What follows is the introduction to my new book, Politics on the Couch. Because we live in an interactive world and this election is an interactive process, I am conducting a new experiment: I'm posting sections of the manuscript twice weekly on my blog here at HuffingtonPost.com and am inviting readers' comments which may be folded into the final print edition to be published by HarperCollins.
Each section will describe psychological forces that affect our thoughts, perceptions, and actions. While the introduction is long - my apologies - subsequent sections will be brief. Since this election changes moment-to-moment, your comments will help us all better understand ourselves, and the voting process.
I look forward to your ideas and comments and invite you to subscribe to my blog so that you'll receive an e-mail alert as new excerpts from the book are posted. My thanks to Arianna Huffington, Colin Sterling, David Flumenbaum and the team at HuffingtonPost.com for their support.
Politics on the Couch
Preface
Change is taking place in America. John Edwards, Dennis Kucinich, and Barack Obama gave it voice fueled by the misery of millions - the young men and women dying and maimed in Iraq; the victims of Katrina; the families whose homes are lost to foreclosure; the medically uninsured.
And it is more than human misery that drives so many people toward change - it is institutional as well as spiritual: our Constitution and American traditions are in tatters. Our pride at being Americans has diminished, as has our respect in the world. Even our fundamentally open-hearted attitude to one another is at risk. We cannot trust our leaders to tell the truth or to protect us from our enemies.
The push for change has emerged - in many - from the state of mind America got into after 9/11. That state of mind, following our experiences of vulnerability, grief, and rage, affected our leaders, the press, and all Americans - and almost led us into totalitarianism. That state of mind still exists, despite the new press for change, and the possibility of totalitarianism has not yet passed. We need to push beyond our adhesion to simplistic solutions and to the restricted thinking that invariably emerges in times of dissonance.
How can we think about that state of mind, especially if many of us are still in it? We certainly can't think about it without knowing what elements make it up. For instance, do we always latch onto slogans linked with patriotic disdain for groups and nations that are different from us? Do we have a natural proclivity to be swept away by certain dangerous modes of thought? Is there an "us" in Bush? And what is that state of mind, ultimately? All of us, voters as well as non-voters, would benefit from thinking about how we have been changed, not just that we want change from the way we are now. Put another way, do we want to change ourselves, or do we just want to have someone else make the changes?
Broken trust can lead to cynicism and apathy; it can also lead to outrage and demand for political reform. Frustration comes from a sense of betrayal - by our leaders, our institutions, the press, and ultimately by each other - we/they the people. We are complicit in letting it come to this. One way we are complicit is that we make mistakes based on powerful factors about which we are unaware. These unconscious states of mind often determine how we vote - not always in our best interest.
That Powerful Connection
All of us have had the experience of feeling strongly about public figures, from movie stars to world leaders. Whether we love or hate them, our feelings and reactions are based on projecting aspects of ourselves onto them.
Our relationships with political candidates are particularly interactive and never more important than in 2008. Our favorite actor wants us to buy tickets to his new movie, but he's unlikely to knock on the door asking for our support. Political candidates say they seek to serve us as they fill the airwaves while also holding numerous large and small rallies. Our relationship with candidates is more interdependent than with movie stars, and therefore our reactions to them reveal a great deal more about us, about who we are. We also relate to our leaders based on childhood relationships - real and imagined - that are kept alive in our unconscious. These feelings, impacted by the media, contribute powerfully to how we experience each candidate.
If a patient came into my office railing against a woman candidate he thought was too pushy, ambitious and without scruples I would think about two things - his childhood experience with his mother and his adult feelings about authority figures (including his psychiatrist), which he is now projecting onto the candidate.
Over the years I have tracked my own reactions to various political leaders from Eisenhower - when I was in middle school and high school - through GWB. I even suffer from legislative envy - a disenfranchised resident of Washington, DC, I have no representative in Congress. Over the years, I noticed things inside myself that I projected onto the candidates. When I wrote Bush on the Couch, I noticed even more.
Then there is the media and what it chooses to emphasize - often influenced by campaign gurus whose own inner worlds are dominated by unconscious fantasies which help them target voter fears and prejudices. Political strategist Karl Rove is a master manipulator in this realm. In 2000 and 2004, he advised Republican candidates to tie their campaigns to banning gay marriage, knowing that such sexual practices are uncomfortable childhood taboos for many people. And who better than Karl Rove to formulate such a plan, having lived through his father's coming out of the closet when he was a boy.
Of course, the real agenda of those candidates was an economic one that would find those same voters losing their homes to foreclosure in 2008. But we didn't realize that until it was too late, and lost our adult security by clinging to our childhood homosexual anxiety. People don't only cling to prejudices out of bitterness - as Obama so famously said in San Francisco - they cling because of private hates and fears.
Understanding a candidate's policies is important, but it is also important to understand our own emotions and experiences and how they shape us as human beings and as voters. I approach this project from my professional psychoanalytic understanding of individual and group psychology, focusing on how unconscious preconceptions, formed from our childhood experiences, affect our perception of the world and also influence our voting choices. Our emotional reaction to candidates is based on these preconceptions; we may even feel that particular candidates are speaking directly to our concerns and to us.
What do we choose to focus on when we choose a candidate? And what does our choice of focus say about us? Are we limited to choices presented by the media? Are we now dominated by particular blogs we choose to read? And what do our past relationships - with former office-holders as well as with members of our own families - have to do with perception?
I am not solely a psychoanalyst; I am also a citizen with my own feelings and memories. As a little boy, I overheard my parents and our neighbors - some of whom were childless - speak with pride about the quality of our local public schools and the taxes they paid to support them. Later, I became a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War and then an active member of Physicians for Social Responsibility. I am a Democrat and a patriot who is heartbroken about the state of our union.
We share a collective responsibility for this country, and we exercise that responsibility in the voting booth. While many believe that a stacked Supreme Court chose our president for us in 2000, and that electronic voting machines are subject to tampering, half of all voters still preferred the candidate who was fundamentally flawed and who was bad for all of us - and we chose him twice.
While it remains true that too few of us vote, the number of voters in the 2008 primaries has been at record levels. Yet those who do cast their ballots are often unaware of unconscious preconceptions and the fantasies that affect them, so they don't spend enough time making thoughtful decisions about who best represents America's values and interests at every level of government. Ironically, they act out of irrational self-interest.
In addition to general principles of unconscious life that are relevant to voting, we will look at how our own family history and our relation to group phenomena influence decision-making. We will also look at ways the media distorts information - and at our complicity in that distortion. We can discover what it is in us that particular candidates seem to speak to - a process that evolves from understanding who we are, where we came from, and what we want.