Corporate professionals need therapy now more than ever
It is tempting to imagine psychotherapy as only a personal refuge; a safe, private and even sacred space concerned solely with stories of intimacy and family. Yet anyone who has sat in a consulting room knows that a great deal of what we talk about in therapy is about work. This is curious, given that therapy training and much of the literature often overlook it. Freud (1914), however, was unequivocal: life is about work and love. These are the two great stages upon which our dramas unfold. If therapy has long attended to love, it has been less willing to admit the psychic realities of work.
Work is not just a way to earn a living. It is central to what it means to be human. From the beginning, our survival and our creativity have been expressed through work — raising children, cultivating land, building homes, crafting tools, telling stories, making art. Work gives us purpose, a sense of contribution, and the capacity to transform the world around us.
The Making of the Corporate World
The modern corporate world did not appear overnight. It is the product of industrialisation, global capitalism, and the steady decline of small-scale, community-based work. Over the last century, corporations have grown into vast, complex systems that concentrate resources, manage global supply chains, and employ millions.
As economies shifted from agriculture to industry and then to services, most people found themselves working not for themselves or their communities, but inside large organisations. Today, the majority of professionals spend their lives inside corporations. These institutions promise stability and opportunity, but that also demand conformity, productivity, and loyalty. Crucially, structures are not neutral: they shape our identities, relationships, and even our inner lives.
Work as a Site of Belonging and Exploitation
The corporate world taps deeply into our need for belonging, recognition, and the promise that our labour matters. At its best, corporate work provides collaboration, challenge, and the satisfaction of building something larger than ourselves. Yet this same need also leaves us vulnerable. When corporations demand loyalty above all, when creativity is reduced to productivity metrics, or when recognition depends only on performance, our most human impulses — to work, to create, to connect — can be exploited.
In today’s world, it is not uncommon for therapy clients to come in burnt-out, disillusioned, and underappreciated at work. The system often takes more than it gives. Although an organisation can offer structure and hierarchy, its ensoulment is forgotten and often left to the people who work within, if they have the capacity to manage it at all.
Just as meaningful work supports our sense of self, the loss of work can shake it to the core. Unemployment is not only an economic problem; it is a psychological and social one. When people are cut off from work, they often lose more than income; they lose structure, routine, community, and a sense of purpose. People often painfully internalise unemployment as personal failure, even though it is usually the result of larger structural forces.
In the corporate world, this vulnerability is not incidental. It is part of how the system maintains control. The ever-present threat of unemployment compels workers to comply, to overextend themselves, and to remain loyal even when workplaces become exploitative. The fear of exclusion from the corporate fold ensures conformity. It also deepens the identification between self-worth and employability. Without a job, many people feel they cease to matter. And so the fear of unemployment silences our unmet needs for decades on end.
Psychoanalytic Perspectives: Work as Drama, Desire and the False Self
Corporate culture often demands that we “leave our emotions at the door.” In practice, this means constructing what Winnicott (1960) would call a false self: a polished, compliant persona that conforms to the culture of “professionalism.” Over time, this mask cracks. People begin to feel hollow, burnt out, or unable to locate who they truly are inside or outside their role. This is because groups (including workplaces) rarely function consciously or rationally but under unconscious forces that point to deeper interactions of unmet needs and childhood traumas that stay alive and active in relationships between work colleagues.
Yet while critiquing corporate culture, we need to watch the temptation to dramatically dismiss the corporate world, “profit” or “bureaucracy” as essentially heartless. Workplaces are not immune to unconscious polarizations of individual vs. group. Seeing corporations only as cold, oppressive, or emotionally detached takes away the nuances of meaning and empowerment of working as a team that corporate workplaces can offer for many people- especially once they find the right fit with roles, relationships and environments.
As Adam Jukes (2001) bluntly observes, “Work is the most important means available to us to make reparation for our unconscious destructiveness.” In other words, we use work to prove (to ourselves and others) that we are creative rather than destructive, essentially that our love is stronger than our hate. The drive to achieve, innovate, or even overwork can be a disguised effort to repair something inside that may be a frantic defence against our inner destructiveness. When people struggle with work — swinging between excitement, boredom, or persecution — it often reflects their deepest ambivalence: do I love more than I hate? Is my creativity stronger than my destructiveness? Jukes links this directly to early caregiver relationships, suggesting that our conflicts with work echo our ambivalence toward our parents. Every organisation, consciously or not, becomes a family. Bosses echo parents; colleagues mirror siblings, and teams become substitute families. Unresolved rivalries and disappointments are replayed at the office: the boss who can never be pleased becomes the unresponsive parent; the rivalry with a colleague restages childhood sibling conflict; the desperate loyalty to a company echoes a longing for family recognition. Without awareness, people get caught in the compulsion to return again and again to the same old patterns.
Bion (1961) helps us see how groups operate under unconscious basic assumptions:
Dependency (waiting for leaders to rescue),
Fight-flight (endless crises),
Pairing (hopes repeatedly invested in the next project).
Such dynamics keep unconscious dramas from childhood alive at work.
Lacan(1977) would say corporate ambition is fueled by lack. The next promotion, bonus, or recognition always promises wholeness but never delivers. The “corporate ladder” mirrors the endless deferral of desire.
Therapy, if engaged honestly provides the chance to confront this gap directly and see these defaults for what they are and, importantly, to loosen their grip.
Structural Critiques: Alienation, Discipline, and Emotional Capitalism
If psychoanalysis helps us see how work becomes the stage for unconscious dramas, Marx (1844/2007) reminds us that the stage itself is built on alienation. Therapy cannot dismantle capitalism, but it can give people a language to name their estrangement, and tools to resist being entirely consumed by it.
Foucault (1977) would have understood workplaces operating as a disciplinary system. Performance reviews, KPIs, surveillance software, wellness apps are not neutral tools; they shape how workers experience their bodies, emotions, and even their sense of time. Therapy can become a counter-space where these disciplinary logics are suspended, and people can reimagine themselves outside the gaze of the corporation.
More confusingly, these days corporate culture has absorbed the language of creativity, flexibility, and authenticity —even psychology and therapy – turning values that once resisted corporate culture into tools of exploitation (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005).. Employees are told to “be themselves” and “bring passion to work,” and tested with personality tests to help support them; but this often masks deeper precarity and exhaustion. Sociologist Eva Illouz (2007) shows how capitalism co-opts emotional life turning feelings into productivity metrics (such as resilience, emotional intelligence, teamwork). It is becoming increasingly harder to value emotions for their human truth, and not their market utility.
Therapy is not a cure for the alienation of capitalism, but could be a site to name and resist it by keeping some part of the true self alive.
Therapy as Resistance and Renewal
To say therapy is necessary for corporate professionals is to recognise that corporate life relentlessly mobilises unconscious dramas while operating within structures of alienation.
In organisational life, each person faces the choice of whether to remain true to his or her instincts and values or adapt to the prevailing culture (Stein, 2023). Responses may range from stubborn individualism to complete conformity. Yet it is precisely this confrontation with the “otherness” of the collective that sharpens self-awareness. Just as light is defined by darkness, the self becomes clearer in contrast with the group. Large organisations can overwhelm individuality and foster groupthink, sometimes driving people into burnout or crisis. Yet these very pressures can also act as catalysts, forcing individuals to take a stand and define themselves against the collective. In this way, negotiating one’s place within a social system becomes part of individuation (the discovery of oneself as a distinct individual).
Therapy helps us reclaim work as a site of meaning rather than depletion by reminding us that the value of our labour lies not only in what we produce, but also in who we become through it. Its unique contribution lies in the capacity to interpret puzzling behaviours, embrace ambiguity, and resist the quick-fix mentality. Real human change is always slow, painful, and incredibly difficult.
For corporate professionals, therapy is not indulgence but an essential recalibration of one’s relationship to work. Good therapy can provide resistance to oppression when needed and can also humanise rather than undermine workplaces. We require both: the possibility of meaningful, creative labour within existing structures, and therapists who act as advocates against exploitation in capitalistic frameworks.
Effective therapy in corporate contexts requires more than empathy. It demands industry fluency and systemic awareness. Its goal is not to optimise output but to humanise environments that often reduce people to their functions. Personal growth moves beyond the private sphere and becomes public and collective, as insights from the therapy room permeate boardrooms, team retreats, and even mergers.
Therapy is therefore both care and resistance. It resists the reduction of human beings to machines, challenges the colonisation of creativity and emotion by market logics, and offers renewal through ways of living and working that honour complexity, conflict, and humanity. Therapy also reminds us that our humanity is not defined by productivity. In doing so, it resists one of the corporate world’s most powerful tools of control: the belief that without employment, we are nothing.
Therapy does not erase the difficulties of corporate life, but it enables people to navigate them without being devoured. It also opens the possibility of imagining paths beyond: self-employment, social enterprises, community-based work, or periods devoted to family and self. In this way, suffering can be transformed into knowledge, compulsion into choice, alienation into solidarity, and endless repetition into the possibility of carving one’s own path.
References
Bion, W. R. (1961). Experiences in groups and other papers. Tavistock.
Boltanski, L., & Chiapello, È. (2005). The new spirit of capitalism (G. Elliott, Trans.). Verso. (Original work published 1999)
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Pantheon. (Original work published 1975)
Freud, S. (1914). Remembering, repeating and working-through (Further recommendations on the technique of psycho-analysis II). Standard Edition, 12, 145–156.
Illouz, E. (2007). Cold intimacies: The making of emotional capitalism. Polity Press.
Jukes, A. (2001). What you want: Even if it hurts. Free Association Books.
Lacan, J. (1977). Écrits: A selection (A. Sheridan, Trans.). W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1966)
Marx, K. (1844/2007). Economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844 (M. Milligan, Trans.). Dover Publications.
Stein, M. (2023, May 9). Jungian analytical psychology in the workplace: An interview with Murray Stein. In D. Verburg (Ed.), Dirk Verburg. Retrieved September 10, 2025, from https://dirkverburg.com/2023/05/09/jungian-analytical-psychology-in-the-workplace-an-interview-with-murray-stein/
Winnicott, D. W. (1960). Ego distortion in terms of true and false self. In The maturational processes and the facilitating environment (pp. 140–152). International Universities Press.
