Trump and the Holding Environment

There are certainly a number of highly political and socioeconomic insights about the Trump catastrophe, and here I offer some psychoanalytic ideas about Trump and his hold on some of the public. The psychological term ”holding environment” refers to the provision of safety and security provided in earliest life. It is often depicted as holding with loving hands as in the Sistine Chapel with God just about touching Adam’s finger or Mary gently holding the baby Jesus. A crucial distinction is that some people interpret this as a time when the mothering person absorbs the baby into her own body boundaries and responds perfectly to all the baby’s needs and feelings, the baby as emperor. Alternatively there is the reality of differentiation and individuation from the beginning of life: “the one thing you can’t do is to be the other person” [1], vs the one person narcissism as will be described in Trump.

What will be elaborated here is the profound destructiveness and deceptiveness of this narcissism, redolent with feelings of omniscience, omnipotence, grandiosity, wishful self-idealization. One representation of the “holding environment” is that God holds everyone in his hands – a song that became a kind of American Anthem in the 1950s on a national television show [2] “He’s got the whole wide world in his hands.” By way of contrast is Leonard Peltier’s view that we are all ordinary people, that our purpose is to try to be useful.

Child soldier Ishmael Beah writes eloquently about how his grandmother’s words about the moon provided a holding environment for this tormented and tortured child soldier from Sierra Leone, a holding environment that he could keep within himself while his world was terrifying. [3]

Where do realistic and rational feelings of security and safety come from? Now is a time of extreme, unprecedented danger as documented by James Hansen’s work on climate change, Daniel Ellsberg’s work on nuclear weapons, Stephen Hawking’s work on artificial intelligence. All these have a time frame, tipping points that cannot be reversed or controlled by human intervention. Freud outlined characteristics of rational thinking that can fluctuate in life and that matures with experience. Rational thinking consists of being able to differentiate human and non-human, human and inanimate. It involves having a rational sense of time not shaped by wishes and fears and a rational sense of cause and effect relationships. Rationality involves being able to be aware of contradictions and being able to bear the tensions of keeping this in mind – the Trumpians do not experience this kind of tension but are comfortable with opposites, reject inner conflict. Rational people as they mature have the capacity to be concerned about others, are able to bear anxiety and difficult feelings like depression.

Trump, like God, is the saviour and destroyer. The Abrahamic god is brutal, sadistic, vicious. God orders Abraham to kill his son as a sign of devotion and love of God, transforming infanticide into an act of love and disavowing his own murderous wishes. The Christian God abandons his own son, Jesus, as he cries out for God’s help on the cross. Willing infanticide is also found in the Greek foundational myths, such as Agamemnon killing his daughter Iphigenia to save Athens in the Trojan war. In the 1970s child psychoanalysts and legal expert wrote a 3 volume series on the best interests of the child, exploring the state’s collusion and participation in child murder and neglect. Now the brutality towards children is so glaring in Israel’s horrific targeting of children, children starving worldwide, children in detention, tortured in prisons

The German writer Thomas Mann’s “Mario and the Magician” is a nauseating story about a hypnotist’s totalitarian control over his audience in which people utterly comply with his humiliating, sadistic, physically impossible directives and are unable to disobey no matter how hard they try. [4] How to understand this? One possible explanation is that following orders is an identification with the narcissist, allowing them also to be as narcissistic and to gratify all their own wishes. One interpretation of Nixon’s landslide victory after Watergate when Nixon’s criminality was obvious was that they then felt it was okay to also be to be dishonest.

Is this applicable to Trump-land? What do people know and not know about Trump and the world-at-large? This was investigated after WWII to explore what people could have known about the Holocaust. [6] There is a song “there’s something happening here and you don’t know what it is, do you Mr. Jones?” This speaks to people feeling terrified while not knowing why, of separating the feeling from the cause of the feeling. For example, many people are terrified by the influx of migrants and back Biden’s and Trump’s closed border policies. They do not think that climate change is fueling mass displacement and migration and believe in all increases in carbon emissions to keep fuel prices down. Do people not know about climate disasters, burning towns and forests, unprecedented storms and sea-level rise?

There is a wonderful children’s literature combining a rational holding environment and morality. Semdak’s Where the Wild Things are has little Max giving up all the pleasure and power of being king of the wild things to return to his own home and warm dinner. In the Little Bear books the mother does the reality testing ay telling Little Bear that he cannot fly to the Moon or marry the princess because he is really a little bear who cannot fly, but that he does not have to make his own birthday cake as she always remembers it is his birthday. One of the best and most sensitive stories is about Frances the Badger while her parents wait patiently as she struggles inside herself about whether to eat the delicious chocolate chompo bar she bought for her sister’s birthday – she holds onto the chocolate and squeezes it lovingly but then decides to give the whole thing to her sister Gloria. Amartya Sen describes how children can go beyond a morality of equality and empathically consider individual needs and experiences as they decide how to share a flute.

The maturational process of developing a morality is stunted in Trump-land which is stuck at the earliest stage of vengeance, of eye-for-an-eye revenge such as in Israel’s Oct 7 retaliation. Gone are developments in understanding violence, attending to motives and underlying causes and extenuating circumstances. Officially torture is now justifiable when it purportedly prevents more violence.

Trump’s granddaughter Mary Trump writes of the moral dishonesty rooted in the Trump patriarchy, the admonition to cheat, deceive, bully in order to achieve the American dream. Clinicians working with delinquents often found this in the family background [5] ; the Rockefeller patriarch was a snake-oil-salesman who instructed his children how to fool people, Joe Biden has just pardoned his son Hunter for wrongdoing while he himself seems to think nothing about causing death and starvation and incarceration to millions of children.

Many testimonies of Holocaust survivors described the psychological capacity to sense real human beings in the other, to have a capacity to be concerned about others that did not have to do with any moral codes or religious doctrines or prescriptions – but really with an emotional sense of the realness of other people. This did not have to do with loving or hating others but simply with a basic human sense, to surpass narcissism. The consequences of narcissism at this time cannot be underestimated; they are terrifying.

NOTES

[1] Clare Winnicott Winnicott, C. (1980) Fear of Breakdown: A Clinical Example. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 61:351-357. Clare Winnicott

[2] 1 He’s got the whole world in his hands.
He’s got the whole world in his hands.
He’s got the whole world in his hands.
He’s got the whole world in his hands.

2 He’s got the wind and the rain in his hands.

(Sing three times)

He’s got the whole world in his hands.

3 He’s got the little tiny baby in his hands. . . .
He’s got the whole world in his hands.

4 He’s got you and me, brother, in his hands. . . .
He’s got the whole world in his hands.

He’s got you and me, sister, in his hands. . . .
He’s got the whole world in his hands.

6 He’s got everybody here in his hands. . . .
He’s got the whole world in his hands.

[3] Ishmael Beah p 14 “you were negative nineteen years old.” That[s what my father used to say when I would ask about what life was like in Sierra Leone following independence in 1961, p 14 Every morning in Mattru Jong we would go down to the wharf for news from home. But after a week the stream of refugees from that direction ceased and news dried up… p 16”there was a thick forest on one side of the village where my grandmother oived and coffee farms on the other. River flowed from the forest to the edge of the village, passing through palm kernels into a swamp. Above the swamp banana farms stretch into the horizon. The main dirt road that passed through Kabati was rutted with holes and puddles where ducks liked to bathe during the day and in the backyards of the houses birds nested in mango trees. In the morning, the sun would rise from behind the forest. First its rays penetrated through the leaves, and gradually with cockrows and sparrows that vigorously proclaimed daylight, the golden sun sat at the top of the forest. In the evening, monkeys would be seen in the forest jumping from tree to tree, returning to their sleeping places. On the coffee farms, chickens were always busy hiding their young from hawks. Beyond the farms, palm trees waved their fronds with the moving wind. Sometimes a palm wine tapper could be seen climbing in the early evening…Smoke rose from thatched roof kitchens, and people would start arriving from farms carrying lamps and sometimes lit firewood. “ We must strive to be like the moon.” An old man in Kabati repeated this sentence often to people who walked past his house on their way to the river to fetch water, to hunt, to tap palm wine; and to their farms. I remember asking my grandmother what the old man meant. She explained that the adage served to remind people to always be on their best behavior and to be good to others. She said that people complain when there is too much sun and it gets unbearably hot, and also when it rains too much or when it is cold. But she said, no one grumbles when the moon shines. Everyone becomes happy and appreciates the moon in their own special way; Children watch their shadows and play in its light, people gather at the swamp to tell stories and dance through the night. A lot of happy things happen when the moon shines; These are some reasons why we should want to be like the moon….after my grandmother told me why we should strive to be like the moon, I took it upon myself to closely observe it. Each night when the moon appeared in the sky, I would lie on the ground outside and quietly watch it. I wanted to find out why it was so appealing and likable. I became fascinated with the different shapes that i saw inside the moon. Some nights I saw the head of a man He had a medium beard and wore a sailor’s hat. Other times I saw a man with an oxchopping wood, and sometimes a woman cradling a baby at her breast. Whenever I get a chance to observe the moon now, I still see those same images I saw when I was six, and it pleases me to know that that part of my childhood is still embedded in me.”

[4] Thomas Mann Mario and the Magician. Stories of Three Decades, the Modern Library, New York, 1930. Also see Leo Rangell The Mind of Watergate, An Exploration of the Compromise of Integrity, Barnes and Noble, 1980.

[5] Szurek, S. A. (1961) Adelaide McFadyen Johnson—1905-1960. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 30:84-85. Superego Lacunae.

[6] Laub, D. & Auerhahn, N. C. (1993) Knowing and not Knowing Massive Psychic Trauma: Forms of Traumatic Memory. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 74:287-302

Knowing and not Knowing Massive Psychic Trauma: Forms of Traumatic Memory

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