http://www.kristeva.fr/the-kristeva-circle/trump.html
“The phenomenon of Donald Trump’s ascendency to become the 45th President of the United States is surely overdetermined, meaning that there are likely many different causes for this. The one I entertain here is I believe significant, though I do not argue that it is the main or only cause. But it is one we should consider and address. In short, I argue that the rise of Trump is in part due to a paranoid-schizoid politics found both in the personality of Trump himself and in a large-scale regression of many in the populace to a more primitive state of denial, splitting, and demonization, coupled with a syndrome of ideality. In other words, both Trump and his supporters split the world into good and bad (or SAD!!!! as Trump likes to tweet). In his inaugural speech he repeatedly demonized foreign powers and idealized America. His America first policy is textbook paranoid- schizoid: “We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies and destroying our jobs.”
The Trump phenomenon shares much with many other nationalist politics on the rise around the world, but mostly an inability to tolerate difference and loss, including loss of a romanticized past or idealized future. Hence our politics today needs something that psychoanalytic theory has tried to offer: an understanding of how to work through trauma, loss, and persecutory phantasies. A politics of working through difficult choices and misrepresentations of others in our midst could help allay the paranoid politics that dominates politics today.”
After giving an account of the concept of working through in Freud, Klein, and Kristeva, I turn to the Trump phenomenon and then close with a brief account of a politics of working through.
I.
But because of the sadomasochistic nature of he drives, the adolescent’s belief in the ideal object is constantly threatened. Accordingly, Kristeva argues, “theadolescent is a believer of the object relation and/or of its impossibility.” [11] This gives rise to the ideality syndrome, the belief that there is a Great Other that exists and can provide absolute satisfaction. This is not just a syndrome that plagues teenagers: “We are all adolescents when we are enthralled by the absolute.” [12]Just as anyone can regress back to a paranoid-schizoid position, the temptation of ideality or its flip side of nihilism can tempt any adult as well as political bodies.
II.
Trump and many of his followers are perfect examples of both the syndrome of ideality and the repetition compulsion, caught up in playing out over and over an attempt to undo what they imagine they have lost, whether a good mother or a perfect country.
The cry Trump repeats at every opportunity—“Let’s Make American Great Again”—taps into a dual wager: (1) that those who imagine themselves as the dominant and quintessential “American” people need not mourn the loss of their presumed dominance at home and abroad and (2) that those who are undermining the old status quo can be undone, thrown out, excised from the body politic, making possible an ideal and perfect state. Those who will not mourn their losses nor tarry with indeterminacy, uncertainty, and democracy demand a politics of black and white and good and evil; and they presume that those who oppose them are the enemies of all things perfect and true.
Let me offer a psychoanalytic, though hypothetical account of the genesis of Trump’s character:
Just after his second birthday, his mother gave birth to a baby brother and then she almost died. After childbirth she got an infection, had to have a hysterectomy then several other surgeries. What trauma. First there was this brute fact that his mother was going to give birth to a rival, then there’s possibly some murderous rage for her doing this, then after that murderous rage she does in fact almost die, and then she’s gone—for how long?—in the hospital, almost dead, almost gone. The boy’s one true love has first defied him, then in fantasy been killed by him, then almost dies and is gone, perhaps he felt terrible guilt that he could not repair and so he could not internalize a good mother.
He grows up to be a bully. At his private school where his wealthy father is a benefactor, he becomes a troublemaker and tyrant, and eventually his teachers persuade the father to send him elsewhere. At military school, the boy learns the lessons that he is special and great and, in the course of this, he almost kills his roommate for not folding the linens correctly. He becomes fastidiously neat and develops a fear of germs, of anything that might invade his body. He goes on in life to purge any imagined invaders, including in his fantasies Muslims, Mexicans, and those who’ve deigned to ruin his imagined perfect kingdom.
And he imagines that he is the king! He takes up the great defense of undoing. This is the defense against felt harm that involves trying to do something all over again in a way that turns out better. How to undo mother’s death from his life when he was just beginning to become a little self? Maybe he could be a big self, maybe he could be so perfect and important and big and great that she would finally notice and love him. Maybe he could be so important and smart and wealthy that she would love him more than anyone else in the world.
Maybe also he could avenge his father’s loss, his father who had to grow up and take over the family business as a young adolescent when his own father died, the grandfather who made his wealth as a poor immigrant by setting up brothels where fools went looking for gold. And in the process maybe he could avenge his mother’s shame, a poor immigrant “domestic” from Scotland, leaving home at 17, arriving at 18, with only $50 in her pocket.
So the child who suffers these losses and sets out to avenge and to undo the harm. He cannot help himself; he isn’t even conscious of what he is doing. His loss turns into narcissism and grandiosity. At his rallies, he throws out protesters and crying babies. He doesn’t see his effects on other people, though most everyone around him is painfully aware of this great malformation. There’s an immense disjunct between how he acts and how he thinks of himself.
Something is terribly wrong. In public he makes great proclamations about his greatness, intelligence, and bigness, and has no sense of how bizarre all this sounds. He insults other people for their “smallness,” and seems totally oblivious that he is exhibiting his own obliviousness. In this respect, he is delusional.
He has no tolerance for criticism, no ability to appreciate other points of view, no capacity for self-reflection. He is like a person play-acting being a person, a person who is big and great and wonderful, whose enemies ought to be purged or imprisoned.
In all his attempts to purge his imagined perfect world of invaders, he purges his own internal shames and demons: the mother who entered the country as a poor domestic servant, the grandfather who made millions by prostituting land and women, all those immigrant foreigners who are trying to infect us. He purges anyone who interrupts him. He befriends those like him, other authoritarian figures. He belittles anyone who doesn’t try to be as strong as him. And because of his appeal to all those in his country who harbor similar wounds, who feel cheated, infiltrated, abandoned, and wronged, the people project their own anxieties into his anxieties and identify with his ways of acting out. He does for them what they cannot do for themselves. Where they are trapped in powerlessness, he can be their power player, their avenger, their hero. And so they nominate him to be their candidate for the presidency of their country.
The Trump phenomenon taps into a global political problem: a lack of public and shared means for working through ambiguity and loss, for coming to understand the strangers in our midst, that is, for moving from a paranoid-schizoid politics to and through a Kleinian depressive kind of politics.
How my heart sings 