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In the decade since Donald Trump began to define American politics, critics have struggled to understand his massive appeal. They have perhaps sensed by now that Trump’s support comes from someplace underneath conscious and rational political analyses. Who else but Sigmund Freud to help explain? “The past few years,” the academic and critic Merve Emre wrote in an essay for The New Yorker this past June, “have given us a Freud for the pandemic, a Freud for Ukraine and a Freud for Palestine, a Freud for transfemininity, a Freud for the far right, and a Freud for the vipers’ nest that is the twenty-first-century American university.” History has now given us another iteration: a Freud for the Trump movement.
Consensus on the causes of Trump’s sweeping electoral victory has formed around the idea that voters were responding to Democratic performance on material matters, namely inflation and immigration. But the Trump movement has never been, to my mind, strictly concerned with tangible issues; part of the allure is immaterial by nature, addressed to elemental human urges. Trump offered something special on that count from the beginning—a politics consisting not mainly of a positive vision but rather of a series of opportunities to own the libs. In this project, rational policy details aren’t a priority and are sometimes absent altogether; the point is domination of one’s enemies, a libidinal desire.
Consider the recent post-election slogan “Your body, my choice,” also engineered to upset and humiliate liberals: It’s an overt statement of sex and dominion. And Trump draws that out in people. “Disinhibition,” the New York Times writer Ezra Klein wrote recently, “is the engine of Trump’s success. It is a strength.” Trump is in touch with the impulses and desires that run counter to social norms, and he invites his audience to put aside the usual internal barriers to acting on or voicing them. This moment is an opportune one for a revival of Freud, whose work, with its signature focus on subterranean inner worlds, helps make sense of these tendencies and their implications for politics.
The temptation to psychologize one’s political opponents typically wins out after defeat, the political theorist and professor Corey Robin told me recently. (An easy claim to test: Among the surge of post-election takes is a subgenre of explanatory pieces evaluating the psyches of unexpected Trump voters—suggestions that Latinos are wedded to political strongmen, or that conservative wives cast their votes for right-wingers purely out of fear or submission.) In those periods, “Freud is mobilized to explain why the left failed—not because of institutions or specific forms of economic power or the Cold War, etc., but instead because of psychic structures that the left never really touched,” Robin said. Freud offers something more than simply assigning diagnoses to opponents: “an archaeology of the mind,” Robin told me, that aims to unearth emotions and desires that people aren’t necessarily aware of themselves.
That sort of excavation can be useful. Freud helps in forming an account of what people are drawn to in Trump—what pleasure, what gratification. Gary Greenberg, a writer and psychotherapist, argued in a 2018 Guardian essay that Trump is a figure who beckons America back to prior states of development—an indicator that the death drive is at work. Trump, Greenberg wrote, “urges us all to shake loose the surly bonds of civilized conduct: to make science irrelevant and rationality optional, to render truth obsolete, to set power free to roam the world, to lift all the core conditions written into the social contract—fealty to reason, skepticism about instincts, aspirations to justice.” Trump is, in other words, an atavist, inviting citizens to satisfy all of their hungry drives, all of their libidinous instincts: His America is a place for malign energies to express themselves in action. There’s a certain pleasure in that, perhaps, a kind of psychic relief—to lose oneself in a radical movement and to express feelings normally prohibited by society.
Today’s left-of-center would also be wise to consider what Freud might teach them about countering an appeal like Trump’s. In an essay published in Jacobin shortly before the election, the author and psychoanalyst Eric Reinhart argued that liberals have still failed to reckon with the psychological tendencies Freud identified that facilitate mass political movements like those of the president-elect. “Proponents of progressive ideals must instead take the reality of aggression, racism, and sadomasochism seriously as enduring political feelings, including in their own ranks, that require constructive political redress,” Reinhart wrote. This doesn’t mean indulging those feelings—rather, it means offering a politics built to contain them. “To craft an effective liberal or left politics, we must stop vainly demanding that people be more reasonable and own up to the persistent reality of destructive human tendencies that manifest not only around Trump but also in countless contexts throughout history,” Reinhart wrote.
Freudian psychoanalysis has, in the past several decades, faded from a feverish mid-century peak. In 1960, psychoanalysts occupied the majority of psychiatry positions in the United States, but the latter half of the century saw the advent of a vituperative discursive conflict over the validity of some of Freud’s key claims and the credibility of psychoanalysis as an effective, scientific method of clinical treatment. The debate raged across disciplines—by that time, Freud and the psychoanalytic model had been absorbed into numerous other fields, including literature, politics, and sociology. And though psychoanalytic treatment has been largely replaced by more familiar forms of psychiatric care, such as psychopharmacology (the treatment of mental illness with medication) and standardized therapy, Freud’s contributions remain useful.
Psychoanalyzing one’s enemies always comes with a certain degree of condescension, which is unfortunate, because the Freudian lens is an egalitarian approach so long as its advocates recognize that they, too, are ruled by motivations they cannot easily recognize or define. “Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive,” the economist John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1936, “the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as a result of animal spirits—of a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities.” I believe this insight bears wide application: I’m affected enough by vibes and instincts to believe that some part of my mind beneath my conscious thoughts plays an important role in my day-to-day life and decision making, and I suspect the same is true of others. It seems to me that avid Trump support must be anchored in such parts. In that case, whatever explains the Trump movement has in some sense always been with us and has visited us historically before; let’s pray that this time, the fever breaks quickly.
