I am posting this post without the hesitation I always feel any time I make a comment on the US political scene. The reason is that it is scary, very scary to see the world so vulnerable because of Trump's presidency.

It seems that Trump took the decision to withdraw the US from Syria on his own and without consulting with any advisory body in his government. He did not do that before and this step he took with Syria's affair is ominus.
Making a diagnosis of Trump is REALLY of no value except for us who are making the diagnoses.  We should also remember that we - analysts-do not have a measure of normality to give our diagnoses any significance, even to psychiatrists.
However, as mental health providers we could and should express our views regarding Trump's mental and cognitive competence to preside over the administrative   branch in a country like the US. This is not building a wall or raising the price aluminum siding of homes. In the most limited version of the result of his decision there is a possibility of few tens of thousand killed and a similar number of refugees with no where to go this time.
Impeachment will not happen ( I am sure), disqualifying him mentally on cognitive and psychiatric measures is the way to encourage the wobbly senators to call for dismissing him as they did with Nixon before. It is unfair and immoral to allow a mentally deranged man cause so much misery away from his home to please his base at home

Quote for Anyday

Sometimes, in some countries, politics is white collar prostitution. 

A diagnostic test for Trump

Yesterday, we in North America and to most of Europe watched  how the passing of a respectable president of USA was honoured. Whatever could be said about him his nation expressed appreciation, respect and love. The presidents and the dignitaries of the world showed their deference of the man.

Trump was present in the ceremonies. His participation was supposed the be of one of  very few- beside his family- who could give the funeral the status of a high event. He was pitifully neglected, distained, and sat there unwelcome guest.  The eulogies were almost direct critique of his style of presidency.

How he is going to react to yesterday's rejection of Americans and the Europeans is a test to his sick mind:

If narcissist he will be neraged (more than the usual).
If neurotic (hysterical disorder) he will be dangerously suicidal.
If psychopath he will make open gestures of defiance.
If no change or back to his daily silliness then the man is psychology dead. That could only happen when external or the reality of the others does not succeed in penetrating a neurological barrier between his mind and reality.
   

3.Toward a Psychoanalytic Explanation of Social Events

History, myths, and social unconscious.

In preparing to write this part of the issue of the Social Unconscious I went back to Freud’s paper on Family Romances. I wanted to refresh my memory of how the individual creates his individual history from his earlier childhood experiences. I was struck by a statement that I missed in my previous readings of this paper.  After describing some general childhood experience and how they are remembered later Freud said: “These consciously remembered mental impulses of childhood embody the factors which enables us to understand the nature of myths”. Reading this sentence brought to my mind a book I read few years ago by Ray Raphael entitled: The Founding Myths. The book was proving in a methodical way the fallacies of some of the held beliefs about certain historical facts regarding the American revolution and independence. At the time I read the book my thoughts were that history is more important than the facts that created it, and making myths out of actual events is essential in turning events into lasting facts. Without those myths’ history would not link with the present and it would become meaningless. In other words, Jefferson declaration of independence is the issue and not whether he copied and improved Mason’s     prior daft of the document or not.

My point is that the facts and myth that comprises history constitute together the core of a nation’s identity. A similar process is behind the individual conception of our history. Whatever embellishment or correction made to any history it remains what people have created, accepted as the doing of real people in their past. British democracy is worth its value because it is connected to the myth of the Magna Carta! The Magna Carta is a fascinating document that was going to be ignored just few months after signing it, but it was brought back by the initial people who created it, thus it represents the resilience of democracy.

History is very much like dreams; it is there for interpreting. They are also phenomenon of wishful thinking, and that is enough to legitimize a nation’s ownership of its own history. Historians could vet history but people who will decide to accept it or reject it. The notion of history as the embodiment of a nation’s wishes is important in another aspects. Nations’ wishes change over time and relative to circumstances, but historical facts do not change. Therefore, nations could change the narrative of their histories to pronounce a certain wish at a certain time and give it work- over to express another wish. History is the reservoir of the nation’s wishes and is very much made of primary process mechanisms.

It is not difficult to accept and agree that history consciously tells of the past wishes of nations. Because history is the conscious story of those wish therefore there must be corresponding unconsciousness of the wishes. This is where we encounter the puzzle of social unconsciousness: There is no history that articulates the same wish all the time. History is recalled by nations according to existing circumstances, and the wishes keep changing accordingly. This means that social unconsciousness is not an entity (like in the case of the individual).  The unconscious of the conscious wishes is the frustration of not fulfilling them. in other terms, history continues telling about a social wish until a leader or a group of individuals come along and fulfill the wish. Then history stops to start from a different point or with a new wish.

I can talk concretely about this idea in regard to the history of Egypt, which I know reasonably well. In 1882 England invaded Egypt, and an Egyptian general gave the British a fight but lost. They occupied the country and it became a colony in the British empire. The history of Egypt at that point became a series of mythical attempts of conquering the occupiers and regaining independence. There were several revolutions and some ineffective trials to outsmart the British politically. In 1952 a group army officers managed to liberate the country. Egypt was the first Middle Eastern country to break away from the British empire. The history of liberating the country stopped then. But suddenly a new wish to liberate all other occupied colonies in the middle East and Africa became the new history of Egypt. And once again an Egyptian leader with that ambition appeared to become a mythical character in the area, because he expressed a wish that pertains to the whole area of the middle east. His name was Nasser. He is still after half a century of his death represents the old wish of liberating the middle because its total liberation is stil in the making and the wish is fought against by internal and external forces.  

History is the consciousness of nations and embodies their wishes and aspirations. Those aspirations that are conscious have their unconscious counterpart, which is not always easy to define. However, frustrated wishes get their definition and surface to social consciousness in an unusual way. A leader or a group of dedicated people emerge with a vison of change that is the social unconscious pronounced.  Leadership is the voice of the unconscious in a society. There are implicit dangers in the transformation from an individual or a group leadership to a social will. It happens more frequently than desired the a leader distorts the unconscious wish of his society, or expresses the wishes of a minority and run with it if the majority is looking for, high jacking an unconscious wish and changing midway, and other possibilities could be found in Modern Democracies. Leaders do not create history, they only pronounce it. Studying the history of a nation is done properly by putting its leaders in the context of its circumstances. Because misleading and being followed after changing the unconscious wish has a more encompassing meaning. People follow their leaders but they also affect other people around them in ways that could change the whole political scene. This need a separate section of this topic. As we know in individual psychoanalysis, the patient’s change cause changes around him.

2. A way to a nation’s unconscious:

Linguistically it is not correct to contrast Legality with Morality. The antithesis of legal is illegal and immoral is the antithesis of moral. What is legal is also moral and morality is a major element in legalities. However, sometimes- in certain conditions- they become the antithesis of each other, and unlink. We can bring up a child to fear breaking the law but without the moral basis of his legally correct behaviour. However, making them the antithesis of each other reveals something special in a link between the two concepts. This is clear in the Kavanaugh Affair: he could have been without any moral blemish that required the tense investigation the USA lived, and democrats should have put the emphasis not on the silly sexual event but on producing Kavanaugh's doubtful and debatable legal opinions the over the years. Morality and legality were subject to serious, though subtle re-linkage between ethics and power in kavanaugh's case case. The point I am making is to always consider (not ignore) the link or separateness of morality and legality in every similar case. In psychology of individuals we look for the link between the Ego (legality) and the superego (morality). Yet, when we come to evaluating a social event we do not have the luxury of that simplicity: Religion might suggest a social function of superego but it could also be the main mover of the ‘social’ id, as it is the case in the various religious organizations over the years and in Islam now. We can say that morality and legality are always linked, but sometimes in harmony and sometimes in disharmony. Not only that, whenever one of the duo takes a central position in an affair the other emerges spontaneously to give the link a complete shape.

The nature of the link between legality and morality is good to understanding the contemporary American existential crises that is clearly coming to a ‘crescendo’, lately. The crescendo is the need to revue the political system of the two-party model and the election system which annuls the basic democratic model of one person one vote, because they provide the vagueness that blinds a nation of its slow sliding to dis integration. It is also a Crescendo, because (for an outsider and none American) in the last six presidential elections, the choices were puzzling. From the most naïve to the most cunning, from the most systematic to the most erratic, and from the most respectable to the most disgraceful.  In other countries that does not have a democratic system of election, these are signs of looming illegal change of government. In the USA it is not reasonable to anticipate such thing.

Origins of the Contemporary Crescendo:

It is interesting to review some historical events that were instrumental in shaping the ‘national charter’ of different nations. But, in addition to being  distracting we have only the USA that its history is in the making and not already done (Only Islam could be studied this way because its early history is well documented and in writings too).

          The USA started as a country without a nation, and slowly, but painfully, a nation started to form of the flood of immigrants that ‘escaped’ to the new country. The process of building the new country that will bond a nation of immigrants created a conflicted with the natives of the country. For over two centuries the hapless natives were marginalized by force. It was a period of sacrificing morality (civil and religious) in favour of creating legitimacy and legality for the immigrants appropriation the country and claiming ownership of what was legitimately own by the natives (nations too). During that period, traditional morality had a back seat and legality was the issue on both sides of the equation. But something expected happened: the gap between morality and the illegal acts committed by the new nation produced some quasi morality: a system of values that looked like a moral system. It was a morality that reflected in its details what was historically going on; a country in formation struggling between organized social interdependencies versus individuality and self reliance. This was reflected on the formation of first two political parties in the USA. They were formed almost in the same year and were both dealing with that divider: free sense of personal, regional and ethical values, or group values that identifies the core of the American person (federation or confederation).

This issue is very complex and still confuses Americans. Are America a nation of ethical and law-abiding persons therefor share and defend a recognizable specific system of values (those are the legally inclined people and make themselves the defintion of America and those are mostly the democrats), or the people who adopt the system of values derived from their history makes them correct and ethical (those who make their values define them as Americans and are mostly the republicans). This dilemma comes from a historical fact: Americans had a very faint knowledge of the "others" till the the end of WWII ended. Thus, they think that their values are specifically American, when the Magna Carta and the ideologies of the French revolution are the origins and the details of the so called American Values. Non Americans get confused for the opposite that confuses Americans. American talk about their country as a great nation because of its values, When non Americans talk about their values as something that say something of the people and not about a country. 
I believe if we go to the details of the effect of the early building of the USA country and the formation of the American nation we will confirm with convincing proofs that the confusion about morality and legality in contemporary USA is a continuation and residue of the conflicts of the early conflicts of those two conditions. Even the two dominating political parties are characterizations of the polarity of morality and legality but with a great deal of confusion in regard to the modern meanings of the terminologies the politicians are throwing at each other. But how could a nation and a country that challenged the world and created the presidential system of government, and has a large number number of creative minds, was able to accommodate in its social fabric all sort of immigrants, how could that nation be so helpless in changing itself. 

The question is:

How could the core of the American society be fixated on the values of the pioneers, the conflict between individuality and social responsibility, confusing morality with values, and most of all maintain a blind faith in the wisdom of the forefathers?



This is where psychoanalysis could be of some help.

This is where psychoanalysis could be of some help.its social fabric all sort of immigrants, how could that nation be so helpless in changing itself. How could the core of the American society fixated on the values of the pioneers, the conflict between individuality and social responsibility, confusing morality with values, and most of all maintain a blind faith in the wisdom of the forefathers?

This is where psychoanalysis could be of some help.

This is where psychoanalysis could be of some help.m

Toward a Psychoanalytic Explanation of Social Events

This subject is difficult to put in a convincing way without referring to actual events from historical living happenings that could be noticed directly. Therefore, taking an ongoing social event as a point of refence is advantageous because we could avoid using the conclusions of previously happened events to support the ongoing argument at hand. Hopefully it will reveal the logic of the explanations that I will offer.

1.   The Kavanaugh Affair: Social Change.

In the last few days the USA chamber of the senators (upper chamber of the legislative institution) approved the election of a justice to the supreme court. The process was mired in clear and arguable legal, procedural, and ethical transgressions. The justice name is B. Kavanaugh. I am using this very recent case to discuss three issue: How certain social events embody (unconsciously contain) the aspired and needed changes in a society. The second is the psychological underpinnings of the manifestations of the changing taking shape, The third the mutual and corresponding changes in the society and the members of the society.

Confirming Kavanaugh’s membership to the Supreme Court of the USA is not a simple, purely, American matter that should not be of concern to none Americans. As we will see a little later, the way the selection and confirmation of that man portended some major social and political changes in the US that will have international echoes. The reason for stating this idea is the obvious way the republicans (a legislative power) managed to obstruct the democrats’ efforts to block the justice’s selection. They used their majority to break several rules in sharing the authority of the legislative by manipulating the voting process, and not refraining publicly from politicizing an act that belongs to the supposedly important pillar of democracy: the independence and separation of the three powers in a nation. This was not done subtly but openly by stating that their choice of that judiciary is based on his political leanings that are supportive of the declared political stand of the political party in power. The political branch of power in the USA confessed openly its interference in the judiciary power, not only by influencing the process of voting but also by the choice of a judge who supports some of the most partisan moral and political views.  

The Kavanaugh Affair, shows in an unmitigated way that the judges of the supreme court in the USA, which is the final protector of the constitution, are chosen and will be chosen in the future based on their political leanings. Nowhere in the world (even in the lingering dictatorships) does a dictator or a revolutionary leader justifies or legitimizes his or her dictatorship through the judiciary’s source of power (the third power). They openly use the administrative powers (army or Police) or the legislative power (false and fraudulent elections) to claim legitimacy. The reason is that even dictators would like to keep the judiciary power free of blemishes for future use (suspend the constitution but not tarnish it).  The Kavanaugh Affair is the only and the most audacious disregard of conventionalities in the USA, in the last fifty years (or in modern history to my knowledge). Because there are no mistakes in history there must have been precursors to that affair, and it should be looked for and pinpointed. The importance of that is in the absence of concern among American citizens about the inappetence of their claim to pride. The long-lasting claim of the USA of being a nation of the rule of law, and the nation most concern about that internationally is clearly discarded in Kavanaugh Affair.

I would like to make two stipulations for the next idea in this posting.

The Kavanaugh affaire is basically a matter of the principle of separation of powers and the relationship between the judiciary and the legislative powers, and also the place of the executive power in that relationship. It is an affair that relates to the principle of separation of powers and nothing else. The separation of power is the essence and the core of the RULE Of LAW.

The second stipulation is that moral issues are the apex of the social structure of a society. Morality is not absolute or relative to anything outside the social structure of the society. They merely reflect the state of the social structure in some societies, at certain times and change accordingly. Sexual morality varies from society to another, and changes with time in the same society. Therefore, morality is not the main or the only mover of social change.

However, within HOURS of selecting Kavanaugh to the supreme court the issue changed from a serious legal and political matter to become a moral issue. Young females went out demonstrating and objecting, based on a bad individual moral act committed by judge Kavanaugh when he was 18. They forgot the serious and blatantly dangerous precedence of the legislative majority biasing and blemishing the neutrality of the supreme court. The opposition to that dangerous precedence of overpassing the separation of powers was degraded to a moral one. GOD, and what a trivial one. An 18 years old male adolescent (Kavanaugh) tried to violate the privacy and moral standards of a 15 years old adolescent girl and failed. This happening happens tens of million times every day, everywhere in the world, as part of the initiation rituals of boys and girls to social maturity. It is an ugly face of immaturity but from it the good relationship between men and women comes out. However, Kavanaugh’s behaviour then- as it is now- is something ugly but is not indicative of an unusually deviant personality. His views on the powers of the president, the rights allowed to the office of the administrative branch to obstruct justice, the extent of the president’s authority to forgive himself, and the right to act as an absolute king (ordained by the senates) are the dangers that young girls should have joined young men and marched against. Mature men and women should have also joined to object to Cavanaugh’s judicial mentality not his sexual views.

The precedence of this Historical flop:

If political issues in the USA are degraded, replaced, and lose their importance to moral issues, then the society is unconsciously declaring its political system dysfunctional in two meanings of the word. The first is that the political system is not independent of the social eventualities; it is not a system for ruling the country but it is ruled by whatever social values predominate at the time. This fact is clear in the response to the Kavanaugh case. The insistence, and the objection to his selection were dictated by none judiciary principles. The second meaning is even more alarming. The issue of human rights is the USA is shockingly naïve. In the last two decades the country has been in perpetual street uprising (some violent) for various demands for human rights: women rights, children right (schools shooting), Gay rights, ‘Me too’ rights of women against harassment, even a tennis player claiming the right to break her racket in court like men do, etc. One would consider movements like that in Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia as sign of progress, but in the USA, they mean something else. They mean that the society is waking up from a deep self deception wave to some facts that need to be faced.

How could that happen in the USA. It is a country that has half of the best 100 universities in the world, garnered and still reaping half the Nobel prizes in sciences, gave the world some of the most beneficial inventions we are enjoying, and is the young country that dispelled the fable of Roya Rule and introduced the republican system of government. The USA, was for two centuries a great contributor to the progressive social ideologies and some moral issues too. 

What could have happened lately for the USA to degrade its political problems to some moral issues.

Trump and social change in the USA

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III. Social Change and its Tribulations.

Any social change in any part of the world would affect the rest of the world, depending on circumstances and other factors that are outside the limits of this post. Some changes are easy to talk about because of their clarity and undeniable agreement on their impact, while other changes are not, like the current changes in Africa and their expected impact on the geopolitics of the world in the future.  

After WWII Europe took less than three decades to recover, reorganize, unite, and move toward stable democracies, resulting in unification. Because of the nature of the link between Europe and the US that major change had an immediate and strong impact on the US, but so on Europe too. The US had to adjust to relating to  equals, who continued to change to the better. The eighties' century witnessed  very ‘surprising’ changes.  Soviet Union and China, the two big communist countries (one party system) changed direction. The Russian party under the leadership of Gorbachev and the Chinese party under Deng Chawping reached an internal conclusion that communism has done its work (taking the country out of backwardness to modernism) and was the time to work on allowing the dormant potentials in the country to be activated freely. Gorbachev declared Glasnost and Perestroika, dissolved the Soviet Union, and ended the domination of the Russian Communist party over the communist parties in the Soviets. In China Chawping took a different tact to declare the end of old communism. He maintained the unity of the party as the organization that could manage diversities and control possible forces of disintegration. 
 In Marxism, communism is a stage in socio-historical evolution. It comes when a country is stagnant and not changing. This is why it always came in the form of revolutions because the ruling class always resists change. It is the  responsibility of the ideologues of the communist parties to anticipate and prepare for the next stage after communism. That is what shocked the world when it happened, because those decisions were made by the leaders of the communist parties themselves. All that time, communism was considered an imposition on people, when it originally freed people from the system of servitude that was imposed on them by the Tsars of Russia and the Mandarins of china. However, no one -either from the socialist or the capitalist camps -came up -till now- with what the next stage is going to be (Globalization is not a socio-historical phase).

The US problem with Europe’s change started with R. Reagan. Reagan, in terms of politics and world knowledge was not much better than Trump. But his sunny and charming personality, the optemistic smile on his face helped people to forgo several inappropriate situations. At the time of his presidency the republican party had distinguished minds and Reagan showed willingness to leave serious matters to the experts. He gave the US a pleasant period of governance. Unfortunately, instead of noting and thinking of what was happening in Europe and China a wave self-deception swathed the political scene. Reagan, was very ill-informed about what was happening outside the US. He did not realize that Gorbachev was taking Russia to a new phase in its history, and china was preparing for a new place under the sun. Naively, he thought that asking Gorbachev to bring the Berlin wall down was like God’s promise to Joshua to bring Jericho’s wall down.  He also thought that the evil empire (Lenin inherited the Tsars empire and divided it into 15 sovereign Soviets) disintegrated on his demand, when the fact was that the communist party had decided, few years before, to chnage. Self-deception by considering the world changes a result of the US victory in the cold war had serious negative results. One of those results is the US getting in unwise involvement in the politics of the middle east (Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Pakistan, etc) and becoming a target for Islamic phantasm.

After Reagan the US had two reasonably informed president, Bush senior, and Clinton (excluding certain personal attributes). It also had Obama who is politically on the same level of the best politicians in Europe. Since Reagan, the wave of self-deception and pompous grandiosity kept ebbing and lurking in the background till the election of Trump. Self-deception in terms of pomposity and grandiosity got reversed. 
Instead of saying “we are the greatest and the best” it is now we want to go back to being the best and the greatest.

This is a political riddle, but psychoanalytic thinking could be of much help in solving this riddle.

Psychoanalysts working with social phenomena use one of the three metapsychologies: topographic, economic, and the dynamic. Most, prefer the dynamic metapsychology because it allows them to mix it with the structural point of view (Ego, Id, Super ego). Thus, they could utilize the known psychodynamics of the individual in explaining social phenomena in the same way. This is not right because there is are collective social agencies like group ego or social id; individual agencies are products of individual experiences. However, using the topographic metapsychology, with a fundamental change could be closer to correctness. The fundamental change is reversing the link between the conscious and the unconscious in social phenomena: What is conscious in the individual is unconscious in the society, and visa-versa (most sexual problems in an individual are unconscious, but they are conscious social issues).  I made that observation and could support by evidence, but I am not sure of my explanation of it. 
The individual is born with mental function that needs and is disposed to mature. It starts with the dominance of primary process in it workings but gradually  the secondary process prevails without the elimination of the primary process. The subject is born with ‘an’ unconscious that is allows the emergence of  consciousness. The society is formed of the consciousness of its individuals but engenders unconscious strata of its consciousness. An Islamic society is conscious of its ideology but is unconscious of its illogical sense of entitlement.

Back to the USA of Trump. Firstly, there is Trump’s base on one side and the rest of the US. Trump’s base is consciously admitting that the US is not great and they have to go back to be great again. Unconsciously, they do not see hope in change and advancing to a different future. This view is supported and evidenced by their hanging on to the economic boom of the present and refusing to look at its roots in the near past and the dangers around its future. Trump’s base is unconsciously pessimistic and incapable of facing a reality that could be very different from their phantasies.  The rest of the US is conscious of critical situation and unconsciously realizes that their country has to go through radical change not just cosmetic retouching. But, this large section of the US people faces three preconscious real difficulties. The first is that a loud call for change could put them in conflict with the so-called American Values (not the place for dealing with that topic here). The second is a long history of distorted meanings of conceptions, interpretations, terminology, and superficial understanding of some of the items of the Bill of Rights. The third is the two-party system. The recent political events in the US exposed the danger to democracy under a two-party system, and fragility of the checks and balances as a guarantee for the rule of law.

Conclusion.

History is progress in a dialectical motion: event-its antithesis- a synthesis that becomes the thesis of the next step.  Obama’s presidency looked like a synthesis of Clinton’s and Bush’s (junior) presidencies.  It was not, it was a unique presidency because it declared a radical change in the American society- electing a black president and having a strong- effective- federal government. Then comes Trump to spoil all expectations and defies ‘all mighty history’. Are American people going to restore history’s dignity and make the needed radical changes to its sytem? Or are we (Canadians and the people of the Americas) going endure the brunt of continued political Trump hurricanes?