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| Keep Calm and Carry On – An interview with Murray Stein about Donald Trump
By Robert Henderson
RH: I have wondered how Jung might have understood Donald Trump. I believed Jung had spent some time trying to understand Hitler. Do you think Jung would have spent any time trying to understand Trump?
MS: Of course. Jung was deeply interested in the political figures of his day, so I can’t imagine that he wouldn’t have been fascinated with Trump, just as many Europeans are. Trump is headline news in the Zurich newspapers almost every day. I just now reread the famous Knickerbocker interview with Jung (C.G. Jung Speaking, pp. 115-140). There you can see how closely Jung observed the political personalities in his day. The title of the interview was “Diagnosing the Dictators,” and it appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine in January 1939, so at a very tense time in Europe. Jung showed great interest in the personalities of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin. He doesn’t diagnose them psychiatrically in this interview but rather speaks about their character types. I assume he would take the same approach to Trump. What would he say about Trump? I can only offer my best guess. I don’t think he would put Trump in Hitler’s category (mystical magician). More likely he would put him in the category of Stalin and Mussolini (alpha males and tribal chieftains), although he doesn’t fit this profile perfectly either. Trump has such obvious trickster features, which were not evident in Stalin and Mussolini. In other words, what we project on Trump is different from what people saw in the three dictators discussed by Jung.
RH: In that famous interview, Jung said that Hitler is
“the mirror of every German’s unconscious….Hitler’s power is not political; it is magic…..magic is that part of our mental constitution over which we have little control and which is stored with all sorts of impressions and sensations; which contains thought and even conclusions of which we are not aware…they lie beneath the threshold of conscious attention.” Do you find any of this true about Trump?
MS: No. Trump is no Hitler. His power is not that of the magician. It’s blunt and often quite stupid. He does not relate to the American psyche or speak for it the way Hitler did for Germany in the ‘30’s. Jung saw Hitler as a man without qualities, without a personality of his own. He drew his personality from entering into a state of participation mystique with the German collective. He was in this respect mostly unconscious and devoid of personal wishes or ambition. He was not married to a woman; he was married to “das Volk.” He had little connection to his family or to personal possessions, and he showed no interest in enriching himself financially. This is totally unlike Trump. The German people spoke through Hitler using his voice, a sort of ventriloquism, and his popularity increased over time as he became more aggressive and belligerent echoing their frustration.
Trump’s appeal in America is actually quite small and limited, if you consider the whole population. He doesn’t inspire awe. He’s more of an entertainer than a “leader.” I think in Trump we see a different type of the alpha male, a titanic adolescent, undisciplined and impulsive, often comically so, with grandiose fantasies of himself as King. There is ta difference between the Titans and the Olympians: Titans are gross and clumsy; Olympians have finesse. Trump would like to be an Olympian like Zeus, but he can’t manage it. Obama was an Olympian. Trup is not a normal politician, a man of the party, a leader of a political group. He’s more like a Mafia godfather, and it’s all about the “family,” not the country. A Titan does not hide his personal thoughts and feelings behind political correctness or polished ideological statements. He simply says what’s on his mind at the moment and assumes it will be law. To his base this is appealing because they like an authoritarian boss, all the while thinking they can avoid his catastrophic consequences. Trump wraps them in this illusion as he tweets his mind across the globe.
Another of Trump’s appeal to his base is that of a “bad boy.” Resentment and inferiority feelings might be a common denominator with Hitler and his base. Trump’s appeal is to the shadow of American society, as was Hitler’s to Germany in his day. But Trump’s appeal is quite shallow by comparison. He doesn’t carry the numinous aura of an archetype, which instills fear and trembling. In our time superficial is popular, much more than profound or visionary, and that’s why he’s successful to the degree he is. This is the nature of postmodernity. Trump is, in a sense, a man of these times. Maybe he does belong on the cover of Time magazine after all. He represents well the spirit of these times....
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