The heart of Ferenczi’s trauma theory is what he called identification with the aggressor (Ferenczi, 1933)-a term more often associated with Anna Freud’s ( 1936) later, and somewhat different, meaning. Since then, I’ve used Ferenczi’s and other psychoanalytic theories of trauma to help me understand what gives life to this kind of mass, self-defeating submission. The similarities between how children respond to abuse, and how followers of these movements behaved, were unavoidable to me. My interest in people’s willing sacrifice of their autonomy (Frankel, 2002) was first kindled by Ferenczi’s ( 1933) observations of the effects of child abuse within families, and turned in a political direction (Frankel, 2015a) when the right-wing populist wave that had been growing in some other countries crashed onto American shores, first in the form of the Tea Party, more than a decade ago. My aim in this paper is to use psychoanalytic trauma theory to try to understand why people are drawn to strongmen, and authoritarian movements, that threaten their own autonomy and interests. Ironically, the angry attempt to reassert one’s entitlements ends up facilitating compliance with one’s oppressors and undermining the thoughtful, effective pursuit of realistic goals. On the large scale, these fantasies are generally authoritarian in nature, with three main dynamics-sadomasochism, paranoid–schizoid organization, and the manic defense-plus a fourth element: the feeling of emotional truth that follows narcissistic injury, that infuses the other dynamics with a sense of emotional power and righteousness. Not surprisingly, emotional abandonment, both in individual lives and on a mass scale, is typically felt as humiliating and it undermines the sense that life is meaningful and valuable.īut the intolerable loss of belonging and of the feeling of being a valuable person often trigger exciting, aggressive, compensatory fantasies of specialness and entitlement.
Similarly, large groups of people who are economically or culturally dispossessed by changes in their society typically respond by submitting and complying with the expectations of a powerful figure or group, hoping they can continue to belong-just like children who are emotionally abandoned by their families.
Notably, a persistent tendency to identify with the aggressor is also typical in children who have been emotionally abandoned by narcissistically self-preoccupied parents, even when there has not been gross trauma. In the moment of trauma, children instinctively submit and comply with what abusers want-not just in behavior but in their perceptions, thoughts, and emotions-in order to survive the assault afterwards they often continue to comply, out of fear that the family will turn its back on them. The Sanctuary Church quickly embraced Mr Trump after it came into existence in 2017, and in 2019 Sean Moon told Vice News that he believed God was using the former president to scrub the world of "political Satanism" and to restore the world to its original state of paradise as described in the Bible.Ferenczi’s conception of identification with the aggressor, which describes children’s typical response to traumatic assaults by family members, provides a remarkably good framework to understand mass social and economic trauma. “We are in the death of America right now, and that’s why, of course, God is allowing for our expansion.”
troops and Chi-Com Chinese military to come in and destroy and kill all gun owners, Christians, and any opposition, i.e., Trump supporters,” he said in a sermon.
“The internationalist Marxist globalists are trying to start a civil war here, so that they can bring in the U.N. In Sean Moon's sermons – which are called King's Reports and are live-streamed on Twitch – he has called for his members to prepare for war and issued dark warnings that the federal government and the "globalists" were out to get to them. While the church has not made any overt threats, its ideology has become increasingly militant in recent years.
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