Freudian Tip
Maybe the best way to understand this moment in American political history is to put the nation on the couch for some analysis. It turns out Freud gave a lot of thought to what attracts voters to tyrants and strongmen. “Freud had no compunction in calling the relationship that crowds forge with an absolute leader an erotic one. (In this he was seconded by Hitler, who suggested that in his speeches he made love to the German masses.) What happens when members of the crowd are ‘hypnotized’ (that is the word Freud uses) by a tyrant?” This piece by Mark Edmundson in the NYT (Gift Article) is from 2006, but it’s definitely worth resurfacing. Freud and the Fundamentalist Urge. “We want a strong man with a simple doctrine that accounts for our sufferings, identifies our enemies, focuses our energies and gives us, more enduringly than wine or even love, a sense of being whole. This man, as Freud says in his great book on politics, ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,’ must appear completely masterful. He must seem to have perfect confidence, to need no one and to be entirely sufficient unto himself. Sometimes this man will evoke a god as his source of authority, sometimes not. But in whatever form he comes — whether he is called Hitler, Stalin, Mao — he will promise to deliver people from their confusion and to dispense unity and purpose where before there were only fracture and incessant anxiety. But, of course, the price is likely to be high, because the simplifications the great man offers will almost inevitably involve hatred and violence.”
+ And an article from today in The Atlantic (Gift Article): Freud Is Having a Moment. Trump “urges us all to shake loose the surly bonds of civilized conduct: to make science irrelevant and rationality optional, to render truth obsolete, to set power free to roam the world, to lift all the core conditions written into the social contract—fealty to reason, skepticism about instincts, aspirations to justice.” Trump is, in other words, an atavist, inviting citizens to satisfy all of their hungry drives, all of their libidinous instincts: His America is a place for malign energies to express themselves in action. There’s a certain pleasure in that, perhaps, a kind of psychic relief—to lose oneself in a radical movement and to express feelings normally prohibited by society.” (Now add social media, which features some of the same characteristics.)
+ Of course, those on the other side of the political spectrum are also welcome on Freud’s couch. For them, I’d suggest (as I have a few times in the past) considering what psychoanalysts call the narcissism of small differences, or “the idea that the more a relationship or community shares commonalities, the more likely the people in it are to engage in interpersonal feuds and mutual ridicule because of hypersensitivity to minor differences perceived in each other.” (The way I see it, if you’re pro democracy, you can join me on my couch any time.)
