Whereas authoritarians of old took power by seizing the levers of governance, today’s authoritarians manipulate their way into power through the ballot box. Ironically, it’s not just the beneficiaries who elect authoritarians; it’s also those who are bound to suffer—like the women who thought Trump would make in vitro fertilization free for all, only to find his administration doubling down on the regulation and punishment of women’s reproductive choices. But there’s more to it than promising one thing and delivering another. Authoritarians prey on people’s fears and promise them protection, luring them into voting for a paternalistic savior rather than someone who will promote democracy. They might even say, as one did, vote for me and you’ll never need to bother voting again (Astor 2024).
How do authoritarians convince people to freely choose their own domination? This is the question I’ll be exploring with my undergraduate students this fall in an advanced philosophy seminar at Emory University. I chose the course title, “Authoritarianism,” several months ago. Today, I’d be tempted to call it “Fascism.” I’ve taught versions of this course before, calling it “Populism” or “Politics and Psychoanalysis.” What they have in common is the use of psychoanalytic theory to help understand perplexing and, especially, anti-democratic political phenomena.
I tell my students that if we could easily find rational explanations for anti-democratic trends, then we wouldn’t need to bother with psychoanalysis. But the irrational, often self-destructive behavior that characterizes much contemporary politics is unintelligible without it. My students learn that, while the primary focus of psychoanalysis is on the individual, it’s also a powerful interpreter and even predictor of group behavior. Like individuals, societies have their own unconscious dynamics, their own “neuroses,” as well as shared paranoid delusions and psychoses. When otherwise reasonable people start believing in wild conspiracy theories or imagine that powerless, marginalized people are existential threats to a nation and its citizens, the explanations of pop psychology are useless. Psychoanalysis helps us understand that what seems like “merely” irrational thinking or behavior is motivated by complex unconscious as well as conscious intra- and interpersonal dynamics.
Psychoanalysis still offers the most sophisticated account of these dynamics and their origins, including the psychosocial effects of historical phenomena and the transgenerational transmission of traumas—all of which can be manipulated by savvy (and cynical) politicians. Psychoanalysis also helps explain large-group identity and ethnic conflict, as well as melancholic attachments to old grievances and why such processes and pathologies are so difficult to remedy.
Many political philosophers and political scientists try to explain the symptoms and effects of authoritarianism without exploring its causes. Sadly, the same thing can be said about many parts of the standard psychiatric reference work and diagnostic tool, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, currently in its fifth edition (2022). Earlier editions—for all their many flaws—were more psychoanalytically informed; but modern American psychiatry is moving further and further away from its psychoanalytic roots. Similarly, empiricist social scientists who study authoritarianism can enumerate the elements of the authoritarian playbook but offer little explanation for why these elements routinely occur.
My course on authoritarianism will draw on what social scientists have learned. We’ll read phenomenological accounts such as Hannah Arendt’s classic book, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1973), Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny (2017), and Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works (2020), which together lay out the steps in the fascist playbook: gin up fear, manufacture an alternative reality, blame “outsiders,” consolidate power, delegitimize adversaries, normalize state use of surveillance and violence, and seek solace in a mythic past. At the same time, we’ll study what motivates these phenomena through reading works by Sigmund Freud, Theodor Adorno, Melanie Klein, Frantz Fanon, Vamik Volkan, and Jacques Lacan. To make this manageable in a single semester, each student will use these works to analyze a particular “case study” of authoritarianism, from the past or the present.
Perhaps the most fundamental challenge is introducing students to key concepts in Freud’s metapsychology, such as the unconscious, mourning and melancholia, incorporation/introjection, and the mechanisms of defense. For works by Freud himself, I’ve found Peter Gay’s Freud Reader (1995) very helpful—especially in curbing my tendency to assign too much reading! Lacan and Fanon help explain what makes a phobic object simultaneously so alluring, what leads people to be hoodwinked by even the most outlandish propaganda, and the logic underlying the fantasy of “becoming great again.” And Klein’s (1986) theory of the paranoid-schizoid position makes it easier to see how ancient enmities and traumas can be so quickly reactivated—how common it is for people to regress to archaic defenses such as splitting, denial, and projection.
Psychoanalytic theory also helps explain how authoritarian leaders—who are seldom adept in such theory—manipulate these unconscious processes to take and maintain power. (Adorno’s 1951 essay, “Freudian Theory and the Power of Fascist Propaganda,” is especially useful in this regard.) When coupled with case studies of politically dysfunctional states, a carefully chosen range of psychoanalytic thinkers helps students see the logic of the unconscious at work, which, in turn, helps make sense of the authoritarian playbook.
The course requires an intensive introduction to key elements of psychoanalytic theory as well as various political theories of democracy and its weaknesses. For this to work, students need a variety of resources for understanding personal, interpersonal, and collective functioning on a wide spectrum from the “normal” to the psychotic. Most fundamental are those resources that give students a clear understanding of the individual and collective unconscious. Among other things, I introduce them to a modified version of Fredric Jameson’s concept of “the political unconscious” (2002). I emphasize that the political unconscious doesn’t entail an escape from the individual to some kind of social or political analog. Instead, each person can be seen as a microcosm of the sociohistorical, largely constituted (or “subjectivized”) by shared cultural and linguistic norms.
The (political) unconscious is a place of impulse and repression, resistance and regression, powerful desires and even more powerful—even tyrannical—imperatives. It expresses itself in symptoms. It has errands to run, wrongs to right, and scores to settle. Moreover, any one person’s unconscious is not exclusively one’s own. While some symptoms are representatives of our very personal and idiosyncratic conflicts, all psychic functioning is intersubjective; countless forms of psychic unease (or dis-ease) are communicated and transmitted between us, unconsciously for the most part. Making this abundance of internal conflict and unconscious communication a bit more accessible to consciousness can make the difference, as my students discover, between unthinking capitulation to an authoritarian regime and thoughtful resistance to political tyranny, in pursuit of democratic ideals.
Works cited
Adorno, Theodor. 1991. “Freudian Theory and the Power of Fascist Propaganda [1951]”. In The Culture Industry. Ed. J. M. Bernstein. London: Routledge, 132-157.
American Psychiatric Association. 2022. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 5th ed. Text rev. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.books.9780890425787.
Arendt, Hannah. 1973. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Astor, Maggie. 2024. “Trump Declines to Back Away From ‘You Don’t Have to Vote Again’ Line.” New York Times, 30 July 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/30/us/politics/trump-christians-vote-ingraham.html.
Freud, Sigmund. 1995. The Freud Reader. Ed. Peter Gay. New York: W. W. Norton.
Jameson, Fredric. 2002. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. London: Routledge.
Klein, Melanie. 1986. The Selected Melanie Klein. Ed. Juliet Mitchell. New York: Free Press.
Lacan, Jacques. 2006. Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Tr. Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton.
Snyder, Timothy. 2017. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. New York: Crown.
Stanley, Jason. 2020. How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. New York: Random House.
Volkan, Vamik D. 1997. Bloodlines: From Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism. Boulder: Westview.
—. 2019. “Large-Group Identity, Who Are We Now? Leader-Follower Relationships and Societal-Political Divisions.” American Journal of Psychoanalysis 79.2: 139–155.