Prologue: Perspectives on Populist and Fascistic States of Mind

The impetus to explore the nature of fascistic and populist states of mind was the surprising election of Donald Trump. Along with many fellow Americans, I also woke during the early hours of Wednesday, November 9th, 2016, the morning after the US election, to the shocking news that Donald J. Trump was elected to be the President of the United States. Upon hearing this news, I felt disoriented. Like numerous election pundits, journalists, and colleagues, I also expected Hillary Clinton to win this election. In previous months, I, along with many American urban voters, paid little attention to the election campaign of the candidate Trump, viewing him as a rather marginal and buffoonish character who is unlikely to be taken seriously by voters.

Trapped in my own social and psychic reality, regretfully, I neglected to register the external reality, that is, the deep division in contemporary American society. I was also unaware, at the time, of the universal seductive power of authoritarianism, seduction that has led to a global anti-democratic swing. I still remember, as if it happened yesterday, the heavy feelings and the disbelief I experienced that morning. It was as though the previous night there was a coup, and my adoptive country has been taken over, hijacked overnight, by unknown and ominous forces.

The idea of inviting various psychoanalytic authors to contribute to an issue exploring fascistic and populist states of mind began to germinate in my mind during the summer of 2020, toward the end of the Trump presidency. As several authors in this issue have observed, fascistic and populist states of mind contain a manic element. Fascistic and populist political regimes, likewise, often ascend as quickly as they later disappear. It took me a couple of years to reach a state of mind in which I could begin to understand what was transpiring in the US and earlier that year, during Brexit in the UK. Throughout the initial years, especially from 2016 to 2018, the rapid changes felt like a constant bombardment of concrete beta elements that were obstructing the capacity to think clearly. Remember the first week after the inauguration when Mr. Trump, surrounded by his entourage, signed ceremonially, one executive order after the other at a frenzied speed? Donald Trump signed 15 executive orders within the first week of his administration. This time it was not the Jews or the Roma people who needed to be banned, as in Nazi Germany of the 1930s. This time it was the Muslims who were unwanted. Very soon after the Muslims it was the turn of the Mexicans. Then came the turn of the Dreamers. Later some 50,000 Hondurans, whose Temporary Protected Status (TPS) allowed them to live in the United States after Hurricane Mitch ravaged their country in 1998 were stripped of their TPS status. The US political landscape has indeed been changing since 2016 at a frenzied pace, a pace that made it hard to follow, integrate, think, and comprehend the meaning of the rise of proto-fascistic states in the political and social landscapes. Our country has become increasingly deeply split between Red and Blue America. This split has been widening, leading, according to Marc Fisher, a Washington Post senior editor, to a broad range of voices including Republican and Democratic politicians, historians who study civil strife, and extremists on both ends of the spectrum, to accept the idea that civil war in the US is either imminent or even necessary (Fisher, 2022).

Before describing the various contributions to this issue, I would like to address what we mean when we talk about “a state of mind.” A state of mind, whether it is democratic, perverse, narcissistic, addictive, fascistic, or populist, is a psychological state that includes a set of characteristic affects, several dominant anxieties and defenses that are mobilized to deal with these anxieties. A “state of mind” also contains a number of predominant unconscious fantasies. Bollas (1992) may have been the first writer to introduce the concept of a fascist state of mind. For Bollas, this state gives individuals a license to engage in genocide. Bollas emphasizes that we all, including psychoanalysts, are inclined to possess, or regress into a fascist state of mind. This state, according to him, includes “intellectual genocide” that may be subtle. Intellectual genocide includes acts of distortion, decontextualization, denigration, caricaturization, character assassination, and even gossip aimed at damaging or annihilating the Other.

In my opinion populist and fascistic states of mind, unlike the democratic states of mind, that Bollas (1992, 2018) explores as well, are closely related to the concept of pathological organization that were astutely elaborated by Rosenfeld (1971) and Steiner (1993). When considering populist and fascistic states of mind, I am inclined, in resonance with some of our contributors, to consider these states of mind as pathological organizations, or enclaves. Later in the Epilogue I will summarize how our contributors conceptualize these states of mind.

Unfortunately, the spread of fascistic and populist states of mind is a global phenomenon. While at the end of the Cold War and following the collapse of the Soviet Union it seemed as though totalitarianism and fascism had at last been defeated and liberal democracy had won the ideological battle of the twentieth century, today, democracies around the world are finding themselves battered and weakened. “Democracy is in crisis,” wrote Abramowitz (2018), the president of Freedom House, a nonprofit, nonpartisan, US funded organization that conducts research on and advocacy for democracy and evaluates the level of civil freedom in 195 countries around the world. The most recent Freedom House report (Repucci & Slipowitz, 2022) indicates that freedom around the world continues to face a dire threat, especially after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Freedom House reports that the values that democracy embodies are under assault and in retreat globally. Democracy’s basic tenets – including guarantees of free and fair elections, the rights of minorities, freedom of the press, and the rule of law – have come under attack worldwide. This trend began, according to Freedom House, as early as 2006. The enemies of liberal democracy are accelerating their attacks. Authoritarian regimes have become more effective at circumventing the norms and institutions meant to support basic liberties. Even in countries with long-established democracies, like Poland, India, Hungary and the United States, internal forces have exploited the shortcomings in their systems, distorting national politics to promote hatred, violence, and the pursuit of unbridled power.

It is in the spirit of deep concern for the health of democracy in the United States and the world at large, that I invited five other psychoanalysts to contribute with me to this issue. We all share an alarm for our democratic institutions. Our contributions represent our joint attempt to understand the shift in American and European politics. It is important to note that the very aim of fascistic and populist states of mind is to create a situation where thinking becomes difficult if not impossible. This is why it is especially important to create an atmosphere and a space in which thinking and dialoguing with others is possible.

Robert Prince’s paper Locating the Fascist Mind in this issue begins his article with a powerful question: “What’s going on here?” Prince proceeds to observe what he describes as the “insane” changes in recent American politics. He notes that about a quarter of Republican voters and significant numbers of their representatives believe in outlandish QAnon conspiracy theories and accept the belief that the government, the media, and the financial institutions in the US are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex-trafficking operation. These voters and their leaders are also convinced that a conspiracy designed by shape-shifting lizard-people is intent on taking over the earth and that a storm is coming soon, a storm that will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders. They further believe that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country” (Prince, 2023, this issue, p. 71, quoting a May 2021 CNN broadcast).

Prince explores the dimensions of the fascist mind with particular attention to its construction of alternative reality based on dissociation and perversity. Fascism by its very nature, he writes, is contradictory and paradoxical, thus it cannot be studied in a completely logical and ordered fashion. Culling from a wide range of scholars investigating the nature of fascism, Prince offers a rich meditation on the contradictory nature of fascism. Locating fascism in modernity, Prince describes its obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation and victimhood. Prince notes that the core characteristics of fascisms and populist movements is that they are all mobilized by psychopathic leaders who exploit uncertainty, insecurity, disappointment, and grievances, while promising relief and magical solutions. Price concludes his essay by taking a bold, and in my view correct, perspective that fascism is a form of mental illness. Prince shows how fascism wreaks havoc on his adherents’ common sense and their perception of reality. Possessing unreflective and exaggerated self-confidence, the fascist mind is paranoid in its nature and is unable to deal with complexity or ambiguity. For Prince, the full extent of psychiatric illness in those who subscribe to fascism, is evident in their blatant psychotic thinking and the prevalence of delusions in their inner world.

Our next contributor, Christina Wieland, is a British psychoanalyst who had previously studied in depth the relationship between the Fascist State of Mind and masculine anxieties and defenses against them. Wieland sees these anxieties and defenses as reactions to the stresses of modernity that followed World War I. Wieland asks what transforms an “ordinary” fascist state of mind into a fascist movement and a fascist regime? She wonders what kind of unconscious processes lead to the transformation of ordinary citizens into mass murderers. Wieland views fascistic states of mind as pathological responses to an un-mourned societal trauma. She believes that the inability to mourn a massive social trauma and humiliation underlies an unconscious dynamic that leads to the destruction of meaning within the individual and within a traumatized society. Wieland sees the loss of social meaning and the inability to make reparation through mourning as leading to an alternative “magical restitution” and to a new delusional social meaning offered by fascistic ideology and the fascist state of mind.

In his contribution Perverted Containment: Trumpism, Cult Creation, and the Rise of Destructive American Populism, Michael Diamond, a psychoanalyst from Los Angeles, similarly observes that within large-groups, unconscious archaic fears of annihilation can be triggered during periods of social and political uncertainty. These fears can be stoked by a toxic masculine leader such as ex-President Trump, thus leading to perverse containment.

Diamond shows that since the capacity to submit to authoritarian totalism is rooted in the dependencies of childhood and resides in all of us, cult leaders assuming autocratic or proto-fascist modes tend to style themselves along the lines of paternal or maternal figures protecting a family of followers, while offering seductive solutions to primitive longings and anxieties. In this way, they offer a retreat from a more complex and difficult external reality, promising the false and illusory bliss of a retreat into the maternal womb. This seduction is grounded in the group’s members’ collective illusion of returning to the conflict-free wholeness of merger.

Diamond, who had written extensively about the role of fathers and masculinity, convincingly demonstrates the contrast between the restrained masculinity of leaders like Abraham Lincoln, Robert F. Kennedy and Barack Obama, who offer a sensitive, thoughtful, and refined manhood and the martial masculinity of Donald Trump, who resembles Andrew Jackson in embodying a brash and coarse, often “toxic” form of manhood. Restrained masculinity, Diamond writes (2023, this issue) embraces qualities such as moderation, compassion, graciousness, self-reflection, and gentlemanliness. In contrast, martial manhood is unfiltered and ruthless. It is characterized by greater tolerance for excess, physicality, domination, extreme competitiveness, and lack of empathy. Diamond posits that Trump reflects a very extreme version of phallic masculinity, a phallic state in which development is arrested in its childhood and adolescent phases.

R.D. Hinshelwood, a Kleinian British psychoanalyst and a prolific writer, explores the nature of unconscious group dynamics that create an us versus them mentality. He studies this omnipresent political phenomenon by which groups are formed through splitting and projecting bad parts of themselves into the other group. Hinshelwood examines in particular what he describes as the “the war of projections” between the “elite” and the “people” during and after Brexit. He demonstrates that the identity of each of the two groups cohere by “spitting” unwanted aspects of the group members and projecting them into the other group. He points out that the democratic process by its nature leads to disappointments, disappointments that need to be somehow contained.

Another important unconscious phenomenon that Hinshelwood explores is the fact that the group is held together by what Freud (1921) called the “group ideal,” an ideal that receives its authority from the psychology of the leader. This common element, the “group ideal” takes the place of the individual person’s own “ideals,” or aims. This dynamic indicates that despite our tendency to experience ourselves consciously as separate, at an unconscious level there is a fluidity that allows us to adopt the “group ideal” whenever we enter a group.

Paul Hoggett, a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and political scientist from the UK, who has worked for many years on the psychodynamic of climate change denial, addresses in his paper Reactionary States of Mind as the Holocene Ends the joint impact of populist and totalitarian states of mind on our climate crisis. Hoggett reminds us that the climate crisis may lead to the end of the Holocene, an epoch whose uniquely benign climatic conditions made our current civilization possible. He notes that one of modernity’s fundamental beliefs has been that all problems have a solution. This assumption is periodically called into question by crises such as global warming, a crisis for which there seems to be no obvious solution. Hoggett points out that at times of profound uncertainty toxic feelings like ressentiment may surface. These destructive emotions can jeopardize our democratic institutions and our planet’s survival. Ressentiment, which was first identified by Frederick Nietzsche and later by the German philosopher Max Scheler, is an emotion that typifies adherents of populist movements. When discussing Ressentiment Hoggett refers to a complex set of feelings revolving around suppressed grievance. This grievance is often stoked and nurtured by populist leaders who inflame this problematic emotion in their followers. Ressentiment contains envy, hatred, contempt, and a sense of righteousness. Ressentiment nurses grievance and the wish to revenge, affects that are then directed toward minorities.

In Hoggett’s view our current time is an extraordinary period, one that following Hannah Arendt’s warning, seems to be a pre-Totalitarian period, a period when conspiracy theories are proliferating. Chaos triggered by climate change, such as droughts and floods, has already had a devastating impact on world’s food production leading to austerity. This austerity undermines in turn social stability. Securing “our” people’s resources against “others” involves increased control of borders. Nationalism becomes increasingly an attractive “solution.” As the ship starts to go down, populist leaders shout “man the lifeboats.” The lifeboats are then aggressively protected from imaginary “invading” migrants who are viewed as potentially swamping the boat. This new form of nationalism has become known as “the politics of the armed lifeboat.”

In my contribution entitled In Dark Times: Psychoanalytic Praxis as a Form of Resistance to Fascist Propaganda, I elaborate on Adorno’s observation that fascist propaganda is psychoanalysis in reverse. I demonstrate in detail how psychoanalytic praxis and ethic is diametrically opposed to fascist propaganda and to fascistic states of mind. Like several colleagues in this issue, I show how fascistic states of mind rely on inventing enemies and on using massive projective identification to lodge hated aspects of the Self in these enemies, who are then attacked and destroyed. The inclination to rush into action instead of reflection, the proclivity to create false certainty and remove any traces of doubt in fascistic states is examined as well. The attack on truth and complex thinking in these malignant states is also explored. Using Trump’s rhetoric and the rhetorical devices employed by American ultra-right-wing agitators during the Roosevelt administration, I demonstrate that the very practice of psychoanalysis can be viewed as a form of a steady, thoughtful, and peaceful resistance to the destructive seduction of fascistic states of mind.

I think that reading this issue in its entirety will greatly enrich the readers’ understanding of the history and manifestation of populism and fascism in the political reality, and in the inner world. This Prologue will not be complete without acknowledging and warmly thanking Lester Lenoff, JD, LCSW, a Consulting Editor of Psychoanalytic Inquiry, who kindly encouraged me to undertake editing this issue and offered his support and wisdom throughout this process.

Era A. Loewenstein, Ph.D.

Issue Editor

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Era A. Loewenstein

Era A. Loewenstein, Ph.D., is an adult, child, and adolescent psychoanalyst and Training and Supervising Analyst at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. Era is in private practice of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in San Francisco. She has been writing and teaching about fascistic states of mind since 2016.