Introduction

My metapsychological and historical work has for decades traced core shifts in human character structure and self-formation that bore strong parallels with the work of Kohut. Engaging more and more intensively with Kohut’s work in the past fifteen years, I have increasingly integrated the insights of Self Psychology with my own work in distinct ways: first, as an explanatory frame for the metahistorical analysis of psychological development in Western history; secondly, as a structural psychodevelopmental frame for evolving stages of individual selfhood through core narcissistic unfolding in the post-liberal, post-Protestant age. A third use of Kohut’s work is to identify the enveloping narcissistic injuries in this era as a result of American socialization and self-formation that can explain the self-arrest and self-regression shaping the contemporary crisis of American society. While Kohut’s theoretical insights are crucial for my own psychohistorical and metapsychological investigations, my goal is to offer a frame expanding the conceptual application of his work that can help us understand the broader dimensions of the late modern world.

The President holed up in his mansion is a story we have seen before. Noted by commentators as eerily reminiscent in their closing acts of Charles Foster Kane or Gatsby – deepest explorations of the dark regions of the American Dream, the focus however is quickly shifted: from what this might tell us about the American experience to the irrationality of these sequestered figures or, for Trump, his admirers’ perverse indulgence in victimization.

In the face of this recent election, it is time to acknowledge some hard questions about the dangers of that drive for power and precedence we call the American Dream. However reassuring it is to link Trump’s appeal to details of the campaign, the starkest realization from this election is how everyone, friend and foe, saw the larger issue of his obsession with dominance.

That more than 70 million voters chose a candidate without a platform other than himself indicates what they found there spoke to them more deeply than simply a politics of grievance or retaliation. Registering his increased percentages among African Americans, Hispanics and Latinos, Asian Americans, women, everyone in fact but already supportive white males, it is important to examine the appeal.

A reconsideration of the American Dream through these two fictional paragons can help us. What we witness in these narratives are promoters of prodigal self-absorption, whose untempered ambition drives their possessors without respite or deviation until it consumes them. No palace, no wealth, position or power or influence could possibly measure up to the fixation animating them.

Something this immune to alteration must lie near the inmost core of the psyche, there to be stirred up by the extravagant national myth: that one can and therefore must fulfill all strivings connected with what Gatsby called his “Platonic conception of himself.” Once riveted to this North Star, there is no descent into criminality, phantasm, or self-deception that will dim its luster. This bedrock level of the self has been called by noted psychoanalyst and founder of Self Psychology, Heinz Kohut, the “archaic grandiose self,” the early childhood presumption of the “omnipotence of the self.”

Never before has any society dared to tempt its members with the possibility and even flagrant promise of a singular answer to the question, “Who is the fairest of them all?” This enticement to self-glorification is moderated for most individuals by the incessant reality frustrations and impediments in their lives. Yet for some few as Kohut explains, whose infantile fantasies “remain unmodified” by experience because of unusual circumstances, ambitions, privileges, desperation, the drive to an “uncompromised” and “absolutarian” pursuit of “limitlessness” remains unchecked.

If only these archetypes were oddities rather than illustrations of a larger pattern. What stares back at us amid the legions of faithful, however, is that Americans have been brought up on such stories, and like Bradley Cooper in Limitless clutch such early magical tales of personal ascendancy. Trump in fact brags about employing the hook of “hyperbole” to “play to people’s fantasies,” manipulating their unfulfilled craving to “think big” by marketing “the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular.”

To be sure, a great number of Americans respond to these cultural temptations by working to reframe and integrate their early hopes with the life they will have. On the other hand, a very great number of us apparently do not. The pressing question is “Why not”?

Americans have resisted confronting how this Dream in a society which underscores winning and losing in its more cutthroat and constricted forms divides us and diminishes us all. From an early age, American children are relentlessly culled and sorted. As in The Hunger Games, those pushed and outfitted by anxious and striving adults intent on high achievement together with a highly stratified schooling system are channeled to higher and higher levels of competition. For the vast numbers left behind by fierce meritocratic selectivity, there is only abandonment to lowered expectations and the sting of failure and insufficiency.

This sorting process into winners and losers is in turn exacerbated through division of the nation into center and margin, cosmopolitan regions of meritocratic privilege and global culture as opposed to those of dead-end economies and cultural stagnation. As the sense grows for the latter of being permanently by-passed, as their best and brightest leave humming the “hillbilly elegy,” the sense of injury is reinforced in much of the country. The result as columnist David Brooks has written is an “intense…backlash” against “highly educated” coastal and urban areas with their monopoly on “economic, cultural and political power,” and the susceptibility to extreme explanations to restore the sense that those on the periphery matter.

Because falling short identifies one as a loser regardless of the situation, unworthy of assistance and support, those multitudes marked with no apparent prospects reveal most clearly the injury inflicted on one’s sense of self. For them the American promise lingers only in the dying embers of early fantasy, there to be fanned by pledges of shared dominance in revivalist frenzy.

And yet, for those climbing the ladder to higher levels of decision-making, status, and reward, the demand to sacrifice one’s own dreams for routinized roles and standardized returns also, as Gatsby was to learn, hollows out the soul. Thus the exemplary successes, Kane and Gatsby and Trump, are no less impaired by archaic grandiosity, no more able to generate a meaningful identity and sustainable community, than the least influential among us.

What lies ahead on this dehumanizing course, while differing by one’s position, can only be an ultimate, fatal, accounting. For those wrapped in their own mythology and first encountering the collapse of archaic omnipotence, the final stage is marked for Kohut with inundation by “archaic” narcissistic “rage.” The desperate but abortive effort to restore grandiosity triggers “fanatic[al]” aggression and “revenge” for injuries inflicted by the “enemy who blocks the way.” Alone in one’s rage, the deeply frozen self plots payback on the world that has foiled its apotheosis.

For those many shunted aside to endure the pain of unreachable futures, there are only dreams of vindication. Refusing to trust promises of assistance from privileged meritocrats who regulate the system to their own advantage, they wrap themselves in the rhetoric of conspiratorial evil and dehumanized others to justify their contempt for all obstructions. Unable to formulate any way to address these core deprivations, however, they opt for craven leaders and untenable policy claims that wreak ever greater injuries on themselves.

For centrists, moderates, liberals, and one-time progressives, the tireless pursuit of systemic returns as substitute for sustained meaning and individual actualization obscures but does not reduce the price of self-betrayal. Trapped in an increasingly grueling pursuit of external markers of achievement and self-worth, they are in contrast to earlier decades unwilling to support redistribution and inclusion for the less fortunate, or to even imagine lives less dominated by organizational imperatives. The final torment is retreat to defense of the system not out of belief but from calculations of personal security.

What makes this time so incendiary? The assumptions Americans have about the future were formed during the post-World War II era of global ascendancy, economic dominance, and post-industrial productivity. Suddenly possessing the wealth to provide expanding acquisition and consumption across all sectors, the nation declared itself the society of winners. Yet, as other regions of the world rise economically and production shifts out of the U.S., the forecast of unlimited abundance is increasingly used to disguise the long-term decline of discretionary wealth and opportunity.

The dramatic decrease in wealth and well-being for all but a few sharpens the realization that competition now involves few, largely foreordained, winners and numberless losers. The predatory agenda of an ever more dominant and aggrandizing elite with political and economic leverage leaves the rest of society to impoverished futures and the prospect of social justice on life support. In this survival of the fittest over the remaining spoils, the call in many quarters is to override remaining limits provided by Constitutional balance, legality, international comity, economic safety nets, and formal representative government. The liberal dream, effective in mobilizing early modern populations to the task of nation building and unprecedented wealth creation, has revealed its dark side as the neoliberal war of all against all.

Observing social analysts and political commentators try in this time of peril to limit our perception of the stakes is deeply unsettling. Daily commentators lurch between terrifying designations such as Paul Krugman’s reference to the U.S. as a possible ‘failed state,’ meant to scare us back into our right minds (without revealing what that right mind is), and banal recommendations that we all start telling the truth again or admit shame at our civic neglect. So-called students of the longer term like Jill Lepore, Sean Wilentz, and Mark Lilla do look beyond the latest election cycle, but only to find in place of eroding conventional clichés new clichés about the devious influence of social media, William Barr’s misunderstanding of executive power under the Constitution, or even the illegibility of the present age to direct the blame so long as we are not ourselves implicated.

Without a significant cohort willing to evaluate our entrapment in obsolete assumptions about psychological development and committed beyond our own life preserver to a more just and deeply self-actualizing future, we cannot reverse course. Looming over us will be the responsibility we have forsaken: to nurture fuller human possibilities emerging from early life aspirations for us all. Young people grow up with dreams beyond conventional boundaries, and cultivating these as the foundation of our identities and source of progress was to be our nation’s distinctive contribution. Only rededication to the flourishing of our young – and to our own – will outflank the retreat to magical thinking.

Failing this, there is Trump as the epitome of liberalism in extremis, standing forth in his ephemeral glory, unswayed by the infinite futility of his ultimate vindication, every minute illuminating himself in the mirror of his grandiosity and willing to bet that it is envy and not pathos that draws his minions to him.