Psychoanalysts Need to Apply Their Knowledge to the Public Arena

Review of Peter Wolson’s Psychoanalysis Enters the Political Fray: The Op-Ed Articles and Journal Blogs of Peter Wolson (Queens, NY: International Psychoanalytic Books, 2019), ISBN 978-1-949093-14-8, pages i-vi, 233, $30.

When honored at a luncheon in May by my psychoanalytic institute to receive the honorific title of “Research Psychoanalyst,” I was pleased to learn that I would have ten minutes to speak to the assembled faculty, members, certification candidates, and their significant others. There was no doubt whatsoever in my mind that I would use this limited time to encourage psychoanalysts to apply this special knowledge not only to themselves, their families, and communities but also to the problems of our society. In preparation for this occasion, I agreed to read and review the valuable book of Los Angeles psychoanalyst Peter Wolson. I was quite pleased by the numerous insights that were revealed during these forays in applying analysis in the public domain that extend from 1972-2018.

Wolson has a sharp mind and knows how to apply our special knowledge. Some of the concepts he lays out are adaptive grandiosity, adolescent rebellion, ambivalence, apocalyptic psychology, cognitive dissonance, dependency vs. autonomy, developmental hatred of the other, dis-identification, exhibitionistic revenge, healthy exhibitionism, healthy narcissism, healthy and unhealthy dependency, healthy and unhealthy idealization, identification with the aggressor, intergenerational transition of trauma, loss of impulse control, the narcissism of minor differences, narcissistic grandiosity and inferiority, the need for authoritarianism, Oedipal victory/defeat, omnipotent control, pride of victimhood, projective identification, psychophobia, regression, regression to omnipotence, separation-individuation, sibling rivalry, splitting, the superego and the cervix of the id, and the unconscious allure of being above the law. He puts almost all of them to very good

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use. I’m especially appreciative of his forceful confrontation and rejection of the “psychophobia” that is rampant in our society even as, I would add, psychological concepts become more and more common place.

Peter Wolson began his application of psychoanalysis to politics with his Los Angeles Times 1972 op-ed “Eagleton and America’s Psychophobia,” which follows from his outrage at the dropping of Thomas Eagleton as George McGovern’s vice-presidential running mate when it was learned that he had been in a psychiatric hospital. There was a long hiatus before he really began in 1999 when he focused on the hatred of politicians who represented what the hater was doing, such as Bill Clinton hated by people like Newt Gingrich, Henry Hyde, and Dennis Hasteret, who were committing sins of sexual impropriety that led them to impeach Clinton.

Wolson is very open about his past and very insightful about what goes on in our society, focusing not simply on individuals but also on America’s state of mind, issues of the economy and politics of our major parties, hatred between Republicans and Democrats, the politics of confession, the politics of narcissism, and racism. The author’s depth of understanding and insight is inspiring, as is his willingness to acknowledge his own rush to judgement and shortcomings. For example, he acknowledges his “somewhat cavalier approach and one-sided” criticism of the Obama administration for not risking relations with our ally Turkey by acknowledging the Armenian genocide (149). In most cases he’s careful to use modifiers. There is a tentative quality, which you would expect from a well-trained psychoanalysis, as he formulates ideas in the course of gathering evidence from his patient, or in this case our society and his own countertransference. When a psychoanalyst leans into absolute certainty, I start to worry that their political ideologies and theories are dominating their thinking.

There’s a most insightful discussion about the role of envy and the public’s eagerness to turn against politicians, as well as of the psychological dynamic of the public confession. I think that he is correct when he suggests that “Trump’s hatred of the non-white ‘other’ probably helped him win the election” (193), and when he declares “that blaming the mentally ill is often a manifestation of psychophobia” (185).

While I laud Peter Wolson for doing this work (which I was calling on my colleagues of the New Jersey Institute for Training in Psychoanalysis to do), IP Books for publishing it, and Peter Loewenberg for writing the introduction, I also have strong major concerns.

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In reading an author so skillfully calling out psychophobia, I think it essential to critique his psychohistoricalphobia. Nowhere is there any sign that he has read the numerous well-researched psychobiographies and psychopolitical articles that he could find in The Journal of Psychohistory, The Psychohistory Review, and the pages of this journal. One does not expect an author who makes his living treating patients to be an in-depth primary source scholar, but it would be appropriate if his two bibliography pages had some reference to the literature that psychohistorians have created in the period that he has covered. This is frustrating. He also, in writing extensively on Trump, and to a lesser extent the Bushes and Clintons, fails to use their primary sources, which are most readily available.

There are also some small errors. Donald Trump purchased huge knives at age 12, not 13. At the New York Military Academy some of his instructors served not in Vietnam but in World War II (177). His older brother died of alcoholism at age 42, not 43 (178). His father visited him more often than most fathers, but not “every weekend.” But more importantly, I think he misses the role of Trump’s career as a television celebrity in his presidential success.

Psychoanalysis Enters the Political Fray is well worth reading and, as Peter Wolson says in his conclusion, “In the Age of Trump, where virtually everyone has become ‘armchair psychologists,’ it’s important to all around deepen the public understanding of the cataclysmic political problems that face us” (202).

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