Political psychology is currently for academics and politicians. it should be for right wing political extremists before they become extreme. I have spent years as a psychotherapist working with clients ‘in the system.’ A big part of what I do is psychoeducation. I demonstrate, unpack, and drill down deep into the psychodynamic structures that my patients have internalized, often across generations. that are making them project outward onto a blank screen in which there is absolute good and absolute evil, all good and all bad, and no nuance. To embrace nuance is tantamount to annihilation. as the late Mark Shields once said: “the Left falls in love and the Right falls in line.”
I now teach psychodynamic and psychoanalytic theory in the prison system to incarcerated students who are completing their degrees. We go from the personal to the political, the individual to the nation, and in this way, they feel empowered and illuminated and in control of their own minds and emotions. One does not get swept away by political emotion if one has mastery over one’s own mind and the sense of individuation that protects the individual from being swayed by the group.
Narcissism means that we are externally focused on one half of the mentalizing dialectic, the half in which are hyper-vigilant around how others see us but carries with it no sense of concern for how we see others. I teach psychoanalytic theory in the prison system, and I worked for a number of years in a methadone clinic that catered to the deep, semi-rural underclass of the area in which I live.
Narcissists—along with most other people—love hearing about themselves. As long as their interest can be held, as long as they are the center of focus, they are likely to pay attention to the one who is talking about them. Individual psychology—explaining the psychodynamics of the individuals experience, giving them a story on which to hang their identity—is enticing. Once we have them that way, we can reach them, we can expand on what they understand about themselves to get them to start thinking, really reflecting, on what they now know they might not know. Once you know something, you cannot unknow it.
Attachment, Self and Other, and Self-Regulation
The relational bond forged in infancy between the infant and the infant’s primary attachment figure will determine such things as the brain development, emotional development, and psychological development of the infant. Numerous studies have pointed to the necessity of a “secure base” from which infants can progress from dependence to independence. When there are disruptions in attachment, either through prolonged separation, loss, or the primary caregiver’s inability to respond optimally to the infant’s needs, attachment disorders develop and can negatively impact both the individual and the social context in which the individual interacts across the lifespan.
Attachment is comprised of several components: the actual relationship developing in real time between caregiver and infant; the “object-relations” internalization of caregiver representations by the infant; and, as often as not, the internalized “legacy” representations of the caregiver’s own “partial” or “incomplete” caregiver representations. This last component, although implied by theories going back to the dawn of psychoanalysis, has only recently been understood as a neurobiological and genetic aspect of inheritance. The development of the field of epigenetics has borne out what was long understood by psychoanalytic theorists in the wake of the Second World War.
