Sunday, November 5, 2017

Psychoanalysts address Donald Trump

Reading and listening to psychoanalysts writing and speaking about Donald Trump, I am struck by the repetition of mistakes often made by people in this profession.  The comments I have noticed are so knowing.  Knowing about what's wrong with Donald Trump, his diagnosis or his psychodynamics, or knowing about how dangerous he is, or how much in denial so many people are about how dangerous he is.  Or knowing about the unconscious psychodynamics of his appeal, or of the way that many people, in voting for him, vote against their own self-interest (as determined by the author).  Psychoanalysts in general tend to present themselves as experts, particularly as experts about unconscious dynamics, about the unconscious itself.

This is an occupational hazard of psychoanalysis, i.e. to believe that one is an expert on the one thing about which no one can be an expert:  the unconscious.  For, by definition, the unconscious always eludes our knowledge, our self knowledge.  Expertise about the unconscious is a contradiction in terms. If we psychoanalysts have an expertise, it consists in sensing the location of our blind spots and trying to learn about them from others (our patients, our families, our friends) who can see us more clearly than we can see ourselves, or from our own dreams and reveries.

In the case of Donald Trump, a commonly shared blind spot is obliviousness to the existence and experience of the millions of people who voted for him.  I suspect this obliviousness is shared by many psychoanalysts as well as those people, the "elite,"against whom Trump was able to mobilize so much resentment.  Is it surprising that people have a huge resentment against those who are oblivious to them and their suffering?   Yet, people like me are continually shocked that there are so many people out there who voted enthusiastically for a man who they felt spoke for them in a very loud, belligerent, unintimidated, voice.

There is a lot of resentment out there directed toward psychoanalysts and psychoanalysis, and I would guess that we feed it with our pretensions to expertise.  But wait---I'm starting to sound pretty knowing myself.  So maybe some of you reading this will comment on what I am overlooking---.