This book does not attempt to interpret Donald Trumpās unconscious or the sexuality of any politicians.1 Instead, I use psychoanalytic theories and practices to explain how someone like Trump can rise to power and why liberals have failed to provide an effective political alternative.2 In looking at the 2016 campaign for the presidency of the United States, I discuss how the liberal (Clinton) abandonment of the working class has resulted in a populism of the Right (Trump) and the Left (Sanders). These dynamics cannot be understood solely in terms of economics and politics, and so it is necessary to turn to psychoanalysis to see how the fantasy of victimhood unifies the Right and why moderate Democrats have moved away from their support for workers and a more equal society. Moreover, it is the liberal fear of the radical Left and the populist Right that often serves to demonize a real push for social and economic justice. In what I call the pathology of obsessional narcissism, we discover the unconscious roots of the liberal investment in an illusionary meritocracy, which replaces a political focus on poverty, labor unions, and the working class with an emphasis on education as the solution to most social and economic problems. Although Bernie Sanders appears to represent a true Left alternative, I point to the limitations of his populist policies and politics. I also argue urgently that in the age of multinational corporations and global climate change, we need a new model of global justice and government that requires an understanding of analytic neutrality and free association.
In looking at the work of Freud, Lacan, and the psychoanalytic critic Slavoj Zizek, I place the current state of American politics in a larger global context. While much of my analysis deals with the 2016 U.S. presidential election, I also examine how we are seeing the same pattern repeated throughout the world (i.e., Brexit): as the Left fails to provide a real alternative to global capitalism, displaced workers blame immigrants, people of color, and Muslims and end up supporting far-Right political ideologies. Meanwhile, moderate liberals remain tied to outdated policies as their fear of the Left and the Right pushes them to conform to the status quo, and all of these political positions fail to confront the current need for a global form of justice and government to deal with problems like climate change, inequality, terrorism, and multinational capital.
Outline of Chapters
Chapter 2 argues that we cannot understand aspects of the current conservative backlash movement if we do not comprehend the role played by fantasies of victimhood. In turning to Freudās original insights into hysteria and masochism, I show that victim identification is one of the strongest political forces in the world today. Not only do religious fundamentalists base their identity on real and imagined scenes of victimhood, but after 9/11, the strongest countries in the world were able to present themselves as victims, and as we learn from psychoanalysis, victims always see themselves as innocent and pure as they reject all criticism and justify all vengeful hostility.
Just as nations and religions define themselves through victim identifications, the wealthiest people in the world have been able to reimagine themselves to be the victims of taxes, government, and liberal institutions like universities, unions, and mainstream media. I show in this chapter that by affirming the mental autonomy of the unconscious and the fundamental masochism of the subject, we can better understand the underlying paranoid fantasies that structure conservative ideology and global politics. Furthermore, I argue that psychoanalysis can also offer a critical counter-discourse to the rise of fundamentalism and neoliberal conservatism.
Chapter 3 turns to a psychoanalytic understanding of the liberal aspects of neoliberal politics. Using Freudās theories of transference, narcissism, and obsessional neurosis, I posit that liberals often want deny their own aggression by having their ideal self-recognized by an ideal Other, and so they often cling to a rhetoric of progressive moral righteousness as they engage in destructive acts of competitive capitalism. As Freud discovered through his experience with transference, patients will idealize their analyst so that the analyst idealizes the patient, and this type of relationship sets of a narcissistic form of social conformity. Since liberals want to be seen as ideal by an ideal Other, they cannot tolerate criticism or acknowledge their role in destructive social processes. In developing the concept of obsessional narcissism and analyzing Hillary Clinton, I examine how psychoanalysis explains many of the contemporary failures of liberalisms. I also indicate how progressive social movements can avoid the pitfalls of narcissistic transference by creating political organizations that move beyond identification, idealization, and cynical conformity.
Chapter 4 argues that if we want to fully understand the political popularity of people like Donald Trump, we should return to Freudās theory of the group formation and his notion of emotional identification. As a form of group hypnosis, Right-wing populism relies on followers suspending their critical faculties as they access parts of their unconscious id, and psychoanalysis helps us to understand how these unconscious processes function in political movements. Moreover, Freudās theory of free association allows us to see the ways Trumpās campaign might, in one sense, actually be good for America because it serves to expose the underlying fantasies that support the conservative coalition. Finally, it is important to place Trumpās persona in the context of contemporary media and neoliberal capitalism.
This critique of Trumpās populism of the Right is matched with an analysis of Bernie Sandersā populism on the Left. Although Sanders offers a much more hopeful and progressive vision, his promotion of a fake revolution and false socialism reveal the limits of neoliberal progressive politics. In failing to take on the global foundation of economics, politics, and culture, Sanders presents a series of policies that are unable to deal with climate change, inequality, terrorism, and taxation. As one of the most famous Left-oriented economists in the world, Thomas Piketty, has argued, the only solution to our current system of capitalist inequality involves a global wealth tax, and yet Piketty himself never mentions the need for a global system of government in order to implement such solutions.3
Chapter 5 argues that we have to rethink the limits of nationalism as we recognize the need for a global government to confront the global challenges of climate change, financial capitalism, tax avoidance, terrorism, migration, and international poverty. By returning to the Freudian concepts of free association and the neutrality of the analyst, I offer a model for global solidarity and universal human rights. Furthermore, since most of our current social issues are global in nature, I argue that we need a global solution in general, but global solidarity is blocked by narcissistic nationalism and the capitalist death drive. In examining contemporary social movements for global justice, I articulate a theory of universal social solidarity.
Footnotes
1
I completed writing this book in June 2016 before the Democratic and Republican conventions.
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2
For the last three decades, I have been going to conferences and reading books that try to establish the political significance of psychoanalysis. One of the most striking things I have encountered over and over again is that many of the contemporary proponents of psychoanalysis do not have a strong grasp of the specificity of psychoanalytic theory and practice. A major claim of this book is that there is a small set of fundamental principles that define psychoanalysis, and these principles can play an important role in helping us think about and change politics in the age of Neoliberalism. The four basic concepts that I will be discussing throughout this book are the unconscious, free association, transference, and the drives, and I will argue that almost every other concept related to psychoanalysis is either a distraction from or a component of these four major concepts. Moreover, I will position psychoanalytic discourse as a supplement to other social science theories. From this perspective, psychoanalysis adds something that is lacking in the fields of economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and history.
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3
Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the twenty-first century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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