by Bandy X. Lee
The negative aspects of Trump’s narcissism strike those who are repelled by him both at home and abroad as a symbolic mirror of everything negative about a culture of narcissism. For many, he has become the very embodiment of everything bad about America: a self-promoting brand; an arrogant bully bursting with hubris; gross insensitivity to others’ needs; possession by consumerism and greed; and entitlement in good fortune, which we have come to believe is our natural due. These are core characteristics of an American cultural complex that betrays that best Self or spirit on which the nation and its constitution were founded. Trump’s narcissism is a perfect mirror of our national and even personal narcissism.
Ultimately, I believe that the Trump phenomenon is less about Trump than about us—about who we are as a people: the elephant in the room turns out to be “We the People of the United States.” How terrifying to think that our politics and our lives today have gotten horribly confused with reality TV, social media, computer and cell phone technology, and their infinite capacity to turn reality into illusion, Self into narcissism.
Conclusion: Groping the American Psyche and Psychic Contagion
There are so many potentially destructive consequences of the emerging Trump presidency—on the climate, on minorities, on immigrants, on women’s rights, on the integrity of the Constitution, and on our relationships with China, Russia, Syria, Iran, North Korea, and even our own allies. But one of the most disturbing thoughts about the Trump presidency is that he has taken up residence not just in the White House but in the psyches of each and every one of us. We are going to have to live with him rattling around inside us, all of us at the mercy of his impulsive and bullying whims, as he lashes out at whatever gets under his skin in the moment with uninformed, inflammatory barbs. The way a president lives inside each of us can feel like a very personal and intimate affair. Those who identify with Trump and love the way he needles the “elites” whom they fear, envy, and despise may relish the fact that he lives inside us as a tormentor. Trump is well versed in brutally toying with his enemies, who include women, professionals, the media, the educated classes, and minorities—to mention just a few.
What most frightens me about Trump is his masterful skill at invading and groping the national psyche. Many tired of the Clintons’ taking up permanent residence in our national psyche. Trump will soon put the Clintons to shame in his capacity to dwell in and stink up our collective inner space, like the proverbial houseguest who overstays his welcome. And many of us never invited Trump into our psychic houses in the first place. That is perhaps why the image that has stayed with me the most from the national disgrace that was our election process in 2016 is that of the woman who came forward to tell her story of allegedly being sexually harassed by Trump (Legaspi 2016).
Some years ago, she was given an upgrade to first class on a plane and found herself sitting next to “the Donald.” In no time at all, she says, he was literally groping her all over—breasts and below. She describes the physicality of the assault as akin to being entangled in the tentacles of an octopus, and she was barely able to free herself and retreat to economy class.
It now feels as though we have all been groped by the tentacles of Trump’s octopus-like psyche, which has invaded our own and threatens to tighten its squeeze for several years. To put it as vulgarly as Trump himself might: Trump has grabbed the American psyche by the “pussy.”
As we slowly collect ourselves after the devastating and unexpected tsunami of Trump winning the presidency and the roller-coaster ride of his early days as president, many are finding renewed energy and commitment to challenge his shadowy agenda in new and creative ways. I hope that in a deep resurgence of activism to reclaim our most cherished and threatened American values, we will resist our tendency to cocoon ourselves in a self-righteous, arrogant bubble of narcissistic ideals, even in the name of being “progressive.”
Thomas Singer, M.D., is a psychiatrist and Jungian psychoanalyst practicing in San Francisco. In addition to private practice, he has served on Social Security’s Hearing and Appeals Mental Impairment Disability team. His interests include studying the relationships among myth, politics, and psyche in The Vision Thing and the Ancient Greece, Modern Psyche series. He is the editor of a series of books exploring cultural complexes, including Placing Psyche, Listening to Latin America, Europe’s Many Souls, The Cultural Complex, and a book in preparation on Asia. He is the current president of National ARAS, an archive of symbolic imagery that has created The Book of Symbols.
References
Epstein, Joseph. 2016. “Why Trumpkins Want Their Country Back.” Wall Street Journal, June 10. www.wsj.com/articles/why-trumpkins-want-their-country-back-1465596987.
Fisher, Marc, and Will Hobson. 2016. “Donald Trump Masqueraded as Publicist to Brag About Himself.” Washington Post, May 13. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/donald-trump-alter-ego-barron/2016/05/12/02ac99ec-16fe-11e6-aa55-670cabef46e0_story.html?hpid=hp_rhp-top-table-main_no-name%3Ahomepage%2Fstory.
Hedges, Chris. 2009. Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. New York: Nation Books.
Legaspi, Althea. 2016. “Woman Says Trump Groped Her on Plane: ‘It Was an Assault.’” Rolling Stone, October 13. www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/woman-says-she-was-groped-by-trump-on-plane-it-was-an-assault-w444700.
MacWilliams, Matthew. 2016. “The One Weird Trait That Predicts Whether You’re a Trump Supporter.” Politico, January 17. www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/01/donald-trump-2016-authoritarian-213533.
Orwell, George. 1949. 1984. Repr. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1983.
Singer, Thomas. 2006a. “The Cultural Complex: A Statement of the Theory and Its Application.” Psychotherapy and Politics International 4 (3): 197–212. doi: 10.1002/ppi.110.
______. 2006b. “Unconscious Forces Shaping International Conflicts: Archetypal Defenses of the Group Spirit from Revolutionary America to Confrontation in the Middle East.” The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal 25 (4): 6–28.
Trump, Donald, with Tony Schwartz. 1987. The Art of the Deal. New York: Random House.
Wright, David, Tal Kopan, and Julia Winchester. 2016. “Cruz Unloads with Epic Takedown of ‘Pathological Liar,’ ‘Narcissist’ Donald Trump.” CNN Politics, May 3. www.cnn.com/2016/05/03/politics/donald-trump-rafael-cruz-indiana/.
WHO GOES TRUMP?
Tyranny as a Triumph of Narcissism
ELIZABETH MIKA, M.A., L.C.P.C.
Tyrannies are three-legged beasts. They encroach upon our world in a steady creep more often than overcome it in a violent takeover, which may be one reason they are not always easy to spot before it is too late to do much about them. Their necessary components, those three wobbly legs, are: the tyrant, his supporters (the people), and the society at large that provides a ripe ground for the collusion between them. Political scientists call it “the toxic triangle” (Hughes 2017).
The force binding all three is narcissism. It animates the beast while, paradoxically and not, eating it alive, bringing its downfall in due time. This force and its influences, which knit the beast into such a powerful and destructive entity, remain invisible to us for reasons that are clearly hinted at but somehow continue to evade our individual and collective comprehension. They make sure we don’t recognize the tyranny’s marching boots, which can be heard from miles away and months away, until they show up on our doorstep, and that’s despite the fact that this very same process has repeated itself countless times in history.
We have known who tyrants are and how tyrannies form since antiquity, and this knowledge has been supported by the ever-growing tragic evidence of the tyrannies’ effects on humanity. Yet, despite making promises to ourselves and one another to “Never forget,” we seem not to remember or not to know, always with devastating consequences. Our forgetting stems partly from miseducation (Giroux 2014) and partly from denial. It gives us clues to the kind of work (psychological, social, political, and economic) that we must
do if we are to avoid the self-destruction promised by tyrannies today.
Let’s take a look at tyranny’s components and their interactions.
The Tyrant
Tyrants come in different shapes and sizes, and depending on perspective, various writers stress similarities or differences among them (Newell 2016). This paper will not delve into those classifications but, rather, attempt to simplify and maybe even illuminate their most salient common features.
Although the terms dictator and tyrant are used interchangeably, it makes sense perhaps to stress that not all dictators are tyrants. Tyrants are dictators gone bad. A leader may start as a seemingly benevolent dictator but turn into a tyrant as his reign progresses, becoming ruthlessly destructive with time, something we have seen repeatedly in history.
All tyrants share several essential features: they are predominantly men with a specific character defect, narcissistic psychopathy (a.k.a. malignant narcissism). This defect manifests in a severely impaired or absent conscience and an insatiable drive for power and adulation that masks the conscience deficits. It forms the core of attraction between him and his followers, the essence of what is seen as his “charisma.” In his seminal paper on “Antisocial Personality Disorder and Pathological Narcissism in Prolonged Conflicts and Wars of the 21st Century” (2015), Frederick Burkle observes that narcissism augments and intensifies the pathological features of a psychopathic character structure, making those endowed with it especially dangerous, not in the least because of their ability to use manipulative charm and a pretense of human ideals to pursue their distinctly primitive goals. We talk about the chief feature of narcissistic psychopathy, the impairment of conscience, and its destructive consequences in “The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Narcissist” (Mika and Burkle 2016).
Impulsive, sensation-seeking, and incapable of experiencing empathy or guilt, a narcissistic psychopath treats other people as objects of need fulfillment and wish fulfillment. This makes it easy for him to use and abuse them, in his personal relationships and in large-scale actions, without compunction. His lack of conscience renders him blind to higher human values, which allows him to disregard them entirely or treat them instrumentally as means to his ends, the same way he treats people.
This dangerous character defect, however, serves him well in the pursuit of power, money, and adulation. Not having the inhibitions and scruples imposed by empathy and conscience, he can easily lie, cheat, manipulate, destroy, and kill if he wants to—or, when powerful enough, order others to do it for him.
The characteristics indicative of narcissistic psychopathy are observable already in childhood. Biographies of tyrants (Fromm 1973; Miller 1990; Newell 2016) note the early manifestations of vanity, sensation-seeking, and impulsivity often accompanied by poor self-control, aggression and callousness, manipulativeness, and a strong competitive drive and desire to dominate coexistent with a lack of empathy and conscience. Plato remarked on the “spirited” character of a future tyrant showing the above-mentioned symptoms already in his youth.
Another common, but not universal, biographical finding is a history of childhood abuse. Here, however, accounts vary; for example, while some, like Miller (1990), stress Hitler’s purported severe abuse at the hands of his stepfather, others (Fromm 1973; Newell 2016) note that his childhood was uneventful in this respect. Biographies can be incomplete or tendentious, intentionally and not, and so it is not always possible to verify the truth. It is impossible to rule out narcissistic upbringing as being involved in raising a future tyrant—creating a narcissistic injury that shapes the child’s life and sets him on a path of “repairing” it through a ruthless and often sadistic pursuit of power and adulation—even when there is no evidence of overt abuse and/or neglect in his biographical data.
While the exact causes of this character defect are a matter of speculation, their possible origins offer intriguing possibilities explaining their clinical manifestations. For example, a narcissistic injury in the first years of a child’s life could possibly impair development of the object constancy capacity. This results in an inability to grasp and adhere to the solidity of facts and, consequently, in a disregard for the truth and other human values, the understanding of which comprises a large part of our conscience. The narcissistic psychopath’s propensity to lie, whether on purpose to achieve a specific result or, seemingly effortlessly, to invent a universe of “alternative facts” that just happen to affirm his grandiose and guiltless image of himself, could be a result of that impaired object constancy capacity.
His lack of empathy, whether resulting from an inborn cause or narcissistic/authoritarian upbringing, would further (or separately) limit development of his conscience and influence not only the child’s socioemotional development but also his cognitive capacities, resulting in what Burkle (2016) calls being smart but not bright. Dąbrowski (1996) termed this as one-sided development, where intelligence and certain cognitive skills develop more or less normally but one’s emotional growth remains stunted. The capacity for emotional development is crucial, as this is the only kind of growth possible throughout our lifespan: expanding and deepening our conscience, and spurring us to learning and meaningful change.
Whether the developmental arrest typical for this form of pathology is inborn, acquired, or a combination of both nature and nurture, it results in the narrow and inflexible character structure, with intelligence subsumed under primitive drives (for power, sex, and adulation).
As Dąbrowski (1986, trans. E. Mika) writes:
A psychopath is emotionally rigid and narrow. He has strong ambitions and significant talents, but they remain narrow and under the influence of primitive drives. He does not experience inner conflicts, but instead he creates external ones. He is not capable of empathy, and so he strives to gain control over others, or, before he can gain dominance, he submits to the control of others. He is usually deaf and blind to the problems of others, to their development and developmental difficulties. He relentlessly realizes his own goals. A psychopath exists on the level of primary integration and is emotionally stunted.
We can distinguish “small” and “big” psychopaths. We find the big ones among the most notorious world criminals, and among aggressive tyrants and dictators (e.g., Nero, Hitler) who do not hesitate to sacrifice others for their own goals. For a big psychopath, a person and a social group do not have any moral value. To him, rules of justice do not exist. Genocide or concentration camps are not a moral problem for him, but a means to an end.
Small psychopaths are miniatures of the big ones. In general, they submit to big psychopaths in the right circumstances. A small psychopath looks for opportunities to realize his own interests and to satisfy his desire to wreak havoc in society. A psychopath thinks that laws are to be broken and that they do not apply to him. He uses any circumstances to secure his position, money, and fortune, regardless of the consequences for others, without any consideration for ethical norms. Psychopaths do not know how to emotionally compare themselves with others, they cannot emotionally understand others, and they lack an empathic attitude.
The individual distinctions between “small” and “big” psychopaths, a.k.a. tyrants, appear to lie predominantly in the level of their narcissism, observed by Burkle (2015), but also in the presence of some socially approved skills, an ability to modulate and/or mask their aggressive impulses and deeds, as well as life opportunities and luck. A narcissistic psychopath without sufficiently developed self-control or advantageous life opportunities may turn into a mass killer whose crimes will land him in prison before his grandiose dreams of power and domination come to fruition.
Narcissistic psychopaths turned tyrants possess the right combination of manipulativeness, self-control, and intelligence to convince others to support them long enough to put their grandiose ideas to work on a large scale. They also appear to possess skills that are seen as charisma, the most frequent of which is the ability to deliver public speeches that inspire others to fo
llow them. More often than not, however, this “charisma” is simply their ability to tell others what they want to hear (i.e., to lie), to make them go along with whatever scheme they’ve concocted for the moment. Their glibness is something that easily fools normal people, who do not understand the kind of pathology that results from a missing conscience.
Once in positions of power, tyrants can fully unleash their sadism under the cloak of perverted ideals, which they peddle as a cover for their primitive drives. Instead of turning into common criminals condemned by society, they become oppressors and/or murderers of thousands or millions, with their atrocities always justified in their own minds and those of their supporters. This is why Pol Pot could say without hesitation: “[Y]ou can look at me. Am I a savage person? My conscience is clear” (Mydans 1997), even though he was directly responsible for the deaths of millions of his compatriots.
Tyrants identify with other tyrants and find inspiration in their successes, while remaining oblivious to their failures. They recognize and respect power as much as they are envious of and despise its wielders. The greater and more ruthless the living or historical tyrant, the bigger an inspiration he is for aspiring ones. His disdain for morality and law and his unbridled aggression in pursuit of power appeal to the tyrant in the making and form a template for his behavior, showing him what is possible.
On the eve of invading Poland in 1939, Hitler, after issuing orders to “mercilessly and without pity” annihilate “every man, woman, and child of Polish ethnicity and language,” spoke admiringly of one such role model: “Genghis Khan had sent millions of women and children to their deaths, and did so consciously and with a happy heart. History sees in him only the great founder of states.” Then he exhorted his subordinates in Poland to “be hard, spare nothing, act faster, and more brutally than the others”—and they eagerly obliged (Gellately 2007).