A look at a different Trump voter

 

For years, I have thought of President Trump’s admirers as psycho­path wanna­bes or as depressed people who escaped from critical childhood loss and its pain into self-sooth­ing emo­tion­alized atti­tudes, including contempt, that projected and justified* their pain. But today I learned that my client, whom I’ve seen for eleven months, who is essentially an all-good person with no more than the average amount of toxic barbs protruding, and always sanguine for therapy, cannot recog­­nize a psychopath when she sees one or joins a relationship with one. Later on – too late – she can grasp the comprehensive malig­nancy, but still she cannot feel it. Not surprisingly, she voted for Trump, the psychopath of our day.

She looked at these “Key Symptoms of Psychopathy” in Robert Hare’s Without Con­science:

* glib and superficial * egocentric and grandiose * lack of remorse or guilt * lack of empathy * deceitful and manipulative * shallow emotions * impulsive * poor behavior controls * need for excitement * lack of responsibility * early behavior problems * adult antisocial behavior**

and had no negative feeling about them at all.

It took me this long (unless I’m forgetting what I once knew) to see this “positive” prong in the attraction to an evil person: the holding-close or gravitating-to the powerful enemy – Donald Trump or a sexually abusive family member – because to separate from him would be to have self-esteem and to feel one’s alone self, one’s own excruciating childhood pain. Cleaving to the “bad object” (who holds out the promise of gratification while providing scant rewards) is not to know, in one’s core, the stark feeling of abandonment. (Her mother was also an abandoning person.)

With her bright high-altitude and down-to-earth mind, she is still numb to feeling. Shame on ther­apy; but it can only work so fast in the face of natural resistance.

- - - - - - - - - - -

* Early blog post – https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2019/10/depressed-trumper.html.

** Robert D. Hare, PhD, Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us, The Guilford Press, 1993, p. 34.