The rise of authoritarianism in political leadership worldwide has been a troubling development especially in democratically constituted nations like the United States, where their constitutional democracy was nearly overthrown by an incumbent president. Parallels to the rise of fascism in Europe in the early part of the 20th century were often voiced in the media. Psychoanalysts were sought out by journalists seeking to diagnose a leader that they called a pathological liar, a narcissist, and a moron. In the ISFN Webinar series titled “Listening with Ferenczi” (2021), psychoanalysts endeavored to analyze the underlying dynamics of the nature of the apparent hypnotic influence the leader had over the populace.

Psychoanalytic principles, usually applied to the understanding of individual dynamics, can also be fruitfully applied to understanding large group dynamics that may lead to the election of populist charismatic leaders with a far-right platform. The four contributors in this issue provide interesting analyses from different perspectives. Together they comprise a clear, cogent, and comprehensive interpretation of the Trump Phenomenon. The discussants’ discourses complement each other, and strands of ideas are woven together to form an appealing narrative explicating the meteoric rise of a political outsider who galvanized the American public like no other political hopeful in American history, rightfully deserving the moniker of Phenomenon, bursting onto the political stage out of nowhere. The incredulity that many politicians and media figures expressed begged the question “How did this happen?” The papers in this issue propose psychoanalytic hypotheses of the undercurrents in the individuals’ and the polis’ psyches that Donald Trump identified and successfully exploited in manipulating the minds of a significant portion of the American populace.

Koritar (2022) suggested that Trump was actually a master hypnotist who mesmerized his listeners with hypnotic technique described by Scott Adams in Win Bigly (2017). Adams recognized Trump’s technique as he himself had taken a training program in hypnosis. Koritar drew on psychoanalytic literature to analyze Trump’s hypnotic technique. Ferenczi (1909) in “Introjection and Transference” proposed that hypnotic suggestibility was based on a regression to infantile transference experiences with parental objects. In a regressed state, the child in the adult responds to a maternal transference acknowledging mother’s love for the child and imagined wish fulfillment of his omnipotent fantasies, while transference to the paternal object represented a submission to the authority of father figure. Transference hungry individuals seek to introject the idealized maternal object in the person of the hypnotist or submit to the internal paternal authority figure embodied in the hypnotist. In the former situation, the suggestion is passively implanted in the psyche of the individual, while in the latter, the suggestion is forcefully introjected. Koritar uses cultural tropes as a starting point in proposing hypotheses of unconscious phantasy driving the mesmerized subject. Koritar proposes that inter-generational transmission of the trauma of the South’s defeat in the Civil War was never accepted and therefore not mourned, resulting in generational transmission of fantasies of white supremacists regaining hegemony over brown-skinned interlopers who had usurped political power that the white majority were rightfully entitled to. Trump’s rhetoric touched a deep chord in the American psyche in promising a return to the good old days of omnipotent and hallucinatory wish fulfillment that had lain dormant for generations in the polis’ collective psyche.

Koritar also used cultural tropes in suggesting how to resist the alluring siren call of the hypnotist’s messaging, citing Homer’s Odyssey (8th century BCE).

Orpheus out duels the sirens with song celebrating the feats of the ordinary hero, much like Joe Biden’s speaking plainly and realistically to the common man. He was elected with a clear majority attesting to the success of his strategy. While Odysseus ordered his crew to plug their ears with wax and block out the trance inducing lyrics, Jack Dempsey, Twitter CEO, cancelled Trump’s Twitter account. Without his Twitter bullhorn, Trump’s siren song was significantly curtailed. As a cautionary note, Koritar suggests that a significant portion of the American public remains susceptible to hypnotic induction and vigilance is warranted for a recurrence of the dangerous method of the hypnotic influencing of the polis.

Prince (2022) explores the effect that Trump had on the public’s appreciation of truth and moral integrity. Approaching the task of rationally understanding the “Trump Phenomenon” can only lead to confusion since there is nothing rational about his messaging. In Trump’s world, facts are only useful if they can sway public opinion in his favor. His speech appeals not to reason but to a deeper stratum of the polis’ hopes and dreams. His background as a showman gives him a distinct advantage over regular politicians in being able to appreciate what messaging works for the audience. Whereas the sober, rational, and substantial discourse of seasoned politicians may go over the heads of the audience, Trump’s stylistic Jingoism is directed at the audience’s emotional appreciation of the performance. Trump is a master of creating an illusion of superiority and strength. He purveys the message that America is in grave trouble and only he, the Strongman, can save it. He addresses the audience in simple colloquial phrases which facilitates identification with him as one of them, that he understands their issues, and that he will make provisions for their needs. He grooms his audience to accept the illusion as reality, and judge reality to be an illusion. Prince outlines in detail how Trump has subverted the truth as “fake news” and replaced it with his version of the truth. In his discussion of the epistemological crisis that Trump has created, Prince questions the nature of reality and concludes that in a large group, “Evidence and logic give way to wish, loyalty, and power as criteria for truth” (Prince, 2022). This alternate reality becomes ontologically experienced as emotional truth, devoid of rational epistemological evidence, and consolidating a sense of belonging and identity to Trump’s followers.

Prince illustrates the destructiveness rendered on the individual psyche in his allegorical reference to Thomas Mann’s Mario and the Magician. Mann (1929) poetically describes the hypnotic state forcefully introjected into the victim by the hypnotist as destructive of the victim’s reasoning capacities, unleashing primitive infantile omnipotent fantasies and drives which in this narrative resulted in a tragic outcome. Prince as well ends his paper with a cautionary message of possible unleashed destructiveness on the polis, as witnessed in the last century and the rise of fascism, unless the hypnotist’s spell is broken. An outcome that is still uncertain.

Miller (2022) contributes to Prince’s discussion pointing out that the narrator of Mario and the Magician, a purportedly neutral observer, had remained vicariously fascinated by the spectacle provided, galvanized by the mobilization of his own internal family and social attitudes. The narrator observed the public humiliation of Mario to the apparent delight of the audience. Trump similarly humiliates anyone who opposes his message, unleashing primitive aggressive drive in his audience, which is directed at the perceived enemy in a polarized field of “us and them.” The tragic consequences of unfettered aggression was witnessed in Charlottesville and on the steps and inside of the Capitol on Jan 6, 2021.

Miller further elaborates on the delusional substitution of reality drawing on social sciences and media sources. The American public have been externally cultivated through consumer marketing, to believe in an imaginary pseudo-reality (Boorstin, 1961), creating the fantastic expectation of an entitlement to gratification that is temporarily fulfilled by corporately orchestrated spectacle (Hedges, 2009), thus creating a desire that becomes an addiction and an entitlement to further spectacle. Miller allegorically refers to Seneca’s (65 AD) description of his experience in the audience of gladiatorial contests in the Coliseum orchestrated by Nero in his bread and games political strategy. Despite being a thinking person with a social conscience, Seneca nevertheless identified with the crowd’s chanting of “Kill him.” The allure of the Spectacle had overpowered his more rational thinking and compassionate faculties, precipitating a regression to more primitive figments of his personality uncoupled from the reality principle, and more prone to hypnotic suggestion. Donald Trump provided a pseudo-reality for the American public groomed to be gratified by spectacle and showmanship. He gaslights this pseudo-reality into the spectacle-hungry populace and demonizes as “fake news” any deviation from his alternate reality.

Frankel (2022) uses psychoanalytic trauma theory elaborated by Ferenczi, to help us understand why individuals are drawn to strongmen and authoritarian movements. In his “Confusion of Tongues” paper, Ferenczi (1933) proposed that as a result of physical, sexual, or emotional abuse, the child experiences a self-fragmentation, dissociation, and autoplastic adaptation to the demands of the traumatizing object, as a self-survival mechanism. The fragile and suggestible self of the child identifies with the aggressor and compulsively complies with the aggressor’s wishes and demands. Fearing alienation from the abuser and the family, the child and later adult, accepts being exploited by the narcissistically preoccupied parent to fulfil their own needs. The child’s sense of abandonment is accompanied by shame and blames herself/himself for the abusive situation. The child can also develop fantasies of being special leading to a sense of manic expansion of the archaic grandiose self and a suspension of reality testing, and a belief in being superior and exceptional, in being privileged and insulated from physical dangers. There are two aspects to identification with the aggressor (IWA). On the one hand, submission and compliance with the strongman out of fear of exclusion from the in-group; on the other hand, in contrast to the sense of helplessness, the individual and by extension the large group, identifies with the authority’s power and sense of being exceptional, but also his sense of cruelty and vengeance.

Frankel references Bach (2006) in discussing the anxieties underlying narcissistic disturbances: fear of abandonment and being forgotten, based on emotional deprivation and not being held in the mind of the other. This represents an early narcissistic injury resulting in a deflated sense of self-esteem, inferiority, and inadequacy. IWA inflates one’s self-worth but also empowers the individual to express their unfettered aggression against the polarized out-group identified by the leader.

On a mass scale, social dispossession is the equivalent of emotional abandonment by a parent. At times of economic downturn, and feeling dispossessed, the populace may look to a strongman to restore their feeling of belonging and being special, albeit in a society split into the in-group and the out-group. Belonging to the in-group provides the adherent a new sense of belonging, meaning, and purpose in their lives. The belief that the dominant group was being threatened by hordes of the migrating out-group flooding the country, as asserted by Trump, resulted in a sense of victimhood, fueling resentment at the perceived threat to their dominance leading to a sense of moral righteousness and rationale for violence directed at the perceived perpetrators.

The ultra-conservative ideology of unfettered capitalism and individualism, creates shame for not being successful in the capitalist ideology, and contributes to further conformation to the neo-liberal capitalist ideal. The strongman’s empty promise of a return to greatness fuels the ordinary citizen’s wishful thinking which represents a regression to a more childlike vision of caretaking by an omnipotent parental figure, expanding on the individual’s narcissistic fantasies as compensatory for their feelings of inferiority, and inadequacy.

Frankel elaborates on aspects of narcissistic fantasy that are fueled in the regressed state of mind. Regression to the Paranoid-Schizoid Position (Klein, 1946) results in the mobilization of primitive defenses: splitting into all-good or all-bad external objects and tribalism; projective identification where one’s unconscious phantasy is forcefully introjected into external objects; unfettered primitive aggressive drive with sadomasochism; magical thinking devoid of reality testing; fantasies of merger with the leader; and manic defense as a flight from dependency, despair, and anxiety resulting in a compensatory grandiose expansiveness. Manic politics is reflected in delusions of omnipotence that underlie the fetish for guns, the refusal to wear masks, the idea of American exceptionalism, and the overvaluation of so-called disruptors whose ideology is to cause disruption and chaos of existing social norms and structures.

The sadistic triad used by the authoritarian leader: control, triumph, and treatment with contempt dismisses the other’s humanity and attacks the out-group members without concern for the damage caused. Schizoid dehumanization, paranoid splitting and rage, envious hatred, and sadism is directed at the out-group and any sign of concern for the other is considered as weakness and ridiculed.

Narcissistic fantasies are experienced as emotional truth, marking a psychic equivalence between internal psychic reality and external objective reality (Fonagy, 1995). Frankel suggests that there is a tendency to feel that one is in possession of bedrock emotional truth once having sustained a narcissistic injury such as feeling forgotten, feeling dispossessed, or dismissed as a human being, and leading to a sense of victimization, self-righteous indignation, and feelings of rage directed at the polarized outsiders who are perceived to be the cause of their indignation. “Manic triumph is justified as victory of the virtuous, and sadism as the punishment the villains deserve.” Frankel concludes: “In the resulting heady haze of outraged entitlement, facts disappear; people displace their humility; and they lose the capacity for sober consideration of the real-world consequences of their choices.”

This is the tragic American carnage: the irreparable damage to the psyche of significant part of the populace, perpetrated by Strongman Trump.

In conclusion, the use of cultural tropes, metaphors, and allegories represents an untapped source of inspiration for psychoanalytic researchers constructing dynamic interpretations also based on psychoanalytic metapsychological constructs. In the series of papers discussed here, the authors used cultural tropes in considering how trance states can be induced and refused: Homer’s (8th century BCE) Odysseus and the Sirens and Orpheus dueling the sirens in the Argonauts, Mann’s (1929) Mario and the Magician, Seneca’s (65 AD) account of Nero and the Spectacle of gladiatorial contests. These materials were useful in elaborating a dynamic interpretation of the leader’s hypnotic influence on the collective and individual psyches of the American populace. As well, citations from current media reports and social sciences discourses on the strongman and neo-liberal exceptionalism, contributed to the analysis of dynamic undercurrents impacting the populace. This combination of psychoanalytic theory, cultural narratives, social sciences discourse, and media news analyses represents a multi-disciplinary approach in producing hypotheses of socio-political phenomena that remain unexplained and confounding. In recent years, the media has increasingly turned to psychoanalysts for their perspectives on current affairs. Traditionally, Psychoanalysis has been an insular practice and psychoanalysts have restricted their practice to the analysis of individual dynamics in psychoanalysis or analytic psychotherapy. However, psychoanalytic principles can be applied to the understanding of large group dynamics and socio-political phenomena as illustrated in the papers in this issue. The disciplines of psychoanalysis and the social sciences can mutually enrich each other with increased collaboration. It may be argued that Psychoanalysis might better be situated in the interdisciplinary field alongside the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Philosophy. Psychoanalysis is unique among these disciplines in offering an observational methodology to study human thinking, feeling and behaving and a metapsychology to form hypotheses of human activity in internal spaces and in the external world.

Ideally, a better understanding of the dynamic undercurrents of socio-political phenomena would lead to containment of dangerous unfettered aggressive drive and a shift from paranoid-schizoid to depressive level mental functioning in the populace.

Note

Endre Koritar, MD FRCP(C). In addition to his work as an Assistant Clinical Professor at the University of British Columbia, Dr. Koritar sits on the Board of Directors of the International Sándor Ferenczi Network and is an Associate Editor of the American Journal of Psychoanalysis. Dr. Koritar is also the current director of the Western Psychoanalytic Society & Institute where he is also a training and supervising analyst.