A Daily Kos story posted today, Trump’s Mental Condition Declines by duty to warn psychologist Armond Aserinsky, Ph.D., aka FilmDog, (read profile) inspired me to write this.
I commented on his story and then realized I had veered into subject matter I could add to.
Aserinsky addressed how he thought Trump was showing evidence of increasing cognitive impairment and how this combined with his existing psychopathology. He concluded his story with this:
If you have had the experience of dealing with someone who is undergoing cognitive decline you know that the patient often feels mortified by such losses. Losing mental abilities is an awful blow to self esteem. If one has a pre-existing problem with self-esteem maintenance, a patient like Trump is apt to go to extremes to deny evidence of organic deterioration.
In sum, I believe we are seeing a confluence of several streams of decompensation. Trump is in a mental “death spiral”. We may therefore anticipate wilder destructive behavior. The man is in a state of barely disguised rage. The question is what can we do to lessen the impact of Trump’s lashing out in what we hope is his final year.
His last paragraph expresses what I tell friends who aren't therapist when they ask me for help understanding what is happening with Trump. We used to call the causes of complex cases “over-determined.” The Germans could call this über durch Trump bestimmt (translate).
To use a weather analogy, appropriate since Trump is an expert on the weather, he is the example of the rare confluence of weather conditions depicted in “The Perfect Storm” a harrowing movie about a real storm that you can read about here..
Getting into the weeds about this, overdetermination is a concept that goes beyond psychology. This certainly is not a new idea with me. For example from Wikipia.org
The Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser imported the concept into Marxist politics in an influential essay, "Contradiction and Overdetermination." Drawing, in an unusual combination, from both Freud and Mao Zedong, Althusser used the idea of overdetermination as a way of thinking about the multiple, often opposed, forces active at once in any political situation, without falling into an over-simple idea of these forces being simply "contradictory." Brewster, in Althusser et al's Reading Capital defines overdetermination as such:
"the representation of dream thoughts in images privileged by their condensation of a number of thoughts in a single image (condensation), or by the transference of psychic energy from a particularly potent thought to apparently trivial things ... [For Althusser] overdetermination of a contradiction is the reflection in it of its conditions of existence within the complex whole."
Thus, for Althusser's reiterating of Marxist thought, overdetermination is what [concealed/unaccepted] "determinant contradictions", or capital-economic incongruities(i.e., abstract labour resulting in "isolation" -- the class struggle), which are analogous to Freud's "potent thoughts", apply to instances that are more really, slight, understandable. An instance of a popular riot calling for revolution could exemplify this. The event has to it, in capitalist culture, an over-application(determination) of agitation. The determinant contradictions(the reasons for popular revolt) are not addressed and so their great mass is "displaced" onto the singular event.
With Trump we not only have to factor in the indications of neurological events into his psychopathology to explain and predict his behavior if we want to grasp the hold he has on his ardent supporters we must analyze group psychology. Trump’s ascent into power and his ability to keep so many supporters requires a new concept even more complicated than overdetermination.
This phenomena has been addressed in many articles, but is put very well in this four minute sobering video from The Atlantic.
All of these things added together explain not just Trump but Trumpism as well. Trump is difficult enough to assess using the usual tools of psychology and neuropsychology, but add in trying to analyze the phenomenon of what happened from 2011 when he flirted with running for president and eventually became the primary spokesperson for birtherism, to his semi-serious entry into the political scene riding down his royal golden escalator and fear-mongered about rapists, to the present day would take a team of experts from multiple fields to write the definitive analysis of how Trump was the eye of the hurricane which nearly destroyed the American democracy which we didn’t realize was so fragile.