by Bandy X. Lee
In addition to our collective inability to sort out illusion from reality, our culture gets further hopelessly entangled with our cult of celebrity. Hedges does not spare us the dire consequences of our intoxication with celebrity, which both fuels the split between illusion and reality while simultaneously filling the gap between the two.
Celebrity culture plunges us into a moral void. No one has any worth beyond his or her appearance, usefulness, or ability to succeed. The highest achievements in a celebrity culture are wealth, sexual conquest, and fame. It does not matter how these are obtained … We have a right, in the cult of the self, to get whatever we desire. We can do anything, even belittle and destroy those around us, including our friends, to make money, to be happy, and to become famous. Once fame and wealth are achieved, they become their own justification, their own morality. (Hedges 2009)
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 America 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.”
With this general formulation in mind, I analyze how Trump’s presidency speaks to three highly intertwined parts of the American group psyche: (1) a woundedness at the core of the American group Self; (2) the defenses mobilized in the groups that feel wounded, who wish to protect against further injury to the shared group Self; and (3) the promise or hope of a cure for the wound.
1. A Wound to the American Group Self
There is a wound at the core of the American group Self/spirit that is deeply felt by many, especially by those who have not participated in our nation’s prosperity and by others who are relatively well off but are keenly aware that our system of government and our way of life are threatened at the core of our collective being. Here is a working definition of the group Self or spirit that I put forth in an earlier paper:
The group spirit is the ineffable core beliefs or sense of identity that binds people together … that [is] known to its members through a sense of belonging, shared essential beliefs, core historical experiences of loss and revelation, deepest yearnings and ideals … One can begin to circle around the nature of a group’s spirit by asking questions such as:
What is most sacred to the group?
What binds the group’s members together?
(Singer 2006b)
Many in our country, on the left, right, and in the center, feel that this stage in our history is less secure than earlier stages. This nervousness about our essential well-being is deeply felt by the progressive left, by the conservative right, and by all those who feel alienated and angered by the current leaders of all branches of government, whom they see as destroying the country, whether the archenemy be Donald Trump of the Republicans or Hillary Clinton of the Democrats. On the right, the threat of terrorism (Muslims), immigrants (Mexicans), the global economy (China and international trade agreements), or progressives are seen as leading us to the brink. On the left, the threats to a sense of well-being and security in our national group Self come as the result of the growing disparity in the distribution of wealth and income; the mistreatment of vulnerable minorities of different races, colors, ethnicities, sexual identities, or genders; our power relationships to other countries around the world; and of course the maltreatment of the environment.
I postulate that these threats are amplified on all sides by an even deeper, less conscious threat that I call extinction anxiety. Extinction anxiety exists both in the personal and group psyche and is based on the fear of the loss of supremacy by white Americans of the United States, the loss of America’s place in the world as we have known it, and ultimately the destruction of the environment and the world itself. One might think of extinction anxiety as the cultural psyche’s equivalent of death anxiety in the individual. For instance, climate change deniers on the right may be seen as denying the very real possibility of the planet’s destruction as a way of defending themselves against the fear of extinction. Aligning himself with this attitude, Trump offers to dispel extinction anxiety by denying it is real and appointing a well-known climate change denier as head of the EPA. Denial, whether at the individual or group level, is the most primitive defense the mind employs to protect itself from psychic pain.
Here is how Joseph Epstein (2016) has described the injury to the group Self/spirit of those attracted to Trump:
Something deeper, I believe, is rumbling behind the astounding support for Mr. Trump, a man who, apart from his large but less than pure business success, appears otherwise entirely without qualification for the presidency. I had a hint of what might be behind the support for him a few weeks ago when, on one of the major network news shows, I watched a reporter ask a woman at a Trump rally why she was supporting him. A thoroughly respectable-seeming middle-class woman, she replied without hesitation: “I want my country back” …
I don’t believe that this woman is a racist, or that she yearns for immigrants, gays and other minorities to be suppressed, or even that she truly expects to turn back the clock on social change in the U.S. What she wants is precisely what she says: her country back … [S]he couldn’t any longer bear to watch the United States on the descent, hostage to progressivist ideas that bring neither contentment nor satisfaction but instead foster a state of perpetual protest and agitation, anger and tumult. So great is the frustration of Americans who do not believe in these progressivist ideas, who see them as ultimately tearing the country apart, that they are ready to turn, in their near hopelessness, to a man of Donald Trump’s patently low quality. (Epstein 2016)
The Self or group spirit of America is built on more than three hundred years of progress, success, achievement, resourcefulness, and ingenuity, accompanied by almost endless opportunity and good fortune. We love and believe in our heroic potential; our freedom and independence; our worship of height and speed, youth, newness, technology; our optimism and eternal innocence. We have enjoyed the profound resilience of the American spirit, which has shown itself repeatedly through very difficult historical trials, including our Civil War, World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, the Vietnam War, the 9/11 attacks, the Iraq War, the financial collapse in 2008, and other major crises, including the one we may be in now. As a country, we have been blessed in our capacity to transcend loss, failure, and the threat of defeat in the face of crisis time and again, and this has contributed to a positive vision of ourselves that has been fundamentally solid at the core for a long time. Of course, that Self-image is subject to inflation, arrogance, and a morphing into hubris, in which we believe in our own exceptionalism and are blind to our causing grave injury to peoples at home and abroad. 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 ability to navigate a highly uncertain future—the nostalgic longing of which is perfectly articulated in the phrase “I want my country back.”
2. Archetypal Defenses of the Group Self
A significant number of people in our society feel cut off from what they believe to be their inherited, natural birthright as American citizens. Although they would not use this language, they are suffering a wound and threat at the level of the group Self, even as they are also suffering individually. We can think of this as a narcissistic injury at the group level. I suggest that Trump has somehow intuited that injury and is playing to it, both as a self-proclaimed carrier of the group renewal and as a defender against those who would do further harm to it—be they terrorists, immigrants, Washington political insiders, the established Republican Party, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, James Comey, or anyone else who gets in Trump’s way.
Trump’s Embrace of the Shadow of Political Correctness
Trump’s particular political g
enius in the 2016 presidential election cycle was to launch his campaign with an attack on political correctness. With incredible manipulative skill, Trump’s call to arms, “Get ’em outta here!” made its first appearance at his rallies, when he urged the faithful in his crowds to get rid of protesters. “Get ’em outta here!” also seems to be his pledge to rid the country of Mexicans, Muslims, and other groups that are being portrayed as dangerous threats to the American Way of Life.
Trump’s strategy has been shrewd. He sensed that political correctness could be the trigger word and target for unleashing potent levels of shadow energies that have been accumulating in the cultural unconscious of the group psyche. He rode a huge wave of pent-up resentment, racism, and hatred long enough to crush all opponents and become the president of the United States. The notion of a trigger word activating a complex goes back to Jung’s early word-association tests, in which certain words detonated powerful emotions contained within personal complexes—such as the mother or father complex. Skillful politicians can trigger cultural or group complexes by a collective word association process that then takes on a life of its own.
Trump is at his best when he is at his most awful: his willingness to be politically incorrect became a sign, to many, of his “truth-telling.” Amid a most dangerous battle between the “alternative facts” of the alt-right 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 validate 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.
This kind of shadow energy is available for exploitation if a group that previously saw itself as having a solid place in American society (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.
Here is how George Orwell, in 1984, imagined the exploitation of those most subject to intoxication with an authoritarian leader like Trump:
In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them … They simply swallowed everything.
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 a 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 unspoken resentments and express their rage. Trump tapped into the dirty little secret of their loathing of various minorities, even though we may all be minorities now. Trump’s formula for repairing these deep wounds had him chanting around the country the hopeful mantra of making better “deals.” Once the complex takes over the narrative or the narrative gives voice to the complex’s core, facts simply become irrelevant. Inevitably, this leads to the kind of terrifying 1984 scenario in which
The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture, and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink … If human equality is to be forever averted—if the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently—then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.
Trump’s cabinet appointments strongly suggest that this is what is happening in our own country. The job of each new Cabinet leader is to reverse or dismantle the very reason for which his or her department exists.
Unholy Marriage of Shadow, Archetypal Defenses of the Group Self, and the Group Self
What makes Trump’s unleashing of the shadow in the American psyche even more dangerous is that these energies become linked or even identical with what I call archetypal defenses of the group spirit:
When this part of the collective psyche is activated, the most primitive psychological forces come alive for the purpose of defending the group and its collective spirit or Self. I capitalize Self because I want to make it clear that it is not just the persona or ego identity of the group that is under attack but something at an even deeper level of the collective psyche which one might think of as the spiritual home or god of the group. The tribal spirit of the clan or of the nation often lies dormant or in the background, but when it is threatened, the defenses mobilized to protect it are ferocious and impersonal. The mobilization of such potent, archaic defenses is fueled by raw collective emotion and rather simplistic, formulaic ideas and/or beliefs [that] dictate how the group will think, feel, react, and behave. (Singer 2006b)
These activated archetypal defenses of the group spirit find concrete expression in forms as varied as the unrest of divided populations over the legal status of foreign immigrants in countries around the world; the threatened development of nuclear weapons by nation-states such as Iran or North Korea; the deployment of suicide bombers by terrorist groups; or the launching of massive military expeditions by world powers. And these same kinds of archetypal defenses come alive in all sorts of skirmishes between diverse groups of people who perceive their most sacred values in jeopardy—the LBGTQ community, blacks, Latinos, white men, women, the Christian right in the United States, Jews around the world, the Muslim Brotherhood throughout the Middle East. The list of groups threatened at the core of their being or at the level of the group Self seems endless (Singer 2006b). What makes Trump’s narcissism so dangerous in its mix of shadow (his attacks on all sorts of groups of people) and Self elements (his self-aggrandizing, inflated sense of himself and those for whom he pretends to speak) is that it plays to the unholy marriage of Self and the aggressive, hateful, and violent elements in the collective psyche.
Trump’s example gives permission for shadowy thoughts, feelings, and actions on behalf of the Self. This underlying group dynamic explains the comparison of Trump to Hitler. Evoking an archaic image of the German Self, Hitler mobilized the most shadowy forces in modern history in the so-called service of that Self-image, which centered on the supremacy of the Aryan race—first the Brownshirts, then the Gestapo, SS, and other forces of the Third Reich, including its highly efficient bureaucracy. Trump seems to be toying with the collective shadow, encouraging its acting out in the name of the Self. It is hard to imagine Trump leading the United States in the same direction that Hitler led Germany—I certainly hope I don’t live to regret writing these words!—but the dynamic is still terrifying. From a Jungian perspective, when the shadowy defenses of the group spirit and the group Self closely align, there is great danger of violence, tyranny, and absolutism—especially with an authoritarian leader and a citizenry responsive to authoritarianism.
3. Curing the Wounded Self of America: Trump’s “Selfie” and America’s “Selfie”
The third and final component of this intertwined triad of forces in the group psyche is Trump’s implicit promise of providing a cure for the wound at the level of the group Self. This is where his narcissism is most prominent and most dangerous. The unconscious equation can be stated as follows: “I am the Greatness to which America may once again aspire. By identifying with how great I am, you can rekindle your wounded American dream and make yourself and America great again.” Or even more bluntly: “I have achieved the American
dream; I am the American dream; I am the incarnation of the Self that the country aspires to.” This, of course, is a massive inflation. Trump’s identification of his personal being with the Self of America is his source of demagogic appeal. He is encouraging those who have lost a foothold in the American dream to place their trust in him as a mirror of their own potential—a potential that he has already achieved. Trump’s book The Art of the Deal characterizes his magnetic appeal:
I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. (Fisher and Hobson 2016; Trump with Schwartz 1987)
Trump has managed to cultivate and catch the projection of a powerful and successful person who, by virtue of his alleged business acumen and ability to negotiate, is able to make things happen for his own betterment—though rarely for the betterment of others, despite his false claims of giving generously to charities and creating untold jobs. “You, too, can be like me: aggressive, successful, big, powerful,” he is saying. This is the narcissism of Trump joining with the injured narcissism of those Americans who have seen their chances for well-being and security rapidly slip away. Trump celebrates the materialistic, power version of the American dream—of the big man who has made himself rich and powerful through the strength of his personality. He is free to speak his own mind and to pursue, without limits, his own self-aggrandizing goals that he equates with those of America.