Heather - You encapsulated so well this morning the pitiful President we have endured for the last four years. As a licensed clinical psychologist in Massachusetts for 40 years now, I regret that our media does not call Trump out for what he is – a mentally ill person who continues to show us how utterly delusional and dangerous his ra…
Heather - You encapsulated so well this morning the pitiful President we have endured for the last four years. As a licensed clinical psychologist in Massachusetts for 40 years now, I regret that our media does not call Trump out for what he is – a mentally ill person who continues to show us how utterly delusional and dangerous his rants have become. Last night, he went to a whole new level that approached a full blown psychosis.
But even more striking to me in this election has been to face the reality that over 69 million Americans voted for him. As Nicholas Kristof in the NYT yesterday said, "How is it that so many millions of Americans watched Trump for four years, suffered the pain of his bungling of Covid-19, listened to his stream of lies, observed his attacks on American institutions — and then voted for him in greater numbers than before?"
What has taken place in this country with Trump and Trumpism has so stained America's Experiment in Democracy, that I find myself feeling hopeless and traumatized about our future and recovery . . . .
Indeed! Where is people’s moral outrage over the things this president has done? But we can’t forget, even with some states still counting, Biden’s winning the largest popular vote in history. The EC MUST be reconsidered.
Racism and sexism are both powerful goads to people who see their own troubles not as part of a community of the also-struggling but as the result of "others" getting what they "deserve." White fragility is real. And toxic masculinity (which can drive some BIPOC males and some women to choose tin-pot dictators like the Cheeto) is also real.
That is exactly why I am in such a state of disbelief and despair. As Tara Setmeyer said, 70 million Americans voted for a sociopath. How could this have happened?
I could not agree more ! Our public educational system in America has failed miserably, and that began with Richard Nixon in the early 1970s. My despair "index" is rising constantly. We must face, once and for all, that we are indeed a country founded on Slavery and genocide of the American indian, and that reality is with us today.
It's not the first time. For generations Americans have tolerated some pretty ugly stuff and acted as if it had nothing to do with them. We finally stand up and refuse to accept it and people are surprised there is pushback from people who somehow have the idea that all this time they benefited from the status quo? What about this do you not get? Our entire history is about sociopathic behavior. We just chose not to recognize it for what it was. After all, there is all that empty land, all those resources going to waste, all those savages (ie brown people, indiginous people) who are our burden. Um, do you get it now?
I too am aghast at the number of people voting for Trump, but then I thought about it in the framework Erik JM Schneider so beautifully articulated. As abused children often protect and seem to defend their accusers, perhaps many of those voting for him are doing the same. Some only choose to see what he projects and somehow can work what he says and does into their narrative as appropriate. I read a NY Times article which was a profile of women voting. They stated who they were voting for, how they chose to vote and why. All those for Trump chose to overlook, or could not see the horrible consequences of his words and deeds, and interestingly enough, were voting in person. Otherwise seemed like normal Americans to me. We need to reconcile with them or remain a divided country no matter who is in the WH
I, as well as some friends and neighbors, cannot believe the number of people that voted for Trump. What does it take to see that a person is in over his head and unacceptable? In my opinion the answer and solution is education and teaching critical thinking. Everyone on this page knows what critical thinking is but I'm not sure any of the people who voted for Trump even know what critical thinking is.
Laura, I was thinking about that too this morning as I caught up with the election results. I skipped yesterday, and was stunned to learn how close it is. Then, like you, I remembered when I was a volunteer for an organization who helped abused women and children. Many of the women, even as they sought shelter, made excuses for their abusers, and those women almost all ended up going back into the relationship. And I heard children cry out for comfort from parents who'd literally broken their bones- and their spirits. It was what they knew, and that kind of bond is not easy to sever. Those kids often go through life feeling disjointed and seeking relationships like the one they'd been removed from. There are ways to get through, but they require the willingness of others to work with them to help them learn real trust to replace the illusory emotional dependence. That, I think, applies to the people who follow Trump as well. Eventually, they will feel abandoned by him and by us, unless we are willing to make room for them in our world.
Annie, exactly! I cannot pretend to understand why anyone would support Trump, but I do not want to discount them completely as humans. We have all been emotionally abused by his actions and rhetoric, and some of us react very differently. This is one of the hardest "agree to disagree" topics I've ever encountered.
Yes I wonder myself whether something like a public traumatic attachment to authoritarian figures might play out, and have played out previously, in EuroAmerican cultures that have slidden dangerously close to or right into fascism. I don't wish to universalize my own experience, which begins in a fundamentalist Christian family, one side of which is rife with a long long history of child abuse. And yet I have talked to so many other survivors and read enough about how abuse has been covered up in Anglo USian culture in particular as well as in its antecedents in Germany, France, England, and other parts of Europe to have developed a very strong hunch that domestic abuse of all sorts--anything that happens in what is thought of as the private domicile--cannot be looked at as a separate cultural phenomenon from what we call domestic terrorism, authoritarianism, and fascism.
There are many long stories to be told here, but I'll just point out a couple. In Freud's rather infamous repudiation of his discovery that many of his first patients had experienced sexual abuse as children at the hands of adults in their families, he decided that his patients instead had unconscious sexual desires for their parents and other caregivers and that these incidences were fantasies rather than actual events. But this came only after he quite nearly lost his career before it had really begun. He gave a presentation on his early findings in the mid 1890s (1895 or 96 I think) in Vienna, and his colleagues-to-be immediate shunned him, not least because many of them were implicated in what he was recounting, since he was treating their young relatives: daughters and sons, nieces and nephews.
The rest is psychoanalytic history. Jeffrey Masson published The Assault on Truth in the early 1980's detailing Freud's struggle with how to salvage his career and his ultimate decision to betray his patients' trust. Masson did meticulous research in Freud's archived papers, but his conclusions were rejected by psychoanalysts in the US and pretty much ignored in the wider field of mental health care.
This is a repeat of many other cycles. Ambrose Tardieu was a French physician who worked in forensic medicine in Paris in the mid-1800s. He wrote several journal articles detailing his surprising, to him, discovery of widespread evidence of children being fatally injured by their parents and other caregivers after years of a wide array of physical abuse. His articles have been recently rediscovered by mostly North American professionals trying to understand the history and extent of this kind of trauma and how to address it. But at the time it was written, almost nobody, including Jean-Martin Charcot, who would have been a bit younger but was doing similar work in Paris and would later became an inspiration to an even younger Freud, seemed to want to notice what he was writing about.
And so it goes. There is so much more to be said, especially about the strict separation of private and public life in what is often called "Western" culture that has enabled us to compartmentalize this knowledge, often to the point of denial, but at the vary least in order to disavow any connection between the private and the political spheres of our culture. This has been a longstanding tradition within academia as well as in popular culture, but in the last twenty years or so, the distinction has come in for much criticism.
And, interestingly to me, this seems almost certain to be one effect of the gender diversification of university faculty: women and other non-men, as happens so often, have taken on the task of revealing and, with some hope and luck, cleaning up after patriarchal excesses. But of course denial and traumatic attachment can keep anyone from being able to see any of this clearly. We are complex animals, trying mostly to survive. I am both hopeful and somewhat resigned to seeing results from this and other improvements in understanding our relation to each other to take longer than what is left of my own lifetime. As Angela Davis has pointed out, we have to look beyond our own time and put our work in for those who will come after us.
I agree that change and improvement in understanding is a long process. I am hopeful that more and more confrontation of things that have been compartmentalized will lead to a change in attitude and behavior. #metoo, Black Lives Matter and other movements that decry systemic abuse have brought some of this to the public eye. I appreciate your perspective and knowledge.
Two of my relatives, who are good people and active Christians, wear masks, dislike the war on immigrants - nevertheless voted for Trump again. Pressure from their pastor played a strong role. Also the repeated claims about abortion and guns. A friend of mine, who spends much of his life doing stuff to help other people, is pro Trump because he grew up in Russia and identifies the American "left" with the flaws of the former Soviet Union. Then there is the relative who has signed onto to Fox-pushed craziness. I really don't know how to convince any of them, any more than they can convince me. It seems more useful, given a choice, to work against voter suppression.
I for one cannot fathom how 70 million Americans including some of the brightest erudite minds that I have known voted for a sick degenerate like him. Its something I haven't yet understood about human nature and its needs. It is something that will fester in my mind for years until I get some answers...
Heather - You encapsulated so well this morning the pitiful President we have endured for the last four years. As a licensed clinical psychologist in Massachusetts for 40 years now, I regret that our media does not call Trump out for what he is – a mentally ill person who continues to show us how utterly delusional and dangerous his rants have become. Last night, he went to a whole new level that approached a full blown psychosis.
But even more striking to me in this election has been to face the reality that over 69 million Americans voted for him. As Nicholas Kristof in the NYT yesterday said, "How is it that so many millions of Americans watched Trump for four years, suffered the pain of his bungling of Covid-19, listened to his stream of lies, observed his attacks on American institutions — and then voted for him in greater numbers than before?"
What has taken place in this country with Trump and Trumpism has so stained America's Experiment in Democracy, that I find myself feeling hopeless and traumatized about our future and recovery . . . .
Indeed! Where is people’s moral outrage over the things this president has done? But we can’t forget, even with some states still counting, Biden’s winning the largest popular vote in history. The EC MUST be reconsidered.
Racism and sexism are both powerful goads to people who see their own troubles not as part of a community of the also-struggling but as the result of "others" getting what they "deserve." White fragility is real. And toxic masculinity (which can drive some BIPOC males and some women to choose tin-pot dictators like the Cheeto) is also real.
That is exactly why I am in such a state of disbelief and despair. As Tara Setmeyer said, 70 million Americans voted for a sociopath. How could this have happened?
I could not agree more ! Our public educational system in America has failed miserably, and that began with Richard Nixon in the early 1970s. My despair "index" is rising constantly. We must face, once and for all, that we are indeed a country founded on Slavery and genocide of the American indian, and that reality is with us today.
It's not the first time. For generations Americans have tolerated some pretty ugly stuff and acted as if it had nothing to do with them. We finally stand up and refuse to accept it and people are surprised there is pushback from people who somehow have the idea that all this time they benefited from the status quo? What about this do you not get? Our entire history is about sociopathic behavior. We just chose not to recognize it for what it was. After all, there is all that empty land, all those resources going to waste, all those savages (ie brown people, indiginous people) who are our burden. Um, do you get it now?
I too am aghast at the number of people voting for Trump, but then I thought about it in the framework Erik JM Schneider so beautifully articulated. As abused children often protect and seem to defend their accusers, perhaps many of those voting for him are doing the same. Some only choose to see what he projects and somehow can work what he says and does into their narrative as appropriate. I read a NY Times article which was a profile of women voting. They stated who they were voting for, how they chose to vote and why. All those for Trump chose to overlook, or could not see the horrible consequences of his words and deeds, and interestingly enough, were voting in person. Otherwise seemed like normal Americans to me. We need to reconcile with them or remain a divided country no matter who is in the WH
I, as well as some friends and neighbors, cannot believe the number of people that voted for Trump. What does it take to see that a person is in over his head and unacceptable? In my opinion the answer and solution is education and teaching critical thinking. Everyone on this page knows what critical thinking is but I'm not sure any of the people who voted for Trump even know what critical thinking is.
Laura, I was thinking about that too this morning as I caught up with the election results. I skipped yesterday, and was stunned to learn how close it is. Then, like you, I remembered when I was a volunteer for an organization who helped abused women and children. Many of the women, even as they sought shelter, made excuses for their abusers, and those women almost all ended up going back into the relationship. And I heard children cry out for comfort from parents who'd literally broken their bones- and their spirits. It was what they knew, and that kind of bond is not easy to sever. Those kids often go through life feeling disjointed and seeking relationships like the one they'd been removed from. There are ways to get through, but they require the willingness of others to work with them to help them learn real trust to replace the illusory emotional dependence. That, I think, applies to the people who follow Trump as well. Eventually, they will feel abandoned by him and by us, unless we are willing to make room for them in our world.
Annie, exactly! I cannot pretend to understand why anyone would support Trump, but I do not want to discount them completely as humans. We have all been emotionally abused by his actions and rhetoric, and some of us react very differently. This is one of the hardest "agree to disagree" topics I've ever encountered.
Yes I wonder myself whether something like a public traumatic attachment to authoritarian figures might play out, and have played out previously, in EuroAmerican cultures that have slidden dangerously close to or right into fascism. I don't wish to universalize my own experience, which begins in a fundamentalist Christian family, one side of which is rife with a long long history of child abuse. And yet I have talked to so many other survivors and read enough about how abuse has been covered up in Anglo USian culture in particular as well as in its antecedents in Germany, France, England, and other parts of Europe to have developed a very strong hunch that domestic abuse of all sorts--anything that happens in what is thought of as the private domicile--cannot be looked at as a separate cultural phenomenon from what we call domestic terrorism, authoritarianism, and fascism.
There are many long stories to be told here, but I'll just point out a couple. In Freud's rather infamous repudiation of his discovery that many of his first patients had experienced sexual abuse as children at the hands of adults in their families, he decided that his patients instead had unconscious sexual desires for their parents and other caregivers and that these incidences were fantasies rather than actual events. But this came only after he quite nearly lost his career before it had really begun. He gave a presentation on his early findings in the mid 1890s (1895 or 96 I think) in Vienna, and his colleagues-to-be immediate shunned him, not least because many of them were implicated in what he was recounting, since he was treating their young relatives: daughters and sons, nieces and nephews.
The rest is psychoanalytic history. Jeffrey Masson published The Assault on Truth in the early 1980's detailing Freud's struggle with how to salvage his career and his ultimate decision to betray his patients' trust. Masson did meticulous research in Freud's archived papers, but his conclusions were rejected by psychoanalysts in the US and pretty much ignored in the wider field of mental health care.
This is a repeat of many other cycles. Ambrose Tardieu was a French physician who worked in forensic medicine in Paris in the mid-1800s. He wrote several journal articles detailing his surprising, to him, discovery of widespread evidence of children being fatally injured by their parents and other caregivers after years of a wide array of physical abuse. His articles have been recently rediscovered by mostly North American professionals trying to understand the history and extent of this kind of trauma and how to address it. But at the time it was written, almost nobody, including Jean-Martin Charcot, who would have been a bit younger but was doing similar work in Paris and would later became an inspiration to an even younger Freud, seemed to want to notice what he was writing about.
And so it goes. There is so much more to be said, especially about the strict separation of private and public life in what is often called "Western" culture that has enabled us to compartmentalize this knowledge, often to the point of denial, but at the vary least in order to disavow any connection between the private and the political spheres of our culture. This has been a longstanding tradition within academia as well as in popular culture, but in the last twenty years or so, the distinction has come in for much criticism.
And, interestingly to me, this seems almost certain to be one effect of the gender diversification of university faculty: women and other non-men, as happens so often, have taken on the task of revealing and, with some hope and luck, cleaning up after patriarchal excesses. But of course denial and traumatic attachment can keep anyone from being able to see any of this clearly. We are complex animals, trying mostly to survive. I am both hopeful and somewhat resigned to seeing results from this and other improvements in understanding our relation to each other to take longer than what is left of my own lifetime. As Angela Davis has pointed out, we have to look beyond our own time and put our work in for those who will come after us.
I agree that change and improvement in understanding is a long process. I am hopeful that more and more confrontation of things that have been compartmentalized will lead to a change in attitude and behavior. #metoo, Black Lives Matter and other movements that decry systemic abuse have brought some of this to the public eye. I appreciate your perspective and knowledge.
Two of my relatives, who are good people and active Christians, wear masks, dislike the war on immigrants - nevertheless voted for Trump again. Pressure from their pastor played a strong role. Also the repeated claims about abortion and guns. A friend of mine, who spends much of his life doing stuff to help other people, is pro Trump because he grew up in Russia and identifies the American "left" with the flaws of the former Soviet Union. Then there is the relative who has signed onto to Fox-pushed craziness. I really don't know how to convince any of them, any more than they can convince me. It seems more useful, given a choice, to work against voter suppression.
I for one cannot fathom how 70 million Americans including some of the brightest erudite minds that I have known voted for a sick degenerate like him. Its something I haven't yet understood about human nature and its needs. It is something that will fester in my mind for years until I get some answers...