Psychology Meets Politics, part 1 of 4: Meditations on 45's Attacks on Linking

Attacks on Linking

 

After the 1964 election, when many psychoanalysts and psychologist speculated on the mental status and personality organization of Republican candidate Barry Goldwater, there evolved an agreement among mental health professionals known as the Goldwater Rule. Briefly, we agreed that we would not speculate about the mental status of politicians unless we had ample information, such as can usually only be obtained under conditions of evaluation or treatment.

 

I believe the last four years have offered just such ample information. Besides the intimate family and financial documentation provided by 45's niece Mary Trump, 45 has been unusually prolific in documenting his trains of thought, his reasoning, and in giving accounts of his states of mind. Twitter is of course a rich source. So are 45’s rallies and the particular encouragements he has thrown out to his supporters. So too are the accounts, whether testimony or books or lengthy interviews, of the many subordinates who have been dismissed from advisory and Cabinet positions. 45’s many denials of having known these people may be regarded as self-serving, but also as finding it easy to deny connection with them. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Trump_administration_dismissals_and_resignations for a listing. I counted 185 up to March 2018, at which point I stopped counting.)

 

When I think of our Dear Leader, 45, I find myself thinking of other characters, in history and in stories. I think of Henry VIII, incapable of leading or strategizing, propped up by Cromwell, fancying himself irresistible to women. I think of the folk tale of the Fisherman and His Wife, and how she was never satisfied, berating her spouse who did all the work, demanding greater and greater splendor and aggrandizement, until finally she went too far and lost everything. I think of Pinocchio who wanted to become a real boy, and of the Velveteen Rabbit, who was told that becoming real entailed suffering and acquiring imperfections, and how they both succeeded in becoming real, but only through supernatural intervention. But after reading Mary Trump’s Too Little and Never Enough, an unsparing account of her family’s bleak dynamics, I find myself thinking also about Wilfred Bion’s concept of attacks on linking.

To be continued...