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Abstract
Charisma is best understood as an intersubjective phenomenon irreducible to individual psychology, though to some extent the phenomena of charisma and narcissism overlap. From its earliest stipulation by St. Paul as a gift of grace to Weber’s (Citation1922, Citation1946, Citation1968) seminal work on charismatic authority and its inevitable routinization, the concept has evolved into a more nuanced construct that can be useful in formulating leadership/followership dynamics. Via a case vignette, the author illustrates how charismatic organization functions in the clinical situation. Linking Weber’s work on enthusiasm to Bion’s (Citation1958) stipulation of arrogance and stupidity, he shows how the concept of charismatic organization bridges recent social science research and psychoanalytic understanding and provides a way of relating certain clinical phenomena to events on the larger sociopolitical stage.
Acknowledgments
The author wishes to thank Nicole Topich, Special Collections Librarian at Oskar Diethelm Library, Institute of Psychiatry, Weill Cornell Medical College, for research assistance. Thanks also to Jay Greenberg and Lawrence Friedman for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
Notes
1 Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal movements often feature glossolalia as part of a highly emotional style of worship (Scheper Citation2005). Mainstream Judaism has mostly been wary of charismatic expression, with the notable exception of the Hasidic movement. Sunni Islam is like mainstream Judaism in this respect, but Shiah Islam “has always been more open to charismatic religious expression” (p. 1546). Scheper comments that: “ironically, European colonial involvement had the unintended effect of enhancing the role of charismatic Islam in Africa,” adding that “the story of African spirit possession and charismatic religious authority can also be pursued through the African diaspora, in syncretic traditions such as Shango in Brazil, vodou in Haiti, and Santeria in Cuba” (p. 1547). Paul would have been keenly aware of the “ecstatic character of pagan cults” (Conzelmann Citation1975, p. 205).
2 Jesus is thought to have spoken Aramaic and probably Greek (or at least enough colloquial Greek to get by in the marketplace of Sephoris, four miles from Nazareth), and perhaps some biblical Hebrew as well (MacCulloch Citation2020).
3 The nature of glossolalia in this context is intensely debated among scholars of early Christianity. Speaking in tongues is variously understood to mean the miraculous ability to speak heavenly or angelic languages, the miraculous ability to speak unlearned human languages, inspired but inarticulate utterance, or some combination of these (Forbes Citation1995).
4 “χάρισμα [charisma] is linked with χάριϛ [charis] on the one side and πνεΰμα [pneuma] on the other, to the degree that spiritual manifestations are called χαρίσματα [charismata]” (Conzelmann Citation1975, p. 403). It was possibly Paul who introduced χαρίσματα as a term for πνευματικά [pneumatika] (p. 403n11; see also Conzelmann [Citation1975], Palma [Citation1979], Haley [Citation1980], and Potts [Citation2009]). When Paul says: “I want to bring you some spiritual gift to make you strong” (Romans 1:11), he uses the phrase χάρισμα πνευματικον (charisma pneumatikon; Palma [Citation1979]).
5 The version I am quoting from is The New English Bible, with the Apocrypha. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972.
6 “Where id was there ego shall be” (Freud Citation1933, p. 80).
7 The figure of the celebrity was prefigured by the genius, invariably the man of genius. But the term charisma, dating back to Pauline texts in the New Testament and therefore long available, was nevertheless not yet invoked to describe these men of genius (Joosse Citation2014; Lindholm Citation1990; Potts Citation2009). Prior to the twentieth century, female charismatics were generally saints, most notably Joan of Arc, Hildegard von Bingen, and St. Catherine of Siena.
8 An English translation of Volume 1 of the original German multivolume work is included in the reference list as von Harnack (Citation1897).
9 Weber’s word for charisma of office is Amtcharisma (Eisenstadt Citation1968).
10 This is the case with Freud and the first few decades of Freudian psychoanalysis: not a sudden plunge, but a predictable period of scholasticism and moribund orthodoxy.
11 Shils (Citation1961) similarly comments that “the central zone [of a society’s values and symbols] partakes of the nature of the sacred. In this sense every society has an ‘official’ religion, even when that society or its exponents and interpreters conceive of it…as a secular, pluralistic, and tolerant society” (p. 117).
12 “Charismatic groups do not have elaborate systems of roles, rules, and procedures to guide the performance of administrative functions”; they generally lack any provision for succession and carry “strong tendencies toward the destruction and decomposition of institutions” (Eisenstadt Citation1968, p. xix). But the best charismatic leaders recognize that without some administrative or orderly social organization, their group or movement will soon sputter and fade. The most visionary of them therefore make some accommodation to bureaucratization for the sake of continuity and in the interests of legacy.
13 Turner (Citation2003) puts it this way: “The power to interdict is not based on some other power, but rather the power to organize danger through interdiction is originary” (p. 7). He adds that “localization and specification and then abstention and interdiction are responses to danger that are in turn basic to culture itself, found wherever there is culture, and constitute culture” (p. 18). A community of any sort could not exist without an agreed-upon localization of danger, and in that sense, without some sense of the sacred (Rieff Citation2007).
14 Smith (Citation1998) poses this hypothetical question.
15 Shils (Citation1968) refers to this as “protective charisma” (p. 389). I return to this point in my conclusion.
16 See Yukl (Citation1999) and Antonakis et al. (Citation2016) for two often-cited critiques of the literature to which they have contributed. Potts (Citation2009) provides a useful review of various attempts to operationalize charisma in leadership theory and organizational psychology studies.
17 Empirical studies (e.g., Steffens et al. Citation2017) confirm that death serves to consolidate idealizations and projections in a way that enhances the charisma attributed to the deceased. This might especially be the case with political assassinations.
18 This was in pre-COVID times when most of his business would ordinarily be transacted in person.
19 This is very much in keeping with Zimmer’s (Citation2013) description of how, via projective identification, patient and analyst may engender stupidity in each other (see especially p. 402). Similarly, Cassorla (Citation2013) comments that “morbid curiosity and mutual stupidity are related to the transference, but in fact take place in both members of the dyad” (p. 350).
20 See Coen (Citation2007) for an excellent review of this topic.
21 This is not to imply a continuous or constant yearning. As Shils (Citation1961) comments, “Some have a need for such contact only in crises and on special periodic occasions, at the moment of birth or marriage or death, or on holidays. Like the intermittent, occasional, and unintense religious sensibility, the political sensibility, too, can be intermittent and unintense. It might come into operation only on particular occasions, e.g., at election time, or in periods of severe economic deprivation or during a war or after a military defeat” (p. 122).
22 As Shils (Citation1965) puts it, “the charismatic propensity is a function of the need for order” (p. 203). In the treatment setting, order generally means safety.
23 The cult of the narcissistic, charismatic leader appears to have taken hold even in societies that have traditionally been more collectivist and previously less receptive to grandiosity and arrogance (Williams et al. Citation2018).
24 QAnon began in the US in 2017 when someone claiming to possess the highest security clearance, level Q, began posting on the message board 4Chan, claiming knowledge of a global network of Satan-worshipping pedophiles running a child-trafficking ring and conspiring to plot against Donald Trump. According to QAnon, these pedophilic elites kidnap and abuse children, perform satanic rituals, and hold them as hostages in underground prisons in order to harvest their adrenal glands or extract a life-prolonging substance from their blood. Since its inception, “QAnon has…evolved from a fringe internet subculture into a mass movement veering into the mainstream” (Bennhold Citation2020). It now has millions of followers in the US and abroad. Its motto, “WWG1WGA” (“Where we go one, we go all”), exemplifies the elastic pseudo-solidarity of an apocalyptic charismatic movement that manages to unite and homogenize a followership whose interests are disparate (antivaccination, anticoronavirus restrictions, antisemitism, anti-immigrant, and “deep state” believers). The recent election to the US House of Representatives of an avowed QAnon supporter signals its ominously burgeoning popularity.
25 What in this paper I refer to as glossolalia is similar to what Bion (Citation1958) refers to as mutilated communication.