In this episode, I analyze how victimhood works, psychologically and politically. When someone experiences him or herself as a victim, it gives that persona a kind of get-out-of-jail free card to retaliate, strike back, and hurt the person or group that they have come to believe is responsible for their victimization. The political Right capitalizes on this dynamic by repeatedly telling its followers that they have been abused, cheated, and victimized by the liberal elites. As a result, these constituencies would have no moral compunction about harming, imprisoning, or deporting immigrants, just as they had no compunction morally about attacking the Capitol to reverse what they thought was a stolen election. Holding oneself up as a victim gives one a sense of moral righteousness which then can then morally permit violent retaliatory and cruel action. This is what we see on the Right today.
In this webcast, I am interested in using the insights of psychoanalysis to better understand what is going on in the wider social, political, and cultural worlds. I have been a practicing psychotherapist and psychoanalyst for over 40 years and have written extensively about these issues at the interface of psychology and the social/political/cultural worlds (see my publications on this website). I hope to explore matters that are related to current events, but also provide some discussion and understanding of more general issues about human development and psychology.
Inevitability That Trump Will Contest Any Election Result in Which He Loses.
In this first episode of my webcast, I address the issue of how to understand Trump’s need, his compulsive relentless need, to exaggerate his own accomplishments, ego, and greatness. I explain how the mind works -in all of us — to limit, reduce, negate, or otherwise get rid of painful feeling states, an effort often accomplished by exaggerating their opposite. This is a universal experience and expression of the workings of the normal human psyche. In fact, one can often infer very accurately the states of mind that are the most forbidden or intolerable by examining and understanding the ways that the person suffering from these painful states of mind goes about trying to reduce their suffering. For Trump, his bloviating narcissism, conceit, self-aggrandizing and clownish self-promotion obviously comes from his dread and intolerance of any suggestion or any feeling that he’s helpless, inferior, ashamed, or inadequate. I make the argument in this webcast that this isn’t volitional and conscious and intentional but unconscious, automatic, and compulsory. He has no choice. This means that, were he to have lost the election, it isn’t a question of whether or not he would have contested it or fomented a civil war to reverse it, but how exactly he would do it because Trump lacks the psychic freedom to do anything else.
