The State on the Couch

Dr. Keir Martin ISRF Political Economy Research Fellow, 2017–18

In 2003, Canadian law professor Joel Bakan created something of a storm with the publication of his best-seller The Corporation. 1 In it, Bakan attempted to explain to a wider audience what a corporation would look like if one thought of it as a person. This was not so much of a stretch of the imagination, legally speaking, as in the US and the UK, corporations are considered to be ‘persons under law’; non-human entities with many of the rights and obligations that they hold in common with, but separately from, the human persons that created them. Bakan’s real impact came not with his careful explanation of the otherwise obscure legal principle of ‘corporate personhood’ however, but with his characterisation of the kind of person that the corporation would be if it actually were human. ‘Do you work for a psychopath?’, screamed the advertising tag for the book and the festival-winning documentary that it inspired. Focusing on how corporations are legally mandated to pursue their own self-interest in the form of profit above any other form of ethical responsibility to others, Bakan argues that this is exactly the kind of pathological personality that we would instantly recognise as psychopathic in a human person; the relentless drive to secure one’s own interest at the expense of others who one is only capable of seeing as objects in the service of those desires. Bakan’s critique was so effective because it placed a seemingly technical problem in very human terms; a move that paradoxically enough was enabled by the very principle of corporate personhood upon which modern corporate entities are based. By putting the corporation on the couch, Bakan managed to put a face to a sense that a growing number of people had: that the entities that governed their lives increasingly did not have their best interests at heart.

For all their undoubted influence, corporations are not the only non-human entities that seek to shape and regulate our lives on a daily basis. Nation-states have perhaps an even greater influence on us. Indeed, it is only through their legal rules and regulations that the judicial rituals through which corporations come into being can occur at all. How might we characterise these entities and their relationship to us if we were to follow Bakan’s lead? If we put states on the couch, would our clinical diagnosis uncover that they too are psychopaths? Or do they suffer from another form of anti-social pathology, or even (unlikely as it would seem to some) might we find out that they are merely run-of-the-mill moderately well-adjusted personalities with only the usual array of minor everyday tics and neuroses to make them therapeutically of interest to us?

One immediate difference that we might note between the corporation and the state is their purported roles. According to Bakan, the corporation’s fundamental basis as a personality is the relentless pursuit of self-interest, and any benefit that accrues to us is the happy yet unconscious outcome of that pathological drive to wealth and power. The state by contrast is (supposedly at least) established with the protection of our interests at heart. Its role is to step in to regulate our disputes amongst ourselves and to protect us from our enemies abroad, like a concerned teacher or kindergarten worker intervening in playground squabbles to ensure that they don’t get out of hand. This might suggest that the state might be best viewed in terms of a role rather than a pathology. In contrast to the corporation as psychopath, the state can be viewed as the parent-figure whose job is to protect us; both from others and, increasingly, from ourselves.

This last point is important when putting the state, as we find it in its current form, towards the end of the second decade of the third millennium, on the couch. If we view the state as a parent then it would be easy to romanticise it, in contrast to the corporation as psychopath. Who wouldn’t agree that, on the whole, parents as a class are desirable and necessary as a group when compared to psychopaths? We see something of this in the nostalgia in some quarters for the good old Keynesian days of greater state involvement in the economy and society that has arisen in response to 40 years of neoliberalism and 10 years of post-crisis austerity. We see it too in the romanticisation of Scandinavia and its cuddly welfare state as an alternative to the UK’s cold corporate neoliberalism in some quarters of the British media.

State on the Couch by Erin Kavanagh (2019).

See http://www.geomythkavanagh.com/ for more of Erin’s work.

But the role of ‘parent’ is an ambiguous one, and even well-intentioned inappropriate parents can potentially do more harm to the children in their care than any number of short-lived encounters with passing psychopaths. Transactional Analysis, as a school of psychotherapy, explicitly recognises this with its Parent-Adult-Child model of relations. In many contexts Parent-Child relations are entirely appropriate. However, these are mostly relationships between those adults with parental or caregiving responsibilities on the one hand and those children who they care for on the other. Amongst adults, Adult-Adult relationships tend to work the best. Where, in such relationships, an Adult takes on the role of Parent, she treats the other as if they were a Child instead of a fellow Adult, forcing them to comply or to rebel, an act that itself often still casts them in a Child-like role. Such a potential to inappropriately slip into Parent-Child is there in all Adult-Adult relationships, particularly those between Parents and their now-adult Children, as many readers of this journal, half-anticipating and halfdreading a visit from their own parents, will readily testify. Parents who try to mould their children in their own image or continue to cling onto the idea that their growing offspring are still helpless infants, in order to satisfy their own neurotic need for control, can do more harm than good. It’s often the case that such over-controlling parents are the most ostentatiously caring and nurturing. Indeed, in such cases it’s often hard to see where beneficent nurture ends and maleficent control begins.

The expansion of the Welfare State in the UK in the post-war decades did wonders for the lives of millions of its poorer citizens, but it is worth remembering that the provision of those services was often coupled with a moral policing of the sexuality and family lives of its recipients. Likewise, the Scandinavian model so highly regarded in The Guardian might provide an admirable baseline standard of living for its citizens (if not all of its residents) compared to many other countries. But it comes coupled with states that often seem to treat their citizens as recalcitrant children in need of constant hand-holding to ensure that everyone plays well together. This might be preferable in many regards to the neoliberal state that came to prominence in the UK and particularly the US over the past couple of decades. This kind of state, that endlessly cuts back on the care it showed for its weakest citizens whilst increasing the amount of surveillance and imprisonment that it imposed upon them, could easily be characterised as the equivalent of the abusive parent who neglects to provide her children with appropriate care and support and attempts to deal with the consequences of that neglect through angry punishments disguised as discipline.

Either way, there is a potential overlap with Bakan’s perspective on the corporation as psychopath here. What the psychopath on the one hand and the inappropriate parent (whether benevolent-controlling or neglectful-abusive) on the other have in common is a tendency to treat those that they are related to as objects for their own ends rather than subjects in their own right. In even the healthiest of interpersonal relationships there will be moments when we treat those we love as objects, when we manipulate or control them in order to get a desired result that we honestly believe is in their interest; the grabbing of the hand that stops a child or an adult partner stepping in front of a bus that they hadn’t seen coming, for example. The problem is when such behaviour becomes habitual; when it becomes a ‘mother-knows-best’ degree of manipulative control that stops children from exercising their judgment to become the people they desire to be. Where the seemingly social-democratic Scandinavian states and the seemingly neoliberal Anglo-American states of the early 21 st century share common ground is in a desire to ever more minutely manage the desires and dreams of their citizens. One continues to provide for its citizen-children whilst the other neglects them, but both are increasingly interested in controlling what kind of people they think their citizens should be. In this regard, they both resemble the kind of neurotic controlling parent, whose children one often meets as clients in the therapy room. The 21 st -century state is the parent who can’t let go of their children’s childhood, and who comes around to their child’s home and rearranges the ornaments for them.

1. Joel Bakan, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (Free Press, 2004).