My aim in this paper is to use psychoanalytic trauma theory to try to understand why people are drawn to strongmen, and authoritarian movements, that threaten their own autonomy and interests. Ironically, the angry attempt to reassert one’s entitlements ends up facilitating compliance with one’s oppressors and undermining the thoughtful, effective pursuit of realistic goals. On the large scale, these fantasies are generally authoritarian in nature, with three main dynamics-sadomasochism, paranoid–schizoid organization, and the manic defense-plus a fourth element: the feeling of emotional truth that follows narcissistic injury, that infuses the other dynamics with a sense of emotional power and righteousness. Not surprisingly, emotional abandonment, both in individual lives and on a mass scale, is typically felt as humiliating and it undermines the sense that life is meaningful and valuable.īut the intolerable loss of belonging and of the feeling of being a valuable person often trigger exciting, aggressive, compensatory fantasies of specialness and entitlement. Similarly, large groups of people who are economically or culturally dispossessed by changes in their society typically respond by submitting and complying with the expectations of a powerful figure or group, hoping they can continue to belong-just like children who are emotionally abandoned by their families. Notably, a persistent tendency to identify with the aggressor is also typical in children who have been emotionally abandoned by narcissistically self-preoccupied parents, even when there has not been gross trauma. In the moment of trauma, children instinctively submit and comply with what abusers want-not just in behavior but in their perceptions, thoughts, and emotions-in order to survive the assault afterwards they often continue to comply, out of fear that the family will turn its back on them. Ferenczi’s conception of identification with the aggressor, which describes children’s typical response to traumatic assaults by family members, provides a remarkably good framework to understand mass social and economic trauma.
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