“My boss is a psychopath.” The sentence surfaces in hallway conversations, WhatsApp groups, lunches between colleagues, and psychoanalytic sessions. It usually comes with a laugh, as though humor could soften what, when described seriously, almost sounds impossible to believe: the boss who lies while looking you straight in the eye, humiliates an employee in front of the team, takes credit for other people’s work, changes the rules after the game is over, and still manages to convince the victim that they are the problem.

Of course, this is a wild diagnosis. No one can conclude that someone is a psychopath because of an aggressive email or a humiliating meeting. Psychopathy is a complex concept; it is not automatically equivalent to antisocial personality disorder, and it cannot be diagnosed from a distance. But perhaps that is precisely where the conversation becomes interesting: even if the employee gets the diagnosis wrong, are they really that far from the truth?

When someone says, “My boss is a psychopath,” they are probably not trying to complete a psychiatric checklist. They are saying that they work under someone who lies without guilt, manipulates without embarrassment, charms people when necessary, discards them when they are no longer useful, and does not seem to regard other people’s suffering as particularly relevant. Worse still, this person is often rewarded for it. The joke may be clinically imprecise and socially accurate at the same time.

When Cruelty Becomes Competence

The executive world was not necessarily created by psychopaths, but it was structured to select, tolerate, and reward characteristics that, when taken to an extreme, come remarkably close to this mode of functioning. Emotional coldness becomes “objectivity.” The absence of guilt turns into “the ability to make difficult decisions.” Manipulation is renamed “political intelligence.” Superficial charm appears as “charisma.” The obsession with control is mistaken for leadership, while taking credit for other people’s work becomes “strategic vision.”

Even the ability to dismiss hundreds of employees without showing the slightest inner conflict may be celebrated as proof of courage. The same behavior that would make us run from someone in our private lives can be interpreted as competence inside a company. Perhaps the most important question, then, is not whether that boss really is a psychopath, but why characteristics considered dangerous in personal relationships become so highly valued when they appear in the workplace.

That is the contradiction the term “corporate psychopath” attempts to capture. Research into psychopathy in the workplace associates the presence of these traits with higher levels of bullying, unfair supervision, internal conflict, and damage to employee well-being. Studies of the so-called Dark Triad — narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy — also examine how certain characteristics may help people reach leadership positions, although the relationship between personality, power, and performance is more complex than corporate bestsellers tend to suggest.

The corporate psychopath, incidentally, does not need to enter the room shouting. They may be charming, articulate, funny, and extremely skilled at understanding what each person wants to hear. They understand emotions but do not necessarily feel bound by them, because recognizing another person’s vulnerability is not the same as feeling empathy. Sometimes it simply means discovering where to apply pressure.

Their cruelty also tends to be selective. They may treat superiors with deference and subordinates with contempt, build an impeccable public image while psychologically destabilizing the people who work closely with them, and be regarded as an inspiring leader by those who have never depended directly on their decisions. That is why so many accusations seem unbelievable to people who have only ever observed the aggressor from above or at a distance. “They have always been wonderful to me,” someone will say, without realizing that this experience does not invalidate the others. In fact, it merely confirms that the person knows exactly whom they need to please.

Fiction Already Knew This Boss

Fiction recognized this profile long before companies began talking seriously about mental health. Miranda Priestly, in The Devil Wears Prada, may be its most popular representation because she turns humiliation into excellence and absolute availability into professional opportunity. Her cruelty is accepted because everyone around her believes that working for her is a privilege. What is most revealing, however, is not only Miranda’s behavior but Andy’s transformation. In order to belong to that world, she begins reproducing with others the same insensitivity from which she initially believed herself to be different.

In Succession, Logan Roy goes even further. He does not simply rule a company through fear; he creates an entire organization dedicated to anticipating his desires, competing for his approval, and surviving his mood swings. No one knows exactly what the rule is because Logan is the only rule. The alternation between praise and contempt keeps his children and executives trapped in the fantasy that, next time, they will finally be chosen. It is the same mechanism that makes so many abusive professional relationships difficult to leave.

Severance, on the other hand, shifts the focus away from the powerful boss and onto the institution itself. At Lumon, workers are literally separated from their histories, relationships, and lives outside the office. Harmony Cobel and Milchick can demonstrate tenderness while administering human beings as objects because the violence is embedded in the procedure. It does not matter that much who occupies a particular position: the system will continue to exist and will find someone else willing to carry it out.

In Tár, prestige and talent function as protection. The more exceptional Lydia Tár is considered, the easier it becomes to reinterpret her abuses as artistic rigor, eccentricity, or the inevitable price of genius. Miranda, Logan, Cobel, and Lydia are very different characters, but they reveal the same operation: cruelty rarely presents itself by its real name when it is protected by power. It may appear as genius, leadership, discipline, tradition, or the pursuit of excellence. Fiction merely makes visible what professional language attempts to conceal.

The Company Can Also Psychopathize

Perhaps the most disturbing point is not the existence of people with psychopathic traits in positions of authority, but the possibility that the organization itself produces this mode of functioning, even among people who did not originally possess it. A person does not need to be incapable of guilt to learn that expressing guilt will damage their career. They do not need to lack empathy to realize that empathy gets in the way of meeting targets in that environment. Nor do they need to enjoy humiliation to understand that spreading fear increases their authority.

The system does not merely attract certain profiles. It teaches ordinary people to suspend part of their own sensitivity in order to survive and rise through the ranks. Some cannot do it. They become ill, resign, or spend years trying to understand why they failed to adapt. Others find a more efficient solution and identify with the aggressor, reproducing with those beneath them what they suffered from those above. Violence ceases to be an isolated event and becomes a method for training future leaders.

That is why reducing everything to one boss’s personality can be extremely convenient for the company. The organization preserves its image, occasionally selects a villain, and avoids asking why that behavior worked for so long, who protected it, and how many supposedly exceptional results depended on silence, fear, and a team’s deteriorating health. The boss may indeed be a psychopath, but they rarely acted alone.

From the Time Clock to Permanent Surveillance

History helps explain why these behaviors found such fertile ground. With industrialization, workers began to be treated as measurable parts of the production process. Taylorism fragmented tasks, measured gestures, and separated people from the knowledge of what they were producing. Fordism perfected repetition and the discipline of time. The body had to keep pace with the machine.

Contemporary capitalism, however, went further. It is no longer enough to sell one’s body and a few hours of the day. The company wants creativity, emotional availability, enthusiasm, identification, and desire. Workers must deliver results and demonstrate that they love delivering them. They must compete with colleagues, call the team a family, adapt continuously, and accept precarity as an opportunity for reinvention.

From the final decades of the 20th century onward, financialization and the priority given to shareholder returns intensified the pressure for immediate results. People began to be presented as costs, layoffs became signs of efficiency, and constantly expanding targets created organizations in which any limit appears to be a personal defect in whoever dares to articulate it.

Technology completed the process. The boss no longer needs to monitor workers in person because employees carry the company in their pockets. Emails, apps, rankings, performance reviews, after-hours messages, and real-time indicators have made surveillance permanent. Even when no one is watching, the individual monitors their own productivity.

In psychoanalytic terms, the old superego said, “You cannot.” The contemporary superego commands the subject to produce more, exceed their limits, fulfill themselves, be happy, love what they do, and, above all, never stop. When they inevitably fail, they do not conclude that the demand is limitless. They conclude that they themselves are inadequate. It is not enough to be exhausted. They must feel guilty about their exhaustion. It is not enough to become ill. They must interpret their illness as further proof of personal failure.

When Work Destroys Your Trust in Yourself

The rise in mental health-related leave cannot be separated from this model. Brazil recorded more than 546,000 work absences due to mental health conditions in 2025, a new record and an increase of approximately 15% over the previous year, according to social security data compiled by Brazil’s Federal Nursing Council. In 2024, there had already been more than 400,000 cases, compared with 288,865 in 2023. Worldwide, depression and anxiety are estimated to cause the loss of 12 billion working days each year, at a cost of nearly US$1 trillion in lost productivity. The World Health Organization itself identifies excessive workloads, low job control, insecurity, discrimination, and negative behavior as risks to mental health.

Burnout, recognized by the WHO as an occupational phenomenon, results from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed and involves exhaustion, mental distance or cynicism toward one’s job, and reduced professional effectiveness. It is not simply feeling tired after a difficult week. Even so, the system that causes the illness usually returns it to the worker as an individual problem. They need to meditate, exercise, manage their time more effectively, develop emotional intelligence, and strengthen their resilience.

None of these things is useless. Therapy, rest, physical activity, and emotional connections can be essential. The perversity lies in using them to help someone adapt more effectively to an abusive structure. The company creates impossible targets, keeps a destructive boss in place, and offers a lecture on work-life balance or a mindfulness app. In the end, the question still falls on the person who became ill: why couldn’t you cope? Perhaps it would be more honest to ask why they should have been expected to.

In the clinic, work-related suffering may appear as anxiety, insomnia, irritability, crying spells, compulsive behavior, difficulty concentrating, physical symptoms, and a persistent sense of incompetence. Yet one of its most violent effects is often the destruction of a person’s trust in their own perception. The boss makes a promise and later denies ever making it, humiliates someone and calls it feedback, isolates an employee and says they do not know how to work as part of a team, demands the impossible and attributes failure to a lack of commitment. They change the criteria, erase agreements, and retrospectively reorganize events so that they never have to occupy the position of the person responsible.

The alternation between recognition and devaluation makes the bond even harder to break. One day, the employee is treated as indispensable. The next, they are made to feel easily replaceable. They are offered the promise of a promotion, an apparently special relationship, or a compliment that temporarily repairs everything that had been destroyed. They begin to believe once again that, if they work just a little harder, they will finally receive the recognition they want. It is not so different from other abusive relationships. Unpredictability increases dependency because the subject begins chasing the return of the good moment that appeared between two episodes of aggression.

They arrive in analysis wondering whether they are exaggerating, whether they are too sensitive, whether everyone else can deal with that boss and they alone cannot, or whether they genuinely are not competent enough. There is, however, a clinical risk in immediately transforming all workplace violence into fantasy or transference. Not all suffering caused by a boss is merely a reenactment of the relationship with one’s father or mother. Sometimes there is an objectively abusive situation. The subject’s history may explain why they tolerate it, rationalize it, or try to win the recognition of the person destabilizing them, but it does not make the violence any less real.

What Psychoanalysis Can Do

Psychoanalysis will not treat the boss or determine whether they are a psychopath. Nor will it function as a human resources department or career consultancy. Its work begins with the effects that the relationship has produced in the subject: the doubt about their own perception, the guilt over not being able to cope, the fear of losing recognition, the sense of incompetence, and the inability to imagine a life outside that environment.

At first, it may be necessary to help the analysand reconstruct a narrative that has been systematically disorganized. What happened? What had been agreed upon? At what point did the version of events change? What belongs to the subject’s interpretation, and what can be recognized as the other person’s concrete behavior? This does not mean that the analyst must decide who is right, but that they must offer a form of listening that does not reproduce the invalidation the subject has already endured. Analytic neutrality does not mean treating violence and the perception of violence as necessarily equivalent versions of the same event.

Only then does it become possible to investigate why that bond acquired such power. What does the boss’s recognition represent? Why does losing it seem so devastating? What promise keeps the subject trapped: finally being chosen, proving their worth, repairing an old sense of inadequacy, or obtaining from one authority what they never received from another? Analyzing repetition does not mean discovering what the victim did to provoke the abuse. It means understanding why, even while recognizing the suffering involved, they continue expecting something from a relationship that will probably never be able to provide it.

The abusive boss often finds an ally in the worker’s own superego. The external demand to produce more becomes attached to an internal voice that already accuses them of not being dedicated, competent, or resilient enough. That is why stepping away can produce relief and guilt at the same time. The subject does not merely feel that they have left a job; they may feel that they failed, gave up, or lost the opportunity to finally prove their worth. Psychoanalysis makes it possible to separate the subject’s desire from the punitive demand they have learned to recognize as ambition.

There is also a process of mourning. Giving up on being recognized by a particular person or institution means relinquishing a promise in which the subject has invested time, identity, and desire. Even a destructive job may have represented prestige, belonging, security, or an idealized version of the self. Leaving does not automatically produce freedom. It may produce emptiness, shame, and the question of who one is when a title, a company, or a boss’s approval no longer organizes one’s life.

The purpose of psychoanalysis is not to teach the subject to tolerate the intolerable more effectively, but to help them recover the psychological conditions necessary to choose. Remaining for the time being may be materially necessary; leaving may require planning; confrontation may or may not be possible. What matters is that these decisions are no longer governed only by fear, guilt, or the hope of transforming the aggressor. In cases of severe depression, suicidal risk, intense crises, or physical deterioration, psychoanalytic listening also does not exclude medical or psychiatric care. Recognizing the limits of one’s practice is part of care itself.

Survival Does Not Mean Convincing the Aggressor

The first attempt is usually to make the boss understand. To find the right words, present irrefutable facts, and calmly explain that their behavior is causing suffering. The problem is that this strategy assumes a shared pact of truth, responsibility, reciprocity, and guilt. That pact may not exist.

Someone who manipulates others is not necessarily unaware of the suffering they cause. They may simply not consider it important. In some cases, an honest conversation provides them with new information about the employee’s vulnerabilities, which can later be used against them. Survival, therefore, does not mean defeating the psychopath, exposing them in front of everyone, or finally receiving the emotional reparation one wants from them. It means abandoning the expectation that change will depend on making them care.

What matters most is observing behavior rather than trying to decipher intention. Documenting requests, deadlines, changes, and completed work. Confirming important decisions in writing. Preserving relationships outside the circle controlled by the aggressor and checking one’s perception with trustworthy people. Understanding the available institutional channels and legal rights without assuming that the company will necessarily protect the person who reports the abuse. It also means avoiding giving intimacy to someone who turns vulnerability into an instrument of power.

When possible, survival includes building a way out. Financial independence matters precisely because no one leaves an abusive environment simply because they have intellectually understood what they are experiencing. Some people cannot resign immediately, and any discourse that presents resignation as a simple solution risks adding guilt to anguish. Withdrawal may need to be slow, strategic, and silent. Leaving does not necessarily mean failing. Sometimes it simply means refusing to continue offering one’s health, identity, and desire to sustain the sickness of an institution.

There is no need to prove that a boss is a psychopath to recognize that the relationship is destructive. In fact, an obsession with diagnosis may divert attention from what truly matters: what this person does, what effects their actions produce, and why the organization permits or rewards the behavior.

Even so, we should not dismiss so quickly the phrase that circulates among workers. “My boss is a psychopath” may be a spontaneous attempt to name an experience for which corporate language offers only euphemisms. The worker may be getting the diagnosis wrong while getting the structure exactly right. The real scandal is not merely that unscrupulous people rise to positions of power, but that we have created a model of success in which the absence of scruples often looks like competence, while the suffering of those who still possess empathy is treated as an inability to adapt.