Losing it in Trump's America

Living with Shattered Dreams: 

Confessions of an Aging Therapist in Trump's America 

 "Oh! How the city 

once so populous has grown lonely! 

She has become like a widow! 

She that was great among the nations, 

a princess among the provinces, 

has become tributary."

Opening words of the 

Book of Lamentations,

attributed to Jeremiah

The Confession

         The past three years, since Donald Trump announced his candidacy for the office of President of the United States, have been for me a prolonged Season in Hell ... crazy-making times. Jeremiah (above) lamented the coming destruction of his World; I fear for mine. 

         I have, not unlike Dostoevsky's Underground Man or one of Kafka's many sufferers, felt sick, ailing and diseased while not knowing specifically what ailed me. I assumed it had to do with a sense of alienation and a feeling of being under attack. Was my experience akin to that of the immigrant, perhaps? A stranger in a strange land? I don't have sufficient distance from the experience to understand these changes and asking you, my reader, to come back and ask me about my responses to this New America in ten years seems sheepish, at best. 

         From time to time in these years, I have felt hounded by the media-fed tentacles of someone I viewed as a vile impostor, pretending to have extraordinary leadership skills but having no discernible benevolent ones. I was tormented by the idea that a President who took an oath to protect my Country could spitefully or politically choose cabinet members who opposed those very protections that they were to guard.   I felt tortured by Trump's daily antics and his manufactured kerfuffles with others (war heroes, beauty queens, ex-presidents, Gold Star parents, Hollywood, the East Coast, the West Coast, "the Fake News," etc.). It was painful to watch his efforts to destroy alliances that had kept the aligned Democracies united and had equally kept tyrants in check since my Father came home from WWII. I was shocked by his response to whether he had sacrificed for others with: 'I have given thousands of people jobs.' How could it be, I wondered, that my President could believe that his paying of others for a day's work as the Bible demands (Deut. 24:15) constituted a form of sacrifice? I was sad and angry. And, yes, I was crazed. 

I still am.

         I don't know how many hundreds of hours my wife of fifty+ years and I spent listening to pundits and talking heads go on about Trump's misbehaviors. We together learned the hard wayjust how much is given up between elections in representative democracies. We came to realize how naive we had been to imagine that our generation of Baby-Boomers had initiated unalterable positive changes to what it meant to be an American and a Citizen of the World. I could go on ... but it would just signify how sick my wife and I have come to feel in Trump's America.

         Alas! I'm likely no different than more than half of my fellow Americans and most of my patients who have been effectively shell-shocked by the barrage of attacks on what we believed to be central tenets of American life, of decency and of civil discourse. While requirements for confidentiality prevent me from speaking in detail about my patients' experiences, I think it fair to say that, with few exceptions, my patients have reported increases in disturbed sleep, notably more frequent fears of the future, terror at the conditions their children and grandchildren are likely to inherit, a doubling of traumatogenic dreams and a despairing confusion over how they might allay the anxieties of their progeny (see, hypothesis in closing section). "I don't know what to do except watch the news" and "My head feels like it's going to blow up" and "Will the Republic survive" and "What do I tell my (grand)kids" are common refrains. ... Is there more to say to them than: 'for me, too?' 

Background: Why is it so hard?

         These notes arise from my blogs, journals, videos and other writings that occupied not inconsiderable blocks of my time during these years. They confess the continuing trajectory of a late middle-aged psychoanalyst's unsuccessful battle to make peace with his own disturbed feelings surrounding the rise of the new administration in Washington.  My long-held beliefs about these United States that welcomed my family to join in the American experiment have, indeed, all been challenged, leaving me betimes disoriented and confused.

         Some background is in order when a psychoanalyst opines openly that he has experienced a form of craziness. I am a 70+-year-old white Jewish married male. I've led a quiet life, raising – with my wife, Marsha – 3 children and watching the growth of 6 grandchildren to adolescence and beyond. In my working years, I've taught, run a school for disturbed inner city high schoolers, taught in areas as diverse as Biblical Characterology, University Mathematics, Statistics and Psychology, and taught Psychoanalysis to Psychologists, Social Workers, Psychiatrists and others. I sat on boards, practiced clinical psychoanalysis and psychotherapy for forty+ years and directed a psychoanalytic training program for a dozen years. I have led a quiet – more or less apolitical – life until soon after Trump glided down those stairs. The closest my writings previously came to anything political – never mind partisan – was when, in a volume arguing details with Freud about the sexual origins of emotional illnesses, I briefly discussed the delicate balance that exists between individual freedoms and the social contract in Western democracies. It must be no different, I reasoned, than the balance that need be achieved between healthy narcissism and love for the other in individual development (Covitz, 1998/2016, Chapter 10). 

         The reader has a further Right to Know a bit about my background which might contextualize this Saison en enfer. Mother arrived from Hungary in 1921 and Father's family arrived from White Russia perhaps ten years, earlier. I was raised in a devoutly religious home. I was heavily influenced by my WWII Soldier Boy Father who, in addition to working, did all the plumbing, electrical and carpentry work around the house and a stay-at-home Mother who took care of her four baby-boomers – three born before or during the Great War. My Mother cried as she lit a table-full of Remembrance Candles at each holiday for those left behind in Hungary, only to be murdered in Auschwitz. My Maternal Grandfather, too, had an impact on what I considered the Good Life, as we lived upstairs from Grandma and Grandpa till 1954. He was a religious leader in Brooklyn whose doors were open to down-and-outs for a cup of tea and a few bucks ... six days each week. 

         Maybe rules come from parents and ethics from grandparents. Grandpa had three types of visitors: members of my Grandfather's flock; long-bearded scholars who looked like him; and the down-and-out. Memory has it that Grandpa treated them all the same, just as his Torah repeatedly argued and just as he taught me: 'One Law shall there be for the settler, the stranger and the sojourner in your midst, as you remember that you were once a stranger in a strange land.' (Exodus 12:49, Numbers 16:17).

         The core ethical standards were clear: decency, kindness to others (all others), devotion to God and gratitude to the Republic for providing our family with a safe haven ... and for then rewarding us with citizenship. The Fifties in Brooklyn saw families of all ethnicities and colors, speaking in many tongues. We lived – if betimes suspiciously – in a respectful interweave. We didn't have everything in common or look the same but there was some sense that we were all in the Soup and together. Oh, yeah! There was Perry down the block who seemed awfully rich – he had a distant Uncle who owned a toy shop. My family, that is, was part of the wave of immigrants who came to America and, while our Fathers' fingernails may have never been clean (Dad was a printer and Perry's Dad drove a hack) and our Moms had never heard of the Gucci and Hermes of their day, we lived the American Dream and pledged allegiance to OUR flag.

         Years passed and there came Civil Rights and Anti-War Movements and the Summer of Love. My wife knew more about the politics and culture of the day but, still, we had our elbows too deep in the diaper pail to go to Woodstock ... or to even know it was occurring. I quietly supported Civil Rights and anti-War movements. I was pleased that the Bill of Rights was expanding and assumed that the Biblical mandate that I learned from Grandpa to have 'one law for the citizen, settler and sojourner' was well-established on these shores. Oh, I knew that in the Fifties when my family sojourned to Ohio, Ricky, our Doctor's son who walked with me to school, thought I had a box in which I kept my Jewish horns when I left home during daylight hours. I knew, too, that there were rough kids who thought they could beat me up if I wore a Jewish skull cap. And years later, I was aware of prejudices, e.g., when a colleague's Mother-in-Law asked me how it felt to be a Christ killer. Still, I believed that America would continuously grow in a direction towards the aspirational goals of the Founding Fathers. 

         Indeed, I was naive enough to think that those people I was involved in electing to represent me would do so with, at the very least, a sense of noblesse oblige, a noble's sense of responsibility and gratitude for the positions they had been blessed to occupy. I blinded myself to the idea that some of these noblemen might themselves aspire to be autocrats and above the laws that applied to We the Common-Folk People. I never imagined that, once elected, they might choose to exert (what I freely call) Unamerican controls over us/me until the next election. They were, I thought and as I learned in Civics classes, men (with a smattering of women) for whom the ethics espoused by my family – decency, kindness, gratitude to the Republic and a devotion to higher principles – were central to the determination of their behavior. In 2008, when a mixed-race President from the middle class was elected, I became even more certain that the Bill of Rights was well established in our Republic. 

And then came the years of questioning Obama's legitimacy as president and the promise to hamstring his Presidency! 

         And, then, Trump floated down the escalator.

         In the draft of a letter in 1895 (p. 207) and in an unfinished piece on Psychopathic behavior (p.309 ), Sigmund Freud opined: "A man who does not lose his reason over certain things can have no reason to lose."  Freud was quoting Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's play, Emilia Galotti (1772, Act IV, Scene 7)  that dramatized the tensions between autocratic rule and the enlightened Romantic moralities of the 18thCentury, an ethic that moved people to the democratic revolutions that promised liberte, fraternite et egalite. This Freud/Lessing sentiment  – that losing one's mind in the name of preserving one's sanity[1] – had proved correct in my experience. As a school principal for emotionally disturbed high-schoolers, I found that it was the healthier student, the one who was sane enough to be removed from violent inner city schools, who would come to our protected environment. Treating soldiers, I learned, too, that it was in many ways the healthier ones who came back damaged by what are the quotidian horrors in the life of a combat soldier. Those who came back unscathed, perhaps, had little sanity to lose.

         I trained as a psychoanalyst in 1970's America during the continuing cultural changes that spoke to the universal humans' right to a Clean and Healthy Life, a Dignified Liberty, and the Pursuit of an Equal Rights Happiness.  Of course, we were falling short but we were moving in that direction. Women's Rights, Racial Rights, Children's Rights, Gender Rights, Third World Rights ... even Old Folk's Rights to a dignified dotage!  Forty-five years later, I was still in the trenches, assisting people whose development had been derailed, leaving them slaves to their own symptoms. I was trying, that is to say, to help them find a way back to a Good Life, for, in a profound way, that is what therapists of all stripes try to do.   

         It was just then that a purportedly rich, garish and puerile man arose to seek the office of the American Presidency. He demeaned anyone who differed with or opposed him and sought powers hitherto shared with the People and their Elected Representatives.  My every notion of decency was being challenged. More than half the Country was appalled, transfixed by the spectacle, and frightened; a full third was enthralled by him.

         A popular saying goes: insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result. There is, however, another form of madness that arises when people continue doing the same thing and expect the same results, while not allowing for the possibility that circumstances may have dramatically changed or more work need be done. I fell into that second category of the "insane." I imagined throughout my earlier life that as long as I/we kept doing the same things, progress was pretty well certain. I was wrong.

         In the early months of Trump's campaign, I was troubled by the slanderous comments Trump was offering up, particularly his attacks on Brown, Black and/or Foreign people but also by his mocking and criticism of all who disagreed with him and his gratuitous misrepresentation of facts. I started blogs and facebook discussion groups that apparently sought to defend against my fears with humor. I was in a state of denial that there was any likelihood that someone who demonstrated the degree of contempt for the majority of not only Americans but the World could ever be elected President. My denial was followed by an attempt to contain my feelings by intellectualizing ... and more humor. 

         I wrote about a cascading set of characteristics that were obvious in Trump's behavior and spoke of my Duty as a psychoanalyst to Warn others. Trump's behaviors required no special psychological lens to be seen, even if such extra vision might be helpful in understanding just how closely these characteristics were aligned with dangerousness in someone whose rise to power included the keys to the World's biggest arsenal. 

         These characteristics were: 

1.    A grotesque lack of empathy ... i.e., an inability to act with concern and as if others were Subjects in Their Own Right who had feelings, thoughts and relationships of their own to be protected.

2.    A black-and-white splitting of the World into those who were with him and all those others who weren't.

3.    Disrespect for all thought that came before him. Laws and Treaties and Alliances held no sway for him if they had been negotiated or articulated by others. Only what was his mattered.

4.    An inability to consider a number of not-unreasonable positions left his thinking nuance-free. Indeed, he could reverse his own thinking from speech to speech and sometimes within the same speech with each new thought experienced as "100%."

5.    An ability (due to the above), to make decisions very rapidly. Animals, indeed, without the need to consider a variety of outcomes and who depend solely on their instincts, behave similarly.

6.    Finally, all these combined to allow him to recognize a singular truth in his articulations – his own. What he said was true and all else was false or "fake news."

         Knowing – or shall I say believing – that I had some understanding of Trump's behavioral modus operandi did provide, I suppose, a transient sense of control. Humor carried my wife and I through this period and we found friends on and off social media who saw things the way we did. We sought them out and that helped. We avoided Trump supporters. We did go to a Minor League Baseball game in a city that broadly supported Trump and found those in attendance pleasant but said nothing of our perfidies, while there. I – sometimes with Marsha – went so far as to produce comedic, if macabre, videos that I shared with friends. The lead in these videos was a clown, Skary Klown. Skary wore a clown mask and spoke facetiously and with an Eastern European accent. He sang modified popular songs for Donald. My children and grandchildren thought it odd. Humor didn't work, though ... not in any way that would lead to change. The more than several dozen internet death-threats that were sent to me in response to my writings about Trump during those times didn't help, either.   

And Then I Had a Dream and an Hypothesis

I held a large orange poofy-haired man in a headlock. I broke his neck and, as I did, he turned into the Pillsbury Doughboy.

         I had, that is, an opportunity to consider – in light of this murderous dream – where I had psychically gone and parri passu where my patients (mostly progressives) seemed to be. Why the violence? Why the unmasked aggression and why the murderous impulses? I already had talked broadly within my community of people who were worried that a man who had been elected President was extremely dangerous –  due to the combination of his personality traits and the powers that he controlled. Indeed, 27 such professionals had joined under the editorial eye of Bandy Lee to write on this very subject (The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, 2017). I began warning them that – in my experience in the 1960's – groups and individuals that resisted a certain leader tended to take on characteristics of that very leader[2].

An Hypothesis in Closing

         And so, thinking of other men who sought imperial power, I arrived at an hypothesis and will close these notes by briefly describing this idea that may have been obvious to many but had never clarified in my own thinking. 

The Leader who seeks imperial power effectively creates an outrageous persona that with certain differences will be taken on by not only those who support him but unwittingly by those who oppose him, as well. The outrageousness, let me add, is fundamental to this strategy. This is so whether or not the Leader recognizes the centrality of this outrageousness to accomplish complete domination of the nation he seeks to control.

         Allow me, then, to return to the six character traits, then, that I saw in Trump's behavior and admit that they appeared in me and were obvious in my patients and friends, as well. I've taken it as part of my role as a therapist to highlight these propensities in my patients ... and to remind myself of them daily.

1. The Leader, by demonstrating no recognition of the subjectivity of others, makes it impossible for large swaths of the citizenry to feel any empathy for him. And, indeed, many of those I know have expressed their sense that they would not shed a tear if this particular Leader were to become very ill or to die. And I've had that thought, myself.

2.  By doing this, the Leader induces a broad fissure in the Nation between those who support and those who oppose him. One only has to recall the effect of a comment made by Secretary Clinton about "a basket of deplorables" to note how well-defined this split can be. This is not, let me add, the tribalism of different Protestant Churches, for instance, but rather a special form of tribalism in which there are but two identities ... With the Leader and Against the Leader, for nothing else matters.

3. The Leader thus renders all other considerations secondary and all values and alliances that came before irrelevant.

4. In this sense, there is no nuance left in thinking on either side of this cleft. The Leader's supporters (including Legislators) see him doing no wrong and his detractors can imagine him doing no right.

5. Decisions are made, therefore, on-the-spot and without forethought. "If he did it, it's right" or "if he did it, he's wrong." Quick and Dirty.

6. Finally, there is no truth. There is only the Leader and the need to either coronate him or crucify him, so to speak. All else becomes, again, irrelevant.

         Today, according to this hypothesis, it may be wise to keep in mind that we each of us live in this new culture, so do our patients and colleagues and, so, too, do all those who either support or resist Trump. It is a time, that is, of danger to all relationships: clinical, familial and collegial ones.

"She weeps and weeps in the night;

her tears are on her cheeks;

she has none to comfort her among all her lovers;

all her friendly neighbors have dealt treacherously with her;

they have become her enemies." Lamentations 1:2

References:

Biblical references are author's translations from the Hebrew Torah.

Covitz, H. H. (1998/2016). Oedipal Paradigms in Collision: A Centennial Emendation of a Piece of Freudian Canon. Peter Lang, reissued: Object Relations Institute: NY, NY.

Freud, S. (1892). Draft H3 Paranoia from Extracts From The Fliess Papers. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume I ( 1886-1899): Pre-Psycho-Analytic Publications and Unpublished Drafts, 206-212

Freud, S. Freud's, ‘Psychopathic Characters on the Stage’ (1942a [1905-6]), ibid., 7]

Lee, B. (2017). The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. Thomas Dunne Books, NY, NY.

Bio: Howard H. Covitz, PhD, ABPP, NCPsyA is a late middle-aged psychologist-psychoanalyst. For many years he was Director and on the Training Faculty of The Psychoanalytic Studies Institute (PSI/IPP) in Philadelphia. His 1998/2016 Oedipal Paradigms in Collision was nominated for the Gradiva Psychoanalytic Book of the Year. He has written on the connections between Narcissism, Morality and Oedipal Development and on internecine conflict in the psychoanalytic community. He was a member of the Board of the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis for 10 years. He for many years taught university Mathematics, Statistics and Psychology and ran a school for disturbed adolescents in the 1970's. His political activism arises at a point equidistant from his roles as Father, Grandfather, Citizen and Therapist. [email protected]

Abstract: The author describes how his and his patients' sense of the ethical has been affronted by Candidate and then President Trump. He offers an hypothesis that autocratic leaders – by choosing an outrageous persona – split the nation they wish to dominate into two starkly separated camps that both, in certain ways, mimic the autocrat's behaviors.

[1] Later to be called: Regression in the Service of the Ego.

[2] Also known as Identification with the Aggressor.