Individual & Group Psychosis in a Capitalist Liberal Democracy: a symptomatic diagnosis of what ails us

(Bracketed comments, which I trust you will not find too annoying, are from yours truly.)

While I join those who believe that we need to question Donald Trump’s psychological fitness to be president, my focus is less on individual psychopathology than on the interface between Trump and the American collective psyche. There are ways in which Trump mirrors, even amplifies, our collective attention deficit disorder, our sociopathy, and our narcissism. [….] Trump has mesmerized our national psyche like no other public figure in recent memory. There is no doubt that his appeal (his wealth, power, celebrity status, and his brash willingness to shoot from the hip) resonates powerfully with the collective psyche of many Americans, while these same qualities are repulsive to many others. The more vulgar, bullying, impulsive, and self-congratulatory Trump’s behavior and rhetoric [among the symptoms of malignant narcissism and present hedonism], the more some people worship him, while others fervently denounce him as a grave danger to our republic. [….]

I hypothesize a direct link between Trump’s personal narcissism and the collective psyche of those American citizens who embrace his perception of America and who feel that he understands and speaks to them. This is not a political analysis. It is a psychological analysis of what we can think of as the group psyche, which contributes enormously to and fuels political processes. This analysis is based on the notion that there are certain psychological energies, even structures, at the level of the cultural or group psyche that are activated at times of heightened threats to the core identity of the group…. [….] It seems clear that Trump’s narcissism and his attacks on political correctness dovetail with deep needs in a significant portion of the American population to enhance their dwindling sense of place in American and of America’s place in the world. Trump’s narcissism can be seen as a perfect compensatory mirror for the narcissistic needs and injuries of those who support him—or, stated another way, there is a good ‘fit.’ [….] It is quite possible that Trump’s personal inflation, arrogance, and hubris represent a compensatory antidote in our group psyche that is beginning to suffer severe self-doubt about our inability to navigate a highly uncertain future—the nostalgic longing of which is perfectly articulated in the phrase, ‘I want my country back.’ [….]

Trump is at his best when he is at his most awful: this willingness to be politically incorrect became a sign, to many, of his ‘truth-telling.’ Amidst a most dangerous battle between the ‘alternative facts’ of the alt-right [now the core identity of the GOP] and ‘fake news’ came an outpouring of the paranoia and hostility embedded in the cultural complex of those who loathe ‘the deep state.’ Collective emotion is the only truth that matters. A group caught up in a cultural complex has highly selective memory—if any historical memory at all—and chooses only those historical and contemporary facts that value their preexisting opinion. Evidence of this is that no matter what Trump does or how many lies he tells, his base remains steadfast in its support of him, as the polls tell us [things have grown precipitously worse since this was written, as it is no longer a question of a biased selection of self-serving ‘facts,’ but widespread belief in illusions, delusions, and phantasies, as the increasing numbers of adherents to QAnon conspiracy phantasy (including a twenty-four followers running for Congress, several of whom have a good chance of winning a seat in the House) attest]. This kind of shadow energy [a Jungian idea] is available for exploitation if a group that previously saw itself as having a solid place in America (such as white middle-class Americans in the Rust Belt or coal miners in West Virginia) finds itself marginalized and drifting downward, both socially and economically. How easy it is for such a group to see recent immigrants to this country as stealing the American dream from them.

Donald Trump uncovered a huge sinkhole of dark, raw emotions in the national psyche for all of us to see. Rage, hatred, envy, and fear surfaced in the forgotten, despairing, growing white underclass who had little reason to believe that the future would hold the promise of a brighter, life-affirming purpose. Trump tapped into the negative feelings that many Americans have about all the things we are supposed to be compassionate about—ethnic, racial, gender, and religious differences. What a relief, so many must have thought, to hear a politician speak their unpleasant resentments and express their rage. — From Thomas Singer’s essay, “Trump and the American Collective Psyche,” in Bandy Lee, ed. The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President (Thomas Dunne Books, 2017): 281-297

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The symbiotic psychoses of the leaders and the led in the messianic nationalist cult of Trump and the Republican Party are at once an immanent and imminent threat to our Liberal democracy and its constitutionally-mandated welfare state,* or so I would argue. That argument (which is not made in full here) necessarily contains what we can call “psychoanalytic premises,” and thus I am sharing several passages from the beginning of James M. Glass’s book, Psychosis and Power: Threats to Democracy in the Self and the Group (Cornell University Press, 1995) because they are remarkably prescient and thus apropos of our current political situation and climate, particularly insofar as we are inclined to characterize it as “frightening,” “crazy,” and “nightmarish” (it is that … and more).

In my lifetime at least, I cannot recall a time when it appeared so many people (tens of millions?) were dispositionally or habitually afflicted with debilitating psychological phenomena and mental states: denial, self-deception, wishful thinking, illusions, delusions, and phantasies. Being human, we are all in varying degrees and at different times vulnerable to these phenomena and states, but ours is a time and place in which they’ve become ubiquitous at the level of both individual and group psychology. There is of course historical precedence, hence the familiar locution from Erich Fromm: the “pathology of normalcy.” As Daniel Burston¹ informs us, this phrase, while used in reference to the “pervasive alienation of postwar industrial society,” and “[l]ike the very idea of a sane society,” in fact “derives from a broader anthropological and historical outlook Fromm termed ‘normative humanism.’ Its controversial premise [one shared by Gandhi in Hind Swaraj²] is that society as whole can be sick or ‘insane,’ inasmuch as it fails to address existential needs that are vital to the growth and development of the human individual.” We can, like Fromm himself on occasion (and like Marx before him), view this in reference to the denial or distortion of more basic material and psychological needs as well.

Glass begins by speaking of “psychotic disintegration” and “psychotic selves” before shifting to exclusive reference to the “schizophrenic self,” although I prefer the first diagnostic designation if only because it is broader in scope.

“It may seem odd to draw inferences about the operation of power from the parables and stories of individuals who suffer from psychotic disintegration. [….] I take these stories to be real experiences described by human beings who suffer, who know something about the structure and reality of power as it affects their lives, perceptions, and values. The feel of power, the reality of power for psychotic selves, suggests a firsthand knowledge of tyranny. In this sense, I believe, the raw, primitive, archaic quality of the schizophrenic experience demonstrates how power works.

What the schizophrenic self suffers is a microcosmic representation of the political form of power as tyranny and domination. Power is exercised on the self; it defines the world of knowledge and meaning in rigid terms of absolute good and evil [as in the populist cult of Trump]. This power derives not from social or consensual bases but from narcissism and solipsism [hence the shared and mutually reinforcing pathologies between the leader(s) and the led]. It seeks omnipotence [on the collective plain, the ‘power’ of those powerless is thus vicariously realized in the power of the authoritarian demagogue; the religious analogue found in the notion of ‘vicarious’ or ‘substitutionary’ atonement’]. It [i.e., that which is psychologically regressive and more sub- or un-conscious than not] is destructive, parasitic, and violent. It pushes the self into masochism and physical mutilation.” [….]

“The fragility of secondary process³ restraints perhaps implies that only a thin line separates a so-called democratic or participatory politics from equally powerful and dangerous tendencies within the culture to institute the infantile world of unlimited entitlement in the form of tyrannical power. What is repressed, as Freud discovered a century ago, refuses to disappear; it lingers; it affects action; it transforms life; it reappears.

Regression destroys secondary process structures, pushes the self into a state of boundlessness, releases enormous amounts of aggression and intensifies feelings of anxiety and panic. Living without limits, possessed by a delusional epistemology, the self faces a loss of continuity and being. What emerges in both the self and the group are actions or forms of power that have nothing to do with tolerance, respect for rights [such right are morally and legally limited at that point where they cause harm to others or when they interfere with the exercise of the joint or shared rights of others], or what John Stuart Mill calls liberty [Mill’s conception of liberty does not denote or imply, let alone exemplify, the predominant contemporary ‘libertarian’ picture⁴].

Psychosis threatens democratic forms of conflict resolution by attacking a sense of limitation and those boundaries between groups which, while allowing each to pursue its own cultural ends, nonetheless protects the group’s integrity. What psychosis releases—intense vulnerability, rage, and hatred, Kristeva’s ‘unnameable space of need’—finds itself contained within [Liberal] democratic approaches to conflict resolution and negotiation, particularly acknowledgment of and respect for rights. A liberal democratic polity requires renunciation and sublimation and the willingness to endure restraint in the pursuit of self-interest.⁵[….] The willingness to sustain conflict without resort to tyranny requires, to use Peter Gay’s words, ‘a capacity for tolerating delays, disappointments and ambiguities attendant upon any open society, an unimpaired capacity for reality testing, for curbing one’s aggressiveness without turning against oneself, for reliance on defensive stratagems that remain moderates in scope and flexible in application.’ Democracy that respects rights and liberty is indeed fragile. [….]

[Liberal] [d]emocracy is, in its politics as well as in its epistemology, a defense against more extreme (what I call psychotic) modes of being and power. It acts as a protection against regression, the tendency to embrace unyielding and totalizing ideological positions. And its method of conflict resolution functions much the same way as the mother/container does for her infant’s split-off, raging self. A resilient democratic culture (one embracing participatory modes of action) will hold or contain the rage of its constituent groups without allowing it to annihilate either the constitutional structures maintaining the community or the respect for rights which allows conflict to flourish with endangering individuality. Conflict is the lifeblood of democracy, but it consistently circulates around the respect for the capacity of the other to contain and detoxify disruptive aspect of the self or group emotion. Democratic institutions, from this perspective, do not eliminate conflict; rather, they detoxify anarchic or annihilating presence and consequence. Power becomes supportive and creative or, to use Erik Erikson’s concept, ‘generative;’ it fosters growth. Conflict is talked about and legislated rather than imposed and forced. Rage is held by institutional and cultural processes that work to bind the entropic tendency present in all expressions of political interest. [….]

A democratic theory of rights and participation protects against the fragility of human defenses against regression (the psychotic substratum to all human experience, Kristeva’s ‘hole’ that threatens to engulf the ‘subject’), the unbinding of the self, the refuge in solipsism, a kind of political variant on what Otto Kernberg calls ‘pathological narcissism.’ Democracy respects conflict, works to contain its entropy; the dynamic is dialectical, and the relationship between container and contained is reciprocal. Hobbes and Machiavelli fear conflict and its effects and desire to suppress or enchain its consequences; the push is to close off communication, to repress, hold down, crush.

Democracy as a political theory protects the values of liberty and autonomy, which at the level of individual psychology are parallel to the acceptance of boundary, proportion, limitation. Democracy opposes the affect or symptom of nonreciprocal power: unrestrained narcissism, unlimited entitlement, perceptions of omnipotence, delusions or images of grandeur and dominance. As Peter Gay puts it: ‘Cultures … regress just as individuals do …. Jingoism is a triumph of the primary process.’ It is one political equivalent of narcissistic rage.”

These introductory remarks fit rather well within the tradition of psychoanalytic psychology, especially insofar as that was—and occasionally still is—integrated (at times uneasily or inconsistently yet no less coherently) within Leftist worldviews (communist, socialist, and social democratic) from the earliest history of Freudian and later Kleinian psychoanalysis. (This reminds me of why I’ve found much of the political science literature unavailing.)

Erich Fromm, Arno Gruen, Wilfred Bion, Nancy Chodorow, C. Fred Alford, Michael Rustin, Eugene Victor Wolfenstein, Julia Kristeva, and Jessica Benjamin come quickest to mind as well-representing this, or something very close to this kind of psychoanalytically grounded exploration of “the political.” I am not a fan of (meaning, I have reasons not to endorse) “Lacanian” approaches to this subject, which are quite fashionable in some quarters of the academic world, including among those of Marxist suasion. I won’t here attempt a full-bodied explanation of why, but of course I might be mistaken and others remain perfectly free to work on or experiment with the relevance of Lacanian ideas to understanding many-things-political, even if I think one’s discretionary attention is best directed elsewhere.  

* On this, see Sotirios A. Barber, Welfare and the Constitution (Princeton University Press, 2003). On the regnant types of welfare states in North America and Europe, see Robert E. Goodin, et al., The Real Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Cambridge University Press, 1999).

Notes (by me, not Glass)

1. Daniel Burston, The Legacy of Erich Fromm (Harvard University Press, 1991): 133.
2. As Raghavan Iyer explains, Gandhi held “that a man laboring under the delusions engendered by modern civilization I like a dreamer who revels in the seeming reality of his dream. Man today is an emasculated—a favorite word of Gandhi—victim of a vast humbug that is kept alive by schools, legislatures, armies, churches, prisons, and hospitals [not much later Ivan Illich would echo much of this selfsame sentiment]. Our civilization has the seductive color of a consumptive who clings to life but is doomed to die. The analogy is reminiscent of Fourier’s comparison of civilization to a sick person yearning to be healed by some miracle and seizing feverishly upon every fresh panacea, or of Tawney’s image of a hypochondriac who is so absorbed in the process of his own digestion that he goes to his grave before he has begun to live. In our own time, Eric Fromm has argued that just as there is a folie à deux, so there is a folie à millions; ‘the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.’” From Iyer’s The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi (Santa Barbara, CA: Concord Grove Press, 2nd ed., 1983/Oxford University Press, 1973): 25-26. For a concise and incisive summary of Gandhi’s critique of modern civilization, see Bhikhu Parekh’s Gandhi’s Political Philosophy: A Critical Examination (University of Notre Dame Press, 1989): 21-35.
3. This refers to one of the two modes of functioning of the psychical apparatus specified by Freud: (a) “from the topographical point of view, primary process is characteristic of the unconscious system, while the secondary process typifies the pre-conscious and conscious system; (b) from the economico-dynamic point of view: in the case of the primary process, psychical energy flows freely, passing unhindered, by means of the mechanisms of condensation and displacement, from one idea to another and tending to completely recathect the ideas attached to those satisfying experiences which are at the root of unconscious desires (primitive hallucination [and phantasy]); in the case of the secondary process, the energy is bound at first and then it flows in a controlled manner: ideas are cathected in a more stable fashion while satisfaction is postponed, so allowing for mental experiments which test out the various possible paths leading to satisfaction. The opposition between the primary and the secondary process responds to the between the pleasure principle and the reality principle.” This later explication may be a bit clearer for those not well-acquainted with the Freudian corpus: “In Freud’s view … the primary process is the earliest, most primitive form of mentation; it seeks immediate and complete discharge by recathecting the iconic memory trace of the need-satisfying object in accordance with the pleasure principle (this is called hallucinatory wish fulfillment). The freely mobile cathexis in the Unconscious allows one idea within the wish-related associative network to symbolize another idea (a process known as displacement); one idea can also symbolically express several others (condensation); thus unacceptable ideas can evade the censorship of the Preconscious-Conscious system. On a more descriptive level, the concept of the primary process embraces such characteristics of unconscious mentation as the disregard of logical connection, the coexistence of logical contradictions, the absence of a temporal dimension and of negatives, and the use of indirect representation and concretization (imagery). From a developmental perspective, the primary process is gradually (albeit never completely) inhibited in the normal waking state by the secondary process. The latter operates with bound cathexis and verbal, denotative symbols. Governed by the reality principle, it accounts for reality-attuned, logical thought, exemplified by delayed, modulated drive gratification through problem-solving (the internal activity of trial and error). In contemporary psychoanalytic theory, the primary and secondary process modes of thought lie on a continuum, all thought products (dreams, symptoms, slips, fantasies, daydreams, directed problem-solving) show varying degrees of organizational structure and admixtures of primitive, regressive, defensive, and mature mechanisms.” In brief, largely rational thought and conscious action exemplify secondary process mentation. Our two sources, respectively: Jean Laplanche and Jean-Betrand Pontalis (Donald Nicholson-Smith, trans.), The Language of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac Books, 1988; first published in French in 1967, with the first English translation by Hogarth Press, 1973); and Burness E. Moore and Bernard D. Fine, eds., Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press and The American Psychoanalytic Association, 1990).
4. Please see Nadia Urbinati’s Mill on Democracy: From the Athenian Polis to Representative Government (University of Chicago Press, 2002).
5. On this notion of self-interest (which is not synonymous with selfishness or crude egoism) as it developed in the Liberal tradition of political philosophy, please see Stephen Holmes, Passions and Constraint: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 1995).

Further Reading

• Alford, C. Fred. What Evil Means to Us (Cornell University Press, 1997).
• Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflection on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, revised ed., 1991).
• Auestad, Lene, ed. Nationalism and the Body Politic: Psychoanalysis and the Rise of Ethnocentrism and Xenophobia (Karnac Books, 2014).
• Breuilly, John. Nationalism and the State (University of Chicago Press, 2nd ed., 1994).
• Coady, C.A.J. Morality and Political Violence (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
• Cohn, Norman. The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (Oxford University Press, revised and expanded ed., 1970).
• Cohn, Norman. Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith (Yale University Press, 1993).
• Collins, Adela Yarbro. “The Book of Revelation,” in John J. Collins, ed. The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, Vol. 1: The Origins of Apocalypticism in Judaism and Christianity (Continuum, 2000): 384-414.
• Gruen, Arno. The Insanity of Normality—Realism as Sickness: Toward an Understanding of Human Destructiveness (Grove Press, 1992).
• Hedges, Chris. Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (Nation Books, 2009).
• Hobsbawm, E.J. Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge University Press, 1990).
• Keane, John. Violence and Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2004).
• Lee, Bandy, ed. The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2017).
• Mann, Michael. The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
• McGinn, Bernard, ed. The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism: Vol. 2: Apocalypticism in Western History and Culture (Continuum, 2000).
• Rustin, Michael. The Good Society and the Inner World: Psychoanalysis, Politics and Culture (Verso, 1991).
• Storr, Anthony. Human Destructiveness (Grove Weidenfeld, 1991).
• Tismaneanu, Vladimir. Fantasies of Salvation: Democracy, Nationalism and Myth in Post-Communist Europe (Princeton University Press, 1998).
• Urbinati, Nadia. Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People (Harvard University Press, 2014).
• Vetlesen, Arne Johan. Evil and Human Agency: Understanding Collective Evildoing (Cambridge University Press, 2005).

Relevant Bibliographies

• Beyond Inequality: Toward Welfare, Well-Being and Human Flourishing
• Beyond Punitive Liberal Capitalist Society
• Democratic Theory
• The Deformation and Perversion of Education in a Capitalist Democracy
• The Emotions
• Human Nature and Personal Identity
• Toward an Understanding of Liberalism
• Marxism
• Marxism and Freudian Psychology
• Psychoanalytic Psychology and Therapy
• Toward a Realist Social and Political Psychology
• Utopian Imagination, Thought and Praxis