It's not science fiction: you already work in Severance (and you didn't know it)

The show Severance shows us a dystopian universe where people surgically split their identity: one part works, the other lives. But what looks like science-fiction exaggeration actually reveals something very real. Many people already live that split between the "work self" and the "personal self," with no chip in the brain, but with an emotional distance just as brutal.

Psychoanalysis offers a powerful lens for understanding why this show is so unsettling: because it shows what's already happening, even if we've normalized it.

The corporate false self

Severance dramatizes this split to the extreme. In the show, the "innies" don't know anything about their outside life. In your company: how many times have you said "it's not personal, it's business" to justify a decision that actually affected you emotionally?

Remember when Helly looks in the mirror and doesn't recognize herself? The same thing happens when you look at your LinkedIn profile and think: "Who even is this person?"

The boss as totem and the law of the father (Freud)

In Severance, the boss never appears but everything revolves around him. The same thing happens in many companies: authority gets idealized, people avoid contradicting it, they fear it and admire it. It's the modern totem, the symbolic father who can't be killed or questioned.

Does your team argue about everything... except what the boss said? Then you already know that invisible "totem" organizing the workplace climate.

When Cobel is pushed out without explanation, we see the law of the father in action: power that gives and takes without reasons. Like when they cancel your favorite project with a three-line email. And Helena, forced by her father into a role she never chose, shows how authority gets imposed from the family and perpetuated inside the company.

The problem is that this totem, silent as it is, conditions everything: it inhibits critical thinking, blocks creativity, and produces teams that act out of fear or blind obedience. And so decisions stop being collective and become submission disguised as alignment.

Teams that compete (Klein, Bion)

Why do sales and operations hate each other? It's not about the numbers: it's the same childhood rivalry Klein described, just with Zoom meetings and Excel charts.

In Severance, this shows up in the absurd competitive dynamics between departments — like the exclusive party for the "data refiners" or the rivalry with the optics and design team. Covert hostility gets translated into games, prizes, and mutual accusations.

And why is this a problem? Because when teams compete, a lot of energy goes into internal rivalries instead of focusing on solving problems or creating something new. The big picture gets lost: everyone defends their own territory, their budget, their ego. The organization becomes less productive, less creative, more fragmented. Nobody sees the whole — only the corner they're in charge of.

Emotional alienation, grief, and regression

The split in Severance lets the "work self" avoid suffering. But in real life, that emotional disconnection also happens: when you act on autopilot, when nothing gets to you, when you stop feeling. It's a way of surviving, but also a way of shutting down.

Have you ever gotten home and had no idea how to explain why you're so exhausted when "nothing happened"? The cost of that split is high: the person loses the capacity to symbolize their experience. They work, deliver, produce... but can't narrate what's happening to them.

Mark, the protagonist, is trapped in unprocessed grief. His wife's death pushes him to disconnect from the outside world — and to accept the split as a refuge. That decision isn't rational: it's a defense. His unprocessed rage throws him into emotional regression, where the split functions as a psychic refuge.

Silent pacts and alliances (group theory)

Every group has unspoken agreements: who to talk to, who to avoid, how to act so you don't stand out or bother anyone. These are ways of regulating the group's unconscious tension.

In Severance, this is evident in the tacit pact among the innies to keep the routine going, avoid certain hallways, not talk about the boss, and maintain alliances that provide some containment against an oppressive system. The group doesn't just work: it also survives emotionally however it can.

Work as unconscious repetition and neurosis

Why do we choose certain jobs, bosses, or situations that repeat themselves over and over? Work isn't a neutral setting: it's a scene where internal stories get played out.

In Severance, even romantic bonds are colored by this mechanism. The attraction between Mark and Helly shows up as a spark that can't be allowed to develop. Their desire is immediate and, at the same time, impossible: forbidden by the rules, repressed by fear. That's also neurosis. Desire shows up where it shouldn't, and turns into tension, discomfort, or symptom.

And there's a lot more

Why does Helly pretend to be a convinced innie when her outie hates being there? Why does Cobel's aunt join a cult that promises meaning? Why does an innie fall in love with his outie's real wife, while the outie can't feel anything at all? Everything in Severance has a psychoanalytic undercurrent, even what looks like mere set dressing. The show is a feast for anyone who knows how to look.

Severance isn't about brain chips. It's about phenomena we see every day in our working lives — and the cost they impose on us emotionally and physically. Disconnection, autopilot, lack of meaning aren't small details: they make us sick, they shut us down. And the worst part is that many times we don't even notice how much we've given up until the body or mind stops.

Psychoanalysis isn't trying to turn everything into therapy. But it does try to open questions where others give orders. And here's an urgent one:

The question is not whether your company is Lumon. The question is: what part of yourself did you leave in the parking lot today? At what cost?