ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a model of 'perverted containing' to explain escalating destructive social processes rooted in phantasies of omnipotence and nourished by unconscious fears of annihilation, using the example of Donald Trump-a prime example of a destructive narcissistic populist who offers omnipotence as salvation. It combines Rosenfeld's theory of destructive narcissism and Bion's theory of the container/contained to describe the powerful dynamic existing between Trump and his voters in which the omnipotent appeal of the demagogue held his followers in thrall. Trump offers his supporters omnipotence as perverted containing. He embodies omnipotence as a person;therefore, he appears convincing, so people can easily believe in him-especially those who, on an early level of intensive anxieties, feelings of persecution, and longing for symbiosis, prefer to attach themselves to one person. Thus, he accommodates their desires to identify and bond symbiotically with one person in total consensus-without triangulation, without doubting and space to develop individual perception and judgment. In the 2020 COVID-19 crisis, Trump first used his usual means: distortion and denial of reality, self-praise and directing accusations towards the usual 'enemies'. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)
ABSTRACT
The author examines the appearances and formation processes of destructive populist developments in the Western world from a psychoanalytical perspective, using the example of Donald Trump and his voters. She draws on the concepts of Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Wilfred Bion, Herbert Rosenfeld and Otto Kernberg, which build on each other, and drafts the basic features of a psychoanalytic explanatory model of destructive populist social processes. She illustrates the phenomenon of the ¼destructive populist fit« between Trump and his followers by means of an analysis of Donald Trump's well-documented election campaigns in 2016 and 2020, supplemented by his actions during the COVID 19 crisis in 2020. On the psychoanalytical understanding of the effectiveness of his methods and the susceptibility of voters to destructive populism, she applies Bion's model of containing in conjunction with Herbert Rosenfeld's destructive narcissism and develops the concept of ¼perverted containing«: in the course of regression to a paranoid-schizoid level, aggressively destructive and omnipotent affects are idealised and the container function of democratic society is increasingly decomposed, distorted and finally twisted. Beta-elements are not detoxified and digested but, on the contrary, are fueled. This dynamic implies permanent escalation through ever new destructive-exciting acts in order to maintain the symbiotic-destructive fit in the mode of destructive narcissism.