Une Saison en Enfer

Une Saison en Enfer: A Psychoanalyst in Trump's Amerika

Howard H. Covitz

I'm a psychologist/psychoanalyst. I live a pretty quiet life and for the past forty years I've practiced out of an office attached to my home. This home is the home where my wife and I have raised three children – one child still in her early 40's and two in their early-mid 50's.? It's a quiet life, here in the suburbs of Philadelphia. I write a bit, tend to and celebrate family and see those visitors who occasion my office without fanfare. I'm excited about my involvement in some reading groups with other mostly Senior Citizen types but have no engagement with partisan politics.

The practice of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic therapies is not particularly exciting and my impact on the World is limited. I've come to be satisfied in my role of assisting others in learning how best they can love and work and play. Just over 70 years of age, I wasn't looking for a great deal of excitement when Donald Trump announced his candidacy. I hadn't been politically active since the very early 1970's and, even then, my involvement was marginal. While I was a doctoral student in theoretical Mathematics beginning in before and during those contentious times,? I rarely attended protests, as my wife and I were elbow deep in the diaper pail with our two older kids. We didn't know about Woodstock and likely would not have attended had we known.

Disclosure 1: It's true that at one time around 1971, someone recommended that some workers in the Chevy Engine Plant near Buffalo use me as a sounding board for their ideas. I met with them several times and had nothing particular to offer that they could not have reasoned for themselves.

In the years from 1971 to 2015, I did little, if anything, politically. I taught in four universities, a college, ran a school for several years for emotionally disturbed inner city adolescents, taught some courses on the Bible as Literature, ran a Psychoanalytic institute for 12 years, saw my patients and did a lot of hanging out with my family.

Disclosure 2: While I worked and paid my taxes, the country, which had given a home to my forebears, was more like background music. Oh, yes, I appreciated living freely and being protected by my government,? I forgot much of what I learned in Civics class and I'm quite certain that I took Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness as a given.? One should never, I suppose, take the important matters in life for granted.

I disagreed with my Country's choice after 9/11 in going to War, though I was willing to consider that Colin Powell and the others knew a lot more about geopolitics than I. Knowing that my Mother's family was decimated by the Nazi regime came with some sensitivities that the Other was always in danger and the hatred espoused by some to the Moslem community was frightening and brought back memories of the "Nuke Iran" bumper stickers from the years of the Carter Presidency. And if I wasn't always humble in my thinking, my younger son's Ph.D. in political and constitutional theory acted as a reminder that an ex-Mathematician and Psychoanalyst was best to keep his nose clean when it came to speaking out about such matters. I did.

Then the rhetoric began. I was being warned by Candidate Trump of the great threats posed to the American Way by Mexicans and by Moslems. I was watching, too, as rival after rival was demeaned (as were members of their families) and, like many, I was shocked at the mocking of a disabled newsman. Like so many, I was comforted with the thought that Sec. Clinton was going to win the election and Trump was going to be just another Little Rich Boy who grew up believing that everything he said was important – a Little Rich Kid, at that, believing that, at 70+ years of age, his common sense trumped expertise and maintained the belief that he could learn quickly because he was so smart. It was beyond my ability to suspend that much disbelief! So, I went on writing here and there about how disturbing this man was to my own belief in the security of my six grandchildren.

No electric light bulb turned on in my head until a certain interview after the Khan incident. I recall the way Trump went after the Khans who spoke at the Democratic Convention. That wasn't the turning point, either. It was an interview he did that Summer before the election. Following Mr. Khan's impassioned speech about the loss of his son, Khan wondered if Candidate Trump had ever sacrificed. The person interviewing Trump asked the same question. Mr. Trump responded that he had, indeed, sacrificed. He had given many – maybe thousands of people – jobs.

I was dumfounded ... frankly speechless. Was it possible that a Candidate for the Presidency of the United States believed that giving a worker fair pay for a fair day's work was sacrifice? Had we gone back to the Patrone System where employers believed they not-quite but almost owned the laborer and had rights even over their family? Many companies up to WWII were run by this system. The labor movement was in no small part fueled by the rage felt towards employers who thought that the welfare and rights of their employees were subordinate in importance to their successes and profits.

Ah! But I'm a psychoanalyst and not a labor attorney and took this all in very personally.? Psychoanalysts are trained to feel their way into situations. A patient says something angry about the analyst and the analyst associates inside him- or herself and asks: how does this make me feel and what images and associations come to mind? This unfolding material is measured in the crucible of multiple treatment sessions for a long time until a dynamic process comes into focus and, thereafter, may be offered to the patient as a hypothesis.

And so, I paid attention to my feelings. The now-disgraced comedian, Louis C.K. had been comparing the Trump rhetoric to 30's Germany, that is, to the period in Europe that preceded forced incarceration and mass murders. My Grandfather had left in the early Twenties with my Grandmother and their three daughters, the youngest of which was my Mother. Most of the rest of my Grandmother's family died in Auschwitz with 100's of thousand other Hungarians.

My mind was churning. 'Laborers don't matter.' ... 'Foreigners are criminals and bring disease.' .... 'Judges of Mexican descent are not good judges.' ... 'I know more than the Generals and know the tax codes better than anybody.' ... 'I have rights over other people and their bodies.'? 'I can shoot someone on 5th Avenue with impunity.'

Of course, the First Amendment guaranteed anyone living in America the right to go on and on with the hateful rhetoric and accusations and mockery of anyone who disagreed with them. I , similarly, had the right to be offended by that speech. But what could I do? And what was I ethically obliged to do? It was pretty acceptable in the Mental Health Communities that speaking ex Cathedra about public figures was not ethical. I suppose it's something like a Professional Boxer fighting out of the ring. Those of us who can remember recall the furor over hundreds of Psychiatrists analyzing Barry Goldwater in a series of articles in Fact Magazine in 1964. This resulted in the Goldwater Rule that barred at least Psychiatrists from diagnosing people without consent and without a thorough series of clinical interviews – an examination adequate to the task. While this wasn't binding on Psychologists, the American Psychological Association was taking a similar position.

There was, however, another set of rulings in most municipalities that mandated Psychologists and others to work assiduously to prevent harm (homologous but not precisely the same as the Tarasoff Rulings). We had a duty to warn and a duty to protect by communicating with policing authorities that had the role of intervening before the commission of harm. I remembered, too, the verse in Scripture that counterpoised these two requirements: to protect the privacy rights of others vs. the duty to protect life.

"Don't go looselipped among your people (but) don't stand idly by as your neighbor bleeds; I am God." (Leviticus 19:25)

My take on that snippet from the Old Testament was that there was a mandate for us all – but maybe particularly for those who were privy to information and those who had power – to balance the rights of privacy of others with the requirement that we don't stand on that principle when there is danger to others that would result from our silence. I, also, took away from that brief sentence (11 words in the Biblical Hebrew) that Godliness or Goodliness, if you like, was resident in that ability to balance those two ethics and to know when to choose one over the other. I signed petitions during that period, decrying the racially tinged vitriol and venom coming out of the Trump camp. The first (12,000 signatories) was with a group called Citizen Therapists. I talked there about my sense of this need to balance the ethics set out in the Leviticus passage (above). The leader of the group removed me for what he apparently saw as strident transgressions of the Goldwater Rule. I opened a Facebook discussion group that I labeled Free Citizen Therapists, thinking that our Duty to Warn of the dangerousness of Trump's rhetoric did, indeed, supersede his Right to Privacy. John Gartner (a Psychologist) who had been a member of that group opened another discussion group called Duty to Warn (he collected over 60,000 signatures, the vast majority of which came from clinicians) and, shortly thereafter, he and Bandy Lee (a Psychiatrist) began planning a volume on Trump's dangerousness and invited me to join the author's group.

I was specifically thinking in those days that I was and other Mental Health Professionals were in the difficult position that a policeman might find himself in, too. I thought of a little fairy tale that eventually became a chapter in the upcoming book on Trump's dangerousness (Lee, 2017, p. 203) and it became a cornerstone of my thinking about my role as a citizen-psychoanalyst:

I was driving down Old York Road in my Police Cruiser when I saw this driver, a funny-looking kinda-old-guy. He had an orange tint to his skin and yellow poufy hair. He was driving his brand new Bentley, so I assumed he was pretty safe, even though he was weaving just a little haphazardly. Y'know, a little erratic. He had his window open calling some immigrant-looking pedestrians pretty angry names. I pulled him over. He had a small arsenal of automatic weapons up front and what looked like an RPG launcher on the back seat. I asked him: "What's with all the weapons, Sir?"

He says: "Officer.... I got a license and Montgomery County, PA is Open Carry. Anyhow. It's a pretty dangerous World out there. You know, there are a lotta immigrants and I think I saw Moslems dancing in Wall Park."

I go back to my cruiser and call the station-house. “Sarge. Any report of dancing foreigners in the Park?” Sarge asks me what I’ve been smoking; I understand his intent. So, I go back to the car.? "Sir ... I cannot confirm any disturbance going on in Wall Park." "Officer. I saw it myself and I should know because I have a lot of money." Orange-Man then goes on and on talking-trash about people who are different, saying that everybody who disagrees with him is a liar and one of them might have killed a Kennedy and another one should be sent to the Women's Detention Center because she’s the World’s biggest crook. Then he tells me it's not raining and it never rains when he's riding in his Bentley. Meanwhile, the water's pouring off my Stetson. He starts swearing about the Township Commissioners and accusing them of being stupid. In any case ... I have choices, don’t I? I think to myself, I could say any of the following:

(1) "Sir. You be careful, now, and have a blessed day."

(2) "Sir. I just wanna say that your car is the Tiger's roar. Be careful, now!"

(3) "Sir. I think you might be batshit crazy but I can't be sure; so, have a good day."

(4) "Sir. Take me for a ride in your car, please, and gimme a good job? ... and we'll forget about all this silliness."

or

(5) “Sir, would you step out of the car and we’ll take a ride and see if we can’t settle down those images in your head of dancing Moslems in the Park? By the way: were they Barefoot?”

With several dozen other health professionals, that volume was published in October 2017. The group of authors included, indeed, some luminaries from the Twentieth Century – maybe not dinner-table names but well known to all scholarly students of the human mind. Robert J. Lifton who wrote about the thinking that went into autocratic regimes and the horrors of both the Nazi regime and the use of nuclear weapons at the close of WWII and was now speaking of the dangers of normalizing such behaviors that Trump enacted. Judith Herman for decades had been among the few early contributors to the understanding of the sequelae of trauma in the individual. James Gilligan was there, too, talking about the psychiatric evaluation of dangerousness? and Phillip Zimbardo was representing the position that a decent person can become inured to acting with cruelty under certain circumstances.? And Gail Sheehy showed up to join our efforts.

It should be said that these mentioned authors (average age maybe just over 80) and the remaining two dozen authors weren't hippies protesting an unjust war. They weren't smoking dope and armchair philosophizing about a man who was being victimized by the East and West Coast liberals. They were seasoned clinicians (with two exceptions, Gail Sheehy, a noted journalist and a brilliant Betty Teng who was just finishing her training as a Psychoanalyst) – mostly in the 55-70 age group – who were concerned that Donald Trump was poised to damage and maybe destroy the Republic by undermining some of its values, including decency and kindness and truth and respect for women. They were concerned that he was, furthermore, creating division and fomenting violence, as he was doing so and that he was following the playbook of contemporary and historical despots.

The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Professionals Assess a President appeared October 2017 and, within a week, conferences and protests occurred in cities around the Country in order to provide a forum for people troubled by the new Presidency to discuss these matters and their feelings and their fears.? By this time, the Gartner group had decided to take the further step of assessing the President and affixing a name to his way of being. John had long been citing Erich Fromm's work on tyrants whom he labeled Malignant Narcissists. Fromm saw this as a disorder that combined features of a number of Personality Disorders: Borderline, Narcissistic and Sociopathic. Bandy Lee, on the other hand, chose to stay with appraisals of dangerousness. She was following a principle in Mental Health care: we do not hospitalize or recommend that we remove someone's right to bear arms or to care for their children based on a diagnosis but on whether or not they are a danger to self or others. The vast majority of people suffering from severe mental illnesses pass us by in our offices and interact with us and their families with danger to no one. We intervene if and only if there is danger to others or to the person, him- or herself.? I understood both positions but a split did, indeed, occur in this part of the resistance to Trumpian politics. I do remember similar splits occurring in the early 1970's and wondered out loud if resistance movements didn't tend to mirror the movements against which they resisted. In any case, I and a number of others, walked the line and remained affiliated with both groups.

My own concern was not specifically what label we chose to affix to Donald Trump. Indeed, at least two Psychiatrists who had held important positions in the world of Psychiatry objected strenuously to what they called our armchair psychiatry. Neither of these men (Jeffrey Lieberman and Allen Francis) were suggesting that Trump was competent to hold office or that he was a decent man. As an aside, it is quite disturbing to consider that a man my age or older – myself included – might consider learning the duties of arguably one of the most difficult and important jobs in the World. What to say? It's frankly too late for me to become a Nuclear Physicist or a Physician or even a restaurateur.? The psychic and mental athleticism required of such new learning is not for the old.? "Old dogs and new tricks" and all that is not just folk wisdom. In any case, those two psychiatrists were arguing technicalities, e.g., whether someone could be diagnosed as suffering from a Narcissistic Personality Disorder if they weren't suffering – and? Donald Trump didn't appear to be suffering.

Something the non-clinician may not know is that Mental Health practitioners are not in large numbers friendly to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association. Many of us feel that these discrete categories fail to capture the essential components of distress that bring our patients to our consultation rooms. Furthermore, there is considerable confusion about psychological/psychiatric diagnoses. In General Medicine, the diagnosis of a hairline fracture of the femur doesn't suggest that the person may not be suffering, as well, from many other ailments. Indeed, by the time I reached maturity, the idea that a single diagnosis could explain all that ailed me was a hoot-and-a-half. When a mental health expert decides on a diagnostic category, they are suggesting a label that best describes the ailment that is to be treated – at that time and by that clinician and nothing more. And no one was really planning to treat the elected President!

I had taken a different path in noting that there are two kinds of emotional illnesses. The first type of illness collects those disturbances in which the person is essentially acting out upon him- or herself.? Such people develop symptoms that restrict or inhibit actions that promote the Good Life. The Obsessive/Compulsive/Prohibitive type demands that no Good and no pleasurable activity be allowed to stand without tormenting thoughts, the requirement to avoid pleasurable activity and/or the demand that painful behaviors be required and indulged. Anxiety is used as a cudgel to keep these pains going. The Hysterical person who suffers from so-called conversion symptoms and the Phobic who cannot carry out quotidian behaviors without severe anxiety has restricted primarily their own day-to-day activities.

There are, however, disturbances in which the lion's share of the pain is felt by others. I shall briefly describe those attitudes and behaviors that we see in such people who may suffer, as well, from the former type of illness. So, for instance, the person suffering from Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder tends to have less anxiety than his more neurotic obsessional cousin (just mentioned) but imposes restrictions and privations on others, claiming that, if they refuse to cooperate, they'll be causing the sufferer distress. The person correctly diagnosed with a Narcissistic Personality Disorder is not someone who is taken with his own prowess but someone who cannot allow good feelings or strengths in others.? In that sense, Pathological Narcissism is the graduated inability to allow other people a dose of their own healthy Narcissism. This well-healed narcissist embraces his or her own value and may even indulge in self-admiration, all the while allowing others to bask in the sunshine of their own admirable selves. Even the Ancients knew this as was noted nearly two thousand years ago: "Everyone is obligated to say: the World was created for me" (Mishnah Sanhedrin 4). The key, need I add, is the recognition that everyone is responsible to think this. The Pathological Narcissist gets only the first half.

I laid out the primacy of the graduated ability to modulate human narcissism by coming to accept others as Subjects in Their Own Right beginning in the early 1980's, culminating in a volume describing this developmental paradigm in 1998. I'll describe the stigmata of severe Personality Disorders, as I did in the Dangerous Case book (Lee, 2017) and that I felt were obviously displayed in the public behaviors of Candidate Trump and, later, those of President Trump.

1. A person under the sway of severe Personality pathology is generally incapable of understanding and responding in an emotionally empathic way to how another feels. Winning appears to be all, and they make this clear in more-or-less those very words. He may well, in an intellectual way, be able to know how others react or even what they might be thinking (Cognitive Empathy) but this has little bearing on how he treats these others who remain objects, like pieces on a chess board to be moved about in order to win the game – and objects, therefore, identified as either friend or foe. Such a person – especially when emotionally wounded – makes no space for others – past or present or future – and displays an apres moi le deluge relationship to the World.
2. This tendency in such a person effectively splits the World into those who support him and all those others who are against him. Such a person may, indeed, grow to be incapable of bigotry for to be bigoted or racist or sexist, one must feel allegiance to a group and these so-afflicted appear to have few, if any, such allegiances. Still and all, they may have no qualms about using bigotries for their own purposes.
3. Lacking the need to evaluate how his actions may impact others, such a person reacts more quickly and with less skepticism about the correctness of his actions. Conscience is a buffer that keeps most of us from acting in ways that are destructive to others who are seen as like us but with such people conscience has little sway.
4. Such a person has not yet developed a respect for others’ thinking, relationships or efforts, leading him to put little value in the accomplishments of others. As such, he tends not to recognize the necessity for maintaining extant organizations, government structures, conventional practices, and laws, and has no room for alliances between others.
5. Due to the above (1-4), his thinking tends to be focused but lacks nuance. He demonstrates no apparent ability to see more than one "not unreasonable" view: a monomania of sorts. These views, additionally, can flip to their opposite, for what makes any new attitude acceptable to him is under the control of a my-will-be-done syndrome: "It is important and it is important specifically because I said it or did it."
6. Finally (following on 1-5, above), such a person displays at best a? limited capacity to distinguish the real from the wished for/imagined and demonstrates a ready willingness to present distortions of the truth. If the only measure of truth is what he thinks, then truth, itself, as a perception that comports with the perceptive reality of others, has no meaning.

The relationship between these personality characteristics and dangerousness is transparent. We members of Clan Anthropos respond to danger and pain in the very same way all animals do; we either fight or flee the danger and the pain it promises to bring our way. Concerned and loving parenting styles – above and beyond the protective roles of parents in our animal relatives – is most likely an artifact of many thousands of years of cultural development, too. Progressive generations of successful parents – those who promoted the likelihood of survival of their offspring – slowly developed tender and kind ministration styles. Simply put, parental love became a preferred way of raising the young to and beyond a level of independence. We stopped eating our young and slowly – very slowly – began loving them.

The children of all parents tend to identify, too, with certain behavioral characteristics of their parents. Children, that is, of those loving and nurturing parents began to develop the capacity to see their parents as Subjects in their Own Right, just as the parents treated them as separate and worthy of their love. Indeed, perhaps the simplest definition of love is contained in that ability to see the beloved as a separate person and to cherish that separateness.

It was Sigmund Freud who first suggested that the pinnacle of human development is to be first-found in the child's ability to accept and then to cherish the relationship of their parents. Indeed, we all begin life believing that the World was created only for us and it is only through the loving caretaking of others that we learn that there is value in seeing others – not as objects to be manipulated for selfish purposes and pleasures – but as separate complicated others with our own relationships, ideas, desires and needs. Not all of us succeed.

Dag Hammarskj?ld put it this way:

"Do you wish to forfeit even that little to which your efforts may have entitled you? Only if your endeavors are inspired by a devotion to duty in which you forget yourself completely, can you keep your faith in their value. This being so, your endeavor to reach the goal should have taught you to rejoice when others reach it." (Dag Hammarskj?ld - 1957 in Markings, p. 153, 1964)

Malachi, the last prophet canonized in the Old Testament, thought similarly. He suggested that the Messianic era which was to be announced by Elijah the Prophet would be brought about by this coming together of the generations. He described Elijah's task:

"Behold, I am sending to you Elijah the Prophet before the great and awesome day of God. And he shall return the hearts of the parents onto their children and the hearts of the children onto their parents. And if not? I shall mess you up completely." (Last sentences of the Book of Malachi)

I make no claims to having any insight into how this mess ends. Still, as a Country Psychoanalyst, I cannot quite muster up a sense of hopefulness. In subsequent papers (e.g., Covitz 2020), I described, indeed, the sense of madness that four years under the rule of a would-be Emperor – during which time all that I held sacred was mocked and sullied – could induce personality deformation and animus in an otherwise sane husband, father, grandfather and psychoanalyst.

References

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

Covitz, H. (2020). "Living With Shattered Dreams: A Confession and a Hypothesis." Journal of Humanistic Psychology 60:4 494-502.

Hammarskj?ld, D. (1957). Markings,? Alfred A. Knopf, 1964.

Lee, B. Ed (2017). The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump:? 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Professionals Assess a President.? St. Martin's Press/New York.

Yehudah ha'Nasi (3rd C. CE). Mishnah Sanhedrin.