I have been mulling in the back of my mind the insights of Freud and C.G. Jung as I have watched the current campaigns play out. Watching Trump’s victory speech after South Carolina pushed these thoughts from back- to foreground and I thought I would publish one of my infrequent diaries to stimulate a conversation among the readership on this topic.
Specifically, I wonder whether Freud’s concept of id-ego-superego might go some ways to explaining the psychomachia playing out on the national stage. To wit, Trump is the unmediated ‘id’ or ‘libido,’ while Sanders functions as the ever-watchful Super-ego, pricking our consciences to the sticking point. Which leaves, what? Clinton and Kasich as ‘ego’ (that terrain where the urges of the id and the checks of superego are mediated).
In similar vein, Trump seems almost archetypal, to borrow a popularized concept from Jung. I’m a bit weaker on Jungian analysis than Freudian, so I will throw that out there as a possibility to consider. I’m wondering whether the Jungian archetype of the ‘trickster’ might help us understand the appeal of a Trump, while Sanders functions as ‘the wise old man’.
Before I set this diary free, I would like to conclude with a quote by Schopenhauer: “We can do what we will, but we cannot will what we will.” That quote has been gnawing at me for some time also, and bespeaks Jung’s and Freud’s notion of a subconscious that lies largely beyond the purview of the Apollonian.
Full disclosure: I am not an expert in psychoanalysis nor in the thought of either man, more an interested lay person. I would have preferred to append this to someone else’s magisterial thread, but I saw no opportunity to do so without thread jacking. Hence my diary.
Edit: In the final analysis (npi), what really matters most is not what Freud or Jung would have made of the weirdos in the Republican Party this year but more how their insights can be used to safeguard government of the people, by the people and for the people.