Trump and the Paranoid-Schizoid Politics of Ideality

ABSTRACT

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. 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 fantasies.

KEYWORDS:

• Psychoanalysis
• politics
• trauma
• deliberation
• nationalism

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Noëlle C. McAfee

Noëlle C. McAfee is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Psychoanalytic Studies Program at Emory University. The author of several books, including Democracy and the Political Unconscious, McAfee is currently completing a book titled Fear of Breakdown: Politics and the Work of Mourning.