By Hal Brown, MSW
Freud wrote what is considered one of his most influential works in 1929. He was influenced by World War I (then called The Great War) but of course wasn’t influenced by the ascendence of Hitler when he wrote this.
Wikipedia saves me from having to write an overview:
Freud enumerates what he sees as the fundamental tensions between civilization and the individual. The primary friction, he asserts, stems from the individual's quest for instinctive freedom and civilization’s contrary demand for conformity and repression of instincts. Freud states that when any situation that is desired by the pleasure principle is prolonged, it creates a feeling of mild contentment. Many of humankind's primitive instincts (for example, the desire to kill and the insatiable craving for sexual gratification) are clearly harmful to the well-being of a human community. As a result, civilization creates laws that prohibit killing, rape, and adultery, and it implements severe punishments if these rules are broken. Thus our possibilities for happiness are restricted by the law. This process, argues Freud, is an inherent quality of civilization that gives rise to perpetual feelings of discontent among its citizens.
Freud's theory is based on the notion that humans have certain characteristic instincts that are immutable. These include, most notably, the desires for sex, and the predisposition to violent aggression towards authority figures and sexual competitors, who obstruct the individual's path to gratification.
Still, you can find many clues as to what he’d think about Trump and how he won over between 35-40% of the country in that book (here for free).
Here are some quotes which relate to varying degrees to what is happening today:
- “It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement — that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life.”
- “One thing only do I know for certain and that is that man's judgments of value follow directly his wishes for happiness-that, accordingly, they are an attempt to support his illusions with arguments. ”
- “The element of truth behind all this, which people are so ready to disavow, is that men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness.”
- “Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus [man is wolf to man]. Who, in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion?”
- “The element of truth behind all this, which people are so ready to disavow, is that [humans] are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. ... It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness.”
Rather than wade through the original book you can read an article published in The NY Times in 2006 Freud and the Fundamental Urge, but that requires a subscription. This was published prior to Trump publicly speculating about running for president in the 2012 election so this was written before anyone considered Trump even a long-shot candidate for president.
The article is about Freud, Hitler, and the NAZI movement. The salient portion which you can easily relate to Trump and the hold he has over what many of us have called a cult is summarized here:
Freud had no compunction in calling the relationship that crowds forge with an absolute leader an erotic one. (In this he was seconded by Hitler, who suggested that in his speeches he made love to the German masses.) What happens when members of the crowd are "hypnotized" (that is the word Freud uses) by a tyrant? The tyrant takes the place of the over-I, and for a variety of reasons, he stays there. What he offers to individuals is a new, psychological dispensation. Where the individual superego is inconsistent and often inaccessible because it is unconscious, the collective superego, the leader, is clear and absolute in his values. By promulgating one code -- one fundamental way of being -- he wipes away the differences between different people, with different codes and different values, which are a source of anxiety to the psyche. Now we all love the fatherland, believe in the folk, blame the Jews, have a grand imperial destiny. The tyrant is also, in his way, permissive. Where the original superego has prohibited violence and theft and destruction, the new superego, the leader, allows for it, albeit under prescribed circumstances. Freud's major insistence as a theorist of group behavior is on the centrality of the leader and the dynamics of his relation to the group. In this he sees himself as pressing beyond the thinking of predecessors like the French writer Gustave Le Bon, who, to Freud's way of thinking, overemphasized the determining power of the group mind. To Freud, crowds on their own can be dangerous, but they only constitute a long-term brutal threat when a certain sort of figure takes over the superego slot in ways that are both prohibitive and permissive.
As the Nazis arrived in Vienna, many gentile Viennese, who had apparently been tolerant and cosmopolitan people, turned on their Jewish neighbors. They broke into Jewish apartments and stole what they wanted to. They trashed Jewish shops. They made Jews scrub liberal political slogans off the sidewalk, first with brushes and later with their hands. And they did all of this with a sense of righteous conviction -- they were operating in accord with the new cultural superego, epitomized by the former corporal and dispatch runner, Adolf Hitler.
What would Freud be saying today? Would he have maintained his non-political stance as described in this abstract of Freud and the Political from Project Muse:
The political in Freud conceals under the air of innocence a most difficult, even impossible topic. Both terms are far from being unequivocal – it is not quite clear, despite the appearances, what is meant by Freud, in spite of, or rather because of, the aura that surrounds his name and the general clamor provoked by his fame. And it is even less clear what is meant by the political, in spite of, or rather because of, the fact that one is constantly bombarded from all quarters by politics in all shapes and sizes. The trickiest of all is the possible intersection of the two. The temptation is great to adopt a deconstructivist rhetoric, so instead of speaking about the topic to speak about the impossibility of speaking about the topic, the temptation I will very much try to resist.
On the face of it, Freud was not a man of politics, to say the least. He never engaged in political life, not in any significant way, not of his own accord, not until it was thrust upon him in the most insidious form of the rampant anti-Semitism, finally the occupation of his country which forced him into exile. Apart from this staggering ending, his relationship to politics was anecdotic. One can pick out anecdotes about his aversion for Woodrow Wilson and co-authoring the unfortunate book about him; his inopportune scribbled note dedicating a book to Mussolini; his voting for the liberal party (in line with the whole Austrian Jewish community); his skeptical remarks on Bolshevism, inadequate by his own admission; his indulging in an extra cigar when the Emperor refused to appoint Dr. Karl Lueger the burgomaster of Vienna despite his electoral victory in 1895 – the same Karl Lueger, one must add, that served as a role model to the young Hitler who was roaming the streets of Vienna at the turn of the century, the man from whom he learned the tricks of the trade of anti-Semitism, as he described in Mein Kampf. And coming from Slovenia, I cannot resist to pick out one anecdote, I suppose the most spectacular of all, which happened during Freud's one brief visit to Slovenia….
Apart from the anecdotic, however picturesque it may be and however indicative in many ways, there seems to be a glaring absence: Freud never proposed a political line that would follow from his discovery, a political stance to be taken. He avoided any reflection of the political impact that his discovery might have, in a way which cannot be unintentional, although never explicitly stated. He proudly refused that psychoanalysis should adopt any Weltanschauung, any 'world-view', including a political one, claiming that the scientific spirit precludes Weltanschauung. One can draw the conclusion that there is in Freud an inherent indifference in political matters…
Consider this from Time Magazine:
After they (the NAZI army) took Vienna in 1938, the Nazis seized Freud’s money, property, and publishing house, by TIME’s account. Still, he preferred to shelter in place rather than seek asylum among the money-obsessed savages he believed comprised the American populace.
“America is gigantic,” he’s reported to have said (interesting article), “but a gigantic mistake.”
It took the intervention of one of his star patients, Princess Marie Bonaparte, Napoleon’s great-granddaughter, to uproot him — and for London instead of New York. Bonaparte paid what amounted to ransom to secure Freud’s exit visas, and, according to the Daily Mail, “brokered a deal that enabled him to salvage his library, large sculpture collection, and celebrated couch.”
Freud was ultimately happy with the move, according to TIME, which describes his exile as an idyllic period, despite his near-constant pain:
In a comfortable London house near Regent's Park, filled with his Greek and Egyptian treasures, Freud answers letters, continues his writing, even treats a few old patients. Every Sunday evening he settles down in the parlor, coddles his five young grandchildren, enjoys a lively card game called tarot with his sons. Always at his call is his nine-year-old chow dog, Lun. During his 16 years of suffering [from cancer], throughout his 15 operations, he has never uttered a word of complaint. Patient and resigned, secure in his fame, he spins out his last thoughts, and basks in the sun.
His wry sense of humor seems never to have abandoned him, either. According to the New York Times, the Nazis had allowed him to leave Austria on the condition that he sign a statement swearing that they had treated him well. He signed, but added a tongue-in-cheek comment offering more praise for German fascism than he’d ever mustered for American democracy: “I can most highly recommend the Gestapo to everyone.”
I wonder if Freud, who would be 164 years old this year, would be a member of the Duty to Warn group of mental health professionals.