image credit via Twitter @RedTRaccoon
Trump’s speech at Mount Rushmore represents an opportunity to learn about psychology. There are alternative ways of handling criticism. One is to be respectful and receptive to it, welcoming it as a means to improve the system. Another is to feel threatened by it and suppress it with draconian measures, denouncing it as terrorism and fascism. The first shows cooperative and respectful attitudes, the second shows dominant, antagonistic, and disrespectful attitudes.
At Mount Rushmore, we had a clear manifestation of the psychology of antagonistic dominance, authoritarianism. That is a paradox since July 4th is a celebration of a rebellion at authoritarianism, denounced as tyranny. Trump, with his speech, declared war against criticism rather than stand up for receptivity and compassion. Democracy has been established in managing presidential power. There is no need for a French or a Russian revolution. Term limits and the upcoming election give people the capacity to disagree with the presidential use of power and attitude.
In his response, I, as a psychiatrist, identify a psychological diagnostic pattern. In this moment in history, I see the Trump fireworks as shedding light on a psychological condition that helps to understand him and possibly help him. People differ in making decisions. Psychiatry ascribes to Trump an illness diagnosis, narcissism, a label that makes a person feel like a patient. Trump’s speech at Mount Rushmore was a great affirmation of narcissism. He was having a crowd applaud him in the era of Covid-19. However, I consider Trump as more complex than a narcissistic disorder. Narcissism is a limited label. It is stigmatizing but not helpful in understanding and modifying behaviors. I recognize him as a very typical case of a wellness diagnosis that psychologists do not talk about as it is a wellness diagnosis, and DSM 5, the diagnostic and statistical manual, is only about illnesses. Trump is educating us on what is ‘antagonistic dominance’ as a wellness personality type that also generates personal and social pathology.
This diagnosis of relating explains the president’s behaviors: Dominant antagonism elicits fears of others being dominant antagonistic in proportion to one’s own attitude as anticipations of role reversal. These fears generate severe anxiety. They amount to paranoia. Paranoia makes a person defensive; fears elicit counterphobic behaviors. Antagonistic and dominant people distort reality; they anticipate being attacked and are ready to fight back. They fight back before they are attacked. They provoke the public to the extent of eliciting real attacks.
Dominant persons do not have alternative ways of coping with adversity. When threatened, they are compelled to overreact, seeking to win, to be triumphant; they are vitriolic and unapologetic, intimidating, humiliating, contemptuous. Trump always has a disparaging epithet for his opponents. The diagnosis of ‘dominant antagonism’ helps to understand Trump. He is a truly good case of this wellness diagnosis and of this diagnosis’ psychological and sociological consequences. Current psychology does not have wellness diagnoses. I am taking the liberty of introducing them as helpful to the public in comprehending our president’s intense behaviors.
July 4th is a day to celebrate independence and freedom, America’s revolution from oppression. Our president’s repressive tactics spoil the spirit of this day and evoke a populist rebellion. What is relevant is not to react to Trump, but to reflect. We have an opportunity to learn about psychology and to recognize how vulnerable we are in admiring a distorted way of responding as our moral choice. It is time for us to get smart. Here it is no longer party politics but time to recognize pathology’s interference with public health and national policy. Trump is as dangerous as the virus, as his distortions are viral, intoxicating, contagious, and poisonous.
It is time to recognize the psychological origin of his emotionality by choosing a diagnosis that helps us to understand his motivation. Narcissism is an adjective. Trump’s behavior is not about liking himself, but about disliking others. It is about paranoia as distortions of reality by projecting one’s intense aggressiveness to one’s partners, and it is feeling threatened by other people’s anticipated aggressiveness. These fears are self-fulfilling. His defensiveness evokes aggression.
It is upon us to recognize ‘antagonistic dominance,’ explaining how the president is suffering from a particular self-induced anxiety disorder, paranoia, affecting his thought process. The more aggressive you are, the more scared you become. He is a cowardly lion. The more you are a lion, the more you become a coward. He needs to understand this mental dialectic as a syndromal process in order to comprehend his fears and his need to overreact and oppress. See the figure below to put relational modality diagnoses in the familiar spectrum of the story of the characters of The Wizard of Oz.
We need to free ourselves from his distorted perception as our reality. We need to avert being swept away by hate. We also need to protect Trump from his anxieties, but also protect ourselves and the naïve and vulnerable base from his Hitlerian hate-evoking style of leadership. We need to escape from being manipulated by his inflammatory rhetoric defined as America’s moral righteousness. In front of Mount Rushmore, we need to recognize alternative styles of leadership. We need to escape being vulnerable to emotional conditions.
Dominant people can be great leaders. They think outside of the box and confront adversity boldly. But this modality has its drawbacks. Dominance can distort reality and generate conflicts instead of resolutions. Dominant people are prone to abuse power, to be self-righteous, unable to be apologetic, seeking to prevail, ignoring the need for fairness, and mutual respect. Trump does not know how to resolve conflicts because he has the innate need to dominate.
His offensiveness is not narcissism. He could have been ‘dominant cooperative’ in his speech. He could have pursued a conciliatory position instead of declaring a cultural civil war. He could have questioned the abuse of power, by pointing the police mishandling both black and white lives. He could have reminded the crowd of America’s sacrificing 600,000 white lives lost in the Civil War in fighting for black lives. He could have defended America by reminding cultural critics that America had chosen a black president. Instead, he responded with a pompous show of antagonistic, self-righteous, supremacist strength, showing no compassion, no compromise, no receptivity, no consideration, or moderation, no inkling on advocating mutual respect.
Psychiatry and the general public do not understand his behavior as determined by dominance with its nefarious consequences. They either consider him as a Paul Bunyan, the national hero, or dismiss him as a bully. Can we interpret his conduct as a great example of a personality type? Can we recognize his tendency of scapegoating as a self-induced personality problem? Can we see his inspiring the crowd along his biased perception of the truth as the malignancy of a wellness power diagnosis? His pathology has never been so clearly spelled out in front of the public eye. Intense dominance is a dangerous conflict generating personality type. His speech was a nefarious manifestation of an intelligible psychological wellness condition gone wrong.
We have to recognize that his base is susceptible to bias and vulnerable to being inspired and energized by the offensive American hero and storyteller. People are equally unprotected from hateful bias as they are to the killer virus. Without psychological insights, how can the public deal with the president’s distorted paranoid perceptions of reality? We risk being killed and becoming killers. Without clarity in his troubled unconscious, we do not have immunity from his viral antagonistic ideas.
Calling Trump narcissistic is correct, but that diagnosis does not help him or us to understand his own aggressiveness, evoking fears and defenses. In a blog four years ago entitled, ‘Educating Trump,’ I tried my best to help him. I feared Trump could lead us into a war. He is leading us to a civil war. This is a medical emergency. We need the capacity to extricate ourselves from his psychology of power politics. Here on this July 4th , America has to learn to judge oppression as the enemy. It is not a political enemy; it is a psychological one. We need to understand the logic of the human unconscious.
20/20 vision is what the public lacks in understanding Trump’s psychology of leadership. America is just as vulnerable to being biased as Germany was to distorted nationalist views. Trump is furious like Hitler, who inspired a nation to make Germany Über Alles, great again, after its humiliating defeat of WWI. What we need to learn from history is how to understand the human mind seeking conflict resolution along alternative relational choices and hence creating alternative dramatic scenarios.
As a psychiatrist, I have shifted paradigms from stories that divide us, by understanding what is universal in all stories, the conflict resolution nature of the plot of stories as a scientific phenomenon. This shift helped me to understand the unconscious as both orderly abiding by scientific phenomena and as morality driven by seeking to resolve conflicts. The mind along one scientific phenomenon, the equilibrial scale, seeks to resolve conflicts along three formal alternative paths: dominance versus submissiveness, cooperation versus antagonism, and alienation versus mutual respect. These alternatives define four different paths responding to stressors, the relational modalities, the four wellness categories, and the degrees of intensity in respective responses. I am seeing Trump’s condition as the antagonistic dominance type, and a very intense version.
We need science to become less vulnerable to the biases of self-righteous individuals and self-righteous religions so that we are immune from emotional biases. We need skills, emotional literacy, as the capacity to integrate and reconcile the alternative types of resolving conflicts. We need to learn about the optimal ways of resolving by identifying moral values as the scientific principles of the conflict, resolving the unconscious mind as moderation, cooperation, and mutual respect.
The world needs to be educated on morality and psychology as a science, as emotional literacy.
The world needs to be perceptive of the psychological patterns of political leaders. Celebrating July 4th is a good occasion to remember world history shaped by problematic ideologies and by problematic political leaders. American history has to be humble in examining its own record, especially as we listen to Trump’s biased, inflammatory statements.
Dr. Levis reading from “Science Stealing the Fire of the Gods”
Albert Levis, M.D., the inventor of Moral Science, puts his approach into practice at his Museum of Creative Process in Vermont where he connects Formal Theory to the artistic process through exhibitions and workshops. A practicing psychiatrist for over forty years, Levis was trained at the Universities of Zurich and Geneva, the University of Chicago and Yale.
The author of numerous texts — including The Formal Theory of Behavior, Conflict Analysis Training and Science Stealing the Fire of the Gods — Dr. Levis founded and directed the Center for the Study of Normative Behaviour in Hamden, Connecticut before founding the Museum of the Creative Process along with The Wilburton Inn, a family inn in Vermont. His Conflict Assessment Battery is available online at the museum website: www.museumofthecreativeprocess.com