Originally posted at TomDispatch. In 1963, the summer I turned 11, my mother had a gig evaluating Peace Corps programs in Egypt and Ethiopia. My younger brother and I spent most of that summer in France. We were first in Paris with my mother before she left for North Africa, then with my father and Continue reading "The United States Refuses to Play by the Worlds Rules"

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Freudian depth-psychology remains an under-utilized tool in interpreting motivation and personality of recent American leaders  who have chosen to deploy massively destructive military force on large civilian populations in places like Serbia, Iraq and Afghanistan.  A president may deny (or repress) his own destructive hostility, projecting it onto the other.  Splitting-and-projection readily enables a clear definition of an enemy nation, whose population as a whole may have to endure collateral damage. As psychoanalyst Vamik Volkan has elucidated, in extreme situations (such as the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks), both leaders and followers may regress to such splitting mechanisms: we are all-good, blamelessand they, as one war president claimed, maliciously hate our freedom.  Such group-regression, Volkan noted, occurs when the citizenry of a nation abandon mature, inductive rationality and succumb to such dangerously over-simplified, defensive emotional states.¹

Here I am focusing on the urge for, and exercise of, power-over as a manifestation of compensatory narcissism (a term I prefer, in this essay, to Volkans reparative narcissism).  As to sadism, psychoanalyst Erich Fromm perceptively described the dominance-submission psychology of the authoritarian personality: the world is composed of people with power and those without it.  The very sight of a powerless person makes him want to attack, dominate, and humiliate him.² Those individuals who single-mindedly attain such power-over may then successfully compensate for the childhood trauma of feeling insecure, under-valued or humiliated.³  Concurrently, the unconscious desire for revenge may be satisfied through displacement...