and rituals that help people carry transition, ambiguity, and inner conflict without projecting those tensions onto every institution they inhabit.
Jung reminds us that the persona is not the Self, and that confusion at the level of role does not necessarily justify metaphysical certainty about identity. If we cannot speak about archetypes, initiation, and the pressure of the collective unconscious, we will keep forcing institutions to play the role of myth.
The workplace will continue to become a battlefield for psychic material that has nowhere else to go. In that sense, the episode is not only about activist staff. It is about a society trying to repair a mythic deficit with organisational policy, and discovering that policy cannot replace the soul’s need for meaning.
Endnotes
[1] This Isn’t Working: How Should Employers Handle Activist Staff? (Ft. Jaco van Zyl), podcast transcript supplied in “This-Isnt-Working-001-2026-01-22.docx”.
[2] Joseph Campbell, Mythos I.1: Psyche and Symbol, transcript supplied in “Mythos-I-Joseph-Campbell-001-2026-01-22.docx”.
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