Were Sigmund Freud around to muse on the man in the White House, how might he analyze the president and the people who support him?
Theories abound for why Donald Trump twice became president. These include the effects of culture wars, wealth disparity, politically biased news, and political dysfunction. Freud would say, however, that dysfunction in the human psyche is the key consideration. He would contend that a great many of the people who voted for Trump were unconsciously falsifying reality, mainly out of resistance to recognizing and overcoming their neurosis.
To develop this thought, let’s first visit the set of The Apprentice, the television show where Trump, in the decade before first becoming president in 2017, acquired national celebrity. On the show, he played a powerful business executive who judged the worthiness of job-seeking candidates.
The show was a big hit. Viewers loved to see people getting fired by Trump. He was compelling in this role, but not so much because of him personally. In his cold-hearted way, he stirred up in viewers their willingness to take wanton gratification in the downfall of others. The show’s viewers resonated emotionally with the passive helplessness of the job candidates who anxiously and fearfully awaited their fate, as dished out by Trump. Why would TV viewers find this cheerless situation so alluring? The answer is found in our passive relationship to our inner critic.
As Freud asserted, just about everybody has a hidden master in their psyche, called the inner critic or superego. It often operates with calculating cruelty, as Trump did on his TV show. The superego is a primitive drive in our psyche that discharges self-aggression and seeks punishment. It instinctively faults us and judges us unworthy. This self-aggression arises when natural biological aggression, blocked from being expended outward by the child’s physical weakness, turns inward against the child’s weak link, the developing ego. This dynamic usually lingers in adults and creates inner conflict.
The more neurotic an individual, the greater the inner conflict and the more this person experiences the world through dissension, victimhood, misery, and folly.
With inner conflict, the superego attacks and the unconscious ego defends. When active, this inner conflict has us bouncing emotionally back and forth between feelings of weakness versus strength, self-doubt versus self-assurance, and goodness versus wrongdoing in ways that make us moody if not miserable and prone to self-defeat. We get locked into the conflict and fail to acquire the knowledge that would free us.
In this light, let’s consider again what happened on The Apprentice. Dependably, Trump fired someone every week. He humiliated job seekers for presumably being unfit and unworthy. Watching this, viewers resonated emotionally with the job-seeking candidate at the mercy of Trump, just as they resonated unconsciously with the feeling of being at the mercy of their superego.
As an unconscious defense against this weakness, they claimed they identified not with the wretch who was fired but with the arbitrary power displayed by Trump. His cruel power provided them with this defense: “I identify with strength and aggression, not with weakness!” Their gratification in identifying with “strongman” Trump covered up their bittersweet resonance with the victim.
This way the show’s avid viewers could have their cake and eat it, too. Unconsciously, they could thrill to the feel of Trump’s power while passively enjoying the schadenfreude, the harm-joy of other’s pain and humiliation that mirrored the passive double-dealing that neurotic people have with their superego.
Trump is the poster boy for his followers’ refusal to see themselves objectively. This produces loyalty to Trump—or at least to what he represents. He’s a master of self-deception, and his followers take their cues from him. Still, they are loyal not so much to him as to their own egoistic bias, psychological defenses, and bittersweet taste for suffering. Trump is a leader of the widespread refusal to grow psychologically, morally, and spiritually. This resistance to self-development is visible in the widespread opposition to the current “Woke” ethos, the striving to become more conscious and more willing to know reality rather than to falsify it.
Let’s duck back briefly into this deep knowledge. The unconscious ego is largely passive (psychoanalysis has referred to it as the subordinate ego). Its defenses tend to be unstable and ineffective when it engages with the superego. Most people identify with this passive side of inner conflict, while tyrants, criminals, and psychopaths are the Frankenstein monsters of the superego, the aggressive side of inner conflict. The superego’s nature is the cornerstone of fascism, and we need our better self, enlightened by inner truth, to defeat this dark side of us.
Most people, in varying degrees, are unconsciously sensitive to (and fearful of) the superego’s intrusions. The superego is often the source of stress, tension, worry, and anxiety. Under the superego’s thumb, we feel persistently weak in certain contexts. We unwittingly allow life’s challenges to trigger this passive weakness. In daily life, many of us are quick to feel oppressed and dominated by certain people, institutions, and circumstances. Succumbing consistently to cravings and peer pressure are also everyday examples of the ubiquity of the passive side.
Consciously, we dislike feeling controlled or helpless, yet we’re often quick to react to situations, even benign ones, as if we are indeed being controlled and rendered helpless. We’re likely at such times to spin off into anger, self-recrimination, and self-pity. Unconsciously, we often experience feelings of oppression and helplessness in a bittersweet way, and we unwittingly recycle these feelings and indulge in the misery.
The ongoing inner conflict between the passive and aggressive sides in our psyche produces many symptoms, including stress, anxiety, procrastination, indecision, guilt, shame, timidity, and stupidity. (Stupidity arises from how, unconsciously, we scramble to falsify reality, employing psychological defenses that cover up our passive tolerance of the superego’s tyranny.) Meanwhile, most of us aren’t aware of how much we experience the world through inner passivity and fear.
Trump looks for weakness in others. Cunningly and instinctively, he weaponizes the weakness of his followers. He exhorts them to fight—but the real fight, of which he and they are unaware, is the battle to safeguard their idealized ego, even though this sacrifices their better self. They are fighting to deny their deep, unconscious willingness to remain identified with weakness, fear, victimization, and defeat. Their own self-alienation produces alienation with others. National disunity now feels more like the natural order, while anger, indignation, and an emotional affinity for raw power produce illusions of substance and rationality.
The Apprentice was “perfect” for Trump because it sustained his compulsion to focus on the supposed weakness of others and their “justified” humiliation (“Governor” Trudeau, as one of many examples). By fixating on the presumed weakness of others, he projects on to them his profound psychological disconnect from a better self. In this process, he represses his terror of being inconsequential.
Most people can at times feel some measure of unworthiness. Deep in the psyche, many identify with being an unworthy, lesser person, and they instinctively cover up this inner truth. As part of the coverup, they become desperate to feel superior to certain others: “I’m somebody—and you’re nobody!” Trump’s followers make immigrants “contemptible nobodies” who don’t belong here. Making the other “a nobody” hides a person’s repressed identification with being a nobody. We repress a lot of inner fear with doubts about our worthiness.
Trump is a profoundly fearful person, akin in this way to fear-of-his-shadow Joe McCarthy. Through his projections, Trump avoids self-reflection and fights off inner fear. Unconsciously, he greatly fears exposure (especially to himself) of the degree to which he is so psychologically and morally impoverished. This is why he craves attention and looks so often into news cameras during interviews. He needs attention, power, and wealth to compensate for his inner poverty and repressed fear of being a nobody. It’s no coincidence that he generates so much fear in the world. He casts out upon the world what eats away at him from the inside.
The chaos in Trump’s psyche compels him to be an agent of chaos in the world. His inner conflict has him swinging between the passive and aggressive postures in the psyche: He is passively bemused and easily influenced in some situations and vulgar and belligerent in others, mirroring the two poles of inner conflict. Right and wrong become incidental to being at the center of attention and power, all to deny the black hole inside. Meanwhile, loyal insiders who share his disconnect from a better self are there to identify with his power, to spotlight their importance, and to protect him and themselves from awareness of their inner plight.
Democracy is on tilt and mental-health trends are going in the wrong direction. Democracy depends on our collective mental health, yet modern psychology and psychiatry do not show clearly enough the nature of the dysfunction that undermines us from within. If we remain blind to our entanglement in inner conflict and unaware of our passive participation in it, we are more likely to lead ourselves and our world into worsening wretchedness.
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My books describe the numerous ways we become trapped in inner conflict. They’re available here at Amazon.
