Introduction by Hal Brown, MSW
Howard H. Covitz, PhD, ABPP, NCPsyA is a late middle-aged psychologist-psychoanalyst. For many years he was Director and on the Training Faculty of The Psychoanalytic Studies Institute (PSI/IPP) in Philadelphia. His 1998/2016 Oedipal Paradigms in Collision was nominated for the Gradiva Psychoanalytic Book of the Year. He has written on the connections between narcissism and Oedipal development and on internecine conflict in the psychoanalytic community. He was a member of the Board of Directors of the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis for 10 years. His political activism arises at a point equidistant from his roles as father, grandfather, citizen and therapist.
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He also wrote a chapter in the best seller “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.”
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He asked me to edit this for him and post it on Daily Kos.
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We have co-administered a Facebook group for 114 mental health profesionals whose credentials we have verified since September, 2016. Called Free Citizen Therapists it initially began as a time-limited discussion of the 2016 election before Trump’s astonishing election. There were those therapists (MD, MSW, PhD, LPC, etc.) who believed that there should be safeguards against the abuse of diagnostic and therapeutic skills used gratuitously against public figures (The Goldwater Rule) but saw, as well, the ethical duty encumbent on “Citizen Therapists” to warn, report and prevent, where they could, damage to others (which has come to be known as the Tarasoff Rule for a case ruled upon by the California Supreme Court). The exquisite balance necessary to balance both Goldwater and Tarasoff was seen to deserve open discussion. This site initally was a place for such purposes with the understanding that some clinicians would fall on one side of this conroversy and some on the other.
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Since the early days the Facebook group has evolved and now functions as an online clinical discussion group, the equivilant of the group case discussions and presentations we have all engaged in throughout our careers. The only difference is that the case we are discussing is Donald Trump. Most of us have had 20-40 or more years of clincial experience, thus we share our insight from what amounts to several thousand years of experience with tens of thousands of clients.
"The most dangerous times thus far in Trump's presidency" by Howard Covitz, PhD
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I'd like to make clear my position on the right of public figures to privacy and their protection from gratuitous psychologizing by professionals in the field ... the Goldwater Rule and its variants. I am a staunch advocate of that rule in all situations when there is no risk of catastrophic danger to others. I have chosen to speak out because a man was elected president (and given unimaginable powers to do good and evil) who shows the stigmata of those people who are prone to doing others harm. Forgetting all else, at least for the moment, I recall an interview with Trump after the Khizr and Ghazala Khan incident ... after he attacked a Goldstar family and after they asked publicly whether Mr. Trump had ever sacrificed anything. The interviewer asked the same question: had he ever sacrificed for others? Trump responded by saying that he had given many people jobs ... I think he said thousands of people.
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Had he not understood the question? The employer-employee relationship is contractual ... a win-win situation, we might say. Honest labor for fair pay. It became clear to me that Donald Trump failed to comprehend how two people could treat each other fairly. For him, if I take his words seriously, life is a zero-sum game and he must win all the time. The Psalmist said not about Trump but about the God that so many of his followers devoutly worship: "To God belongs the Earth and all that it contains" (Psalm 24). That's not the way Donald J. Trump sees it. ... Furthermore, I must say, that any armed person who is not president and who is doing and saying what Trump says often and openly would be whisked off by the gendarmes to a psychiatric facility for testing.
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Perhaps, I can clarify this.
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Since it became clear that Trump might have the GOP nomination, many of us in the psychoanalytic and mental health communities, including the dozens of contributing authors of “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump” edited by Bandy X. Lee, MD, noted his public behaviors – whether or not these represented his actual psychic capacities or not. These behaviors were consistent with those of people with severe Personality Disorders who tend to be dangerous:
- (1) an inability to see others as People in their Own Right (subjects with their own needs and sense of agency) but rather to see them as objects to be manipulated;
- (2) a splitting of the World into with-me and agin-mecamps ... no grey;
- (3) an apparent lack of impulse control;
- (4) no respect for extant organizations, laws or accepted wisdom;
- (5) an absence of nuanced thought (in addition to any question of cognitive decline); and
- (6) having only one truth, namely what he wishes to be true.
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Trump has remained constant in these behaviors that are good predictors of dangerous and damaging future actions. The fact that he has nearly unlimited powers that are not being checked by the Senate or anyone else leaves the values of the republic and the welfare of the world arguably in grave danger. That is to say, someone with these characteristics may not pose a public threat if they have no means to act; Donald Trump has these means ... and in spades!
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As to whether Donald Trump's followers will listen to the results of the Mueller probe, we know well that the power of the mob and the allegiances to tribal beliefs make it unlikely that the enormous shift we saw during the constitutional crisis precipitated by the Watergate era will carry the day, as they did with public opinion in 1974. But beyond this, we know that the Fourth Estate, this time and to a significant extent, has been wittingly or unwittingly complicit in treating many of Trump's positions AS IF they were reasonable. They have been complicit, that is, in normalizing the pathological as Robert J Lifton has suggested occurs during the rise of authoritarian regimes.
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Even such statements as "the president believes" are misleading. We have come to learn that much of what he does is for purely selfishly pragmatic reasons. Many have questioned whether he has beliefs that go beyond maintaining his own fragile sense of power. Even considering that, it is difficult to believe that there will not be defections from the Trump Cult, if room is made for these people who saw in Trump hope for a better day. I expect there to be efforts (from the Right? from Russian bots?) to paint the Progressive camp as seeing half or more in the MAGA camp as “deplorables” (Secretary Hillary Clinton's disastrous faux pas). Speaking not as a psychoanalyst but as a citizen, father and grandfather, it is absolutely necessary for us to avoid any further alienation of the right, including the religious right.
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If, indeed, the elected president's publicly displayed behaviors are indicative of a severe personality disorder (and I have no reason to believe otherwise), the likelihood of his responding to the pressure of being exposed in any constructive manner is essentially zero. We have made inroads into treating some such people with success but this is a lengthy process and is not accomplished under the type of duress that the president is being exposed to with the damning pictures in Mueller's report. We see from even the redacted Mueller report that, without the likes of John Kelly, Mike Rogers and teams of legal consultants, the six characteristics mentioned above would have moved him to even more dangerous and illegal positions. He is being portrayed in the redacted Mueller report as one who can be controlled – the emperor, in the report, that is, does indeed have small hands. How someone like he will be able to integrate the public shaming that this brings forth for him is not predictable but should be a source for grave concern.
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That having been said and, again, assuming that his pathological behaviors are not all a show, we may presume either an increase in these disturbing behaviors (pulling out of NATO, declaring national emergencies for whatever reason he chooses, ramping up tensions with Iran, using the full-force of the Executive Branch to lash friends and whip foes, or ... ) or a psychic collapse. We saw a notable change in his behavior when he left the White House on Thursday for Mar a Lago when he refused to take any questions. The next days and weeks should clarify which of these paths is taken and how much and what kind of violence he may choose to promote. It is impossible to precisely predict the future actions of someone who apparently lives under the belief that apres moi le deluge.
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These are, in my estimation, the most dangerous times thus far in Trump's presidency ... Dangerous for the Republic with Dangers for the World and Dangers for my Grandchildren.