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The Dynamism [1]

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Date: 2023-10-06  

The subcortical mind is also colloquially known as the animal mind. (Up to ~6:30 of the video provides the backdrop.) Automatic processes occur here, including sexual arousal.

What we today call hypnotism was first known as animal magnetism.

Mesmer evolved the hypothesis of a magnetic force specific to animate beings, calling it animal magnetism. According to this conception, therapeutic action is still the outcome of a physical process, but here it is the magnetizer's own personality which, through his power and through his wellspread fluid, exercises his influence on the patient's weaker organism. (Leon Chertok, “Relation and Influence,” American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis (1986), pp. 14-15)

Today we know that there is no magnetic fluid flowing through the human body, but we certainly still recognize influence. In fact, the basis of what we consider charisma, presented as a form of prestige, is largely a sense of outsize influence.

Indeed, Freud discovered a natural link between hypnosis and sexual desire when his first patient demonstrated her affection for him when under his influence. Sensing this link intuitively, Freud renounced hypnosis as a practice altogether. He then directly discovered transference, according to Chertok (Ibid., p. 19):

It was thereafter possible to understand the mechanism of hypnotic suggestion. Freud summed up his thinking very succinctly when he wrote that suggestion "is the influencing of a person by means of the transference phenomena which are possible in his case[.]” The heightened suggestibility of the subject in the hypnotic setting, and his affective dependence upon the hypnotizer, could thus be accounted for by the special transferential relation binding him to the latter.

Wilhelm Reich spoke to the fact that, in fascism and other reactionary movements that draw upon religious codes that dictate the repression of sexual desire, this excess bodily energy may serve as a source of the adherent’s energy and motivation.

[M]ystical experience actually sets the same process going in the autonomic living apparatus as a narcotic does. These processes are excitations in the sexual apparatus that cause narcoticlike conditions and that crave for orgastic gratification. (The Mass Psychology of Fascism, p. 130) [W]hat religion calls freedom from the outside world really means fantasized substitute gratification for actual gratification. (Ibid., p. 129) [F]aith and fear of God are energetic sexual excitations that have exchanged their goal and content. Accordingly, the religious feeling is the same as the sexual feeling, except that it is imbued with a mystical, psychic content. (Ibid., p. 154)

I hypothesize that this repression energy may be utilized by the fascist leader in a dynamic with the adherent which not only resembles hypnosis but is the exact same thing.

Freud, in Group Psychology and Analysis of the Ego (1922), said:

From being in love to hypnosis is evidently only a short step. The respects in which the two agree are obvious. There is the same humble subjection, the same compliance, the same absence of criticism, towards the hypnotist as towards the loved object. There is the same sapping of the subject’s own initiative; no one can doubt that the hypnotist has stepped into the place of the ego ideal. (p. 58) The hypnotic relation is the unlimited devotion of someone in love, but with sexual satisfaction excluded[.] (Ibid., p. 59)

It is this erotic bond that fuses the leader with the follower, at least from the follower’s perspective. (The leader, too, may be stimulated but almost certainly has some outlet for this sexual charge.) The lack of consummation between leader and follower could drive or undergird a continuous, unquestioning devotion and loyalty, just as one would see in requited (or even unrequited) love.

As the leader is symbolically a totemic fetish to the adherent, the leader can stimulate and satisfy the animal stirrings, the subcortical stimuli, that are thus generated. This very much should resemble teen crushes or infatuations with celebrities, sex symbols idolized from afar.

To that point, Kathleen Taylor in Cruelty (p. 81) says:

Like other intrinsic rewards, sexual satisfaction can be obtained in a staggering diversity of ways; shoes, dogs, dead bodies, and eye-watering pain are some of the more unlikely stimuli. Individuals restricted from fulfilling their sexual needs in one way may seek alternative routes to satisfaction.

Adherents focus unconscious or subconscious sexual desire upon the object of adoration of the intense group (that is, the cult). This transfer of otherwise undirected sexual desire produces a powerful psychological bond between adherent and the object of desire (i.e., the fetish).

So the religion (either associated with the movement or the majority religion of the society in question) urges sexual repression. That energy becomes available through accumulation. The pinnacle leader taps into this energy, possibly due directly to the group treating the pinnacle leader as the highest good and most celebrated object. Thus the devotee is that much more hypnotizable. This hypnosis is a seductive process.

Some may question the need to bring hypnosis into the equation. It may seem an unnecessary element to explain the relation between leader and devotee. Indeed, there must be occasions where ordinary interpersonal relations occur between someone in a superior position and a subordinate (say, an employer and employee). However, the charismatic leader enjoys a particular perch of adoration that is absent from many structured relationships.

This element of adoration, especially if it rises to veneration or worship, may indicate that a more psychological process is at work. The mechanisms of hypnosis hold great explanatory power in terms of understanding the dynamics that occur between the leader as an object of desire and the devotee who is enchanted with such a fetish.

One may ask, what exactly is hypnosis? Brian Vandenberg, speaking of the phenomenon, explained:

[H]ypnosis is a communicative process whereby individuals allow another to assume some measure of control over the organization, orientation, and interpretation of their experience. Hypnosis involves interpersonal influence of intrapersonal processes and presumes an intersubjectivity that makes exchange and influence possible. It is an asymmetric relationship. (“Hypnosis and Human Development: Interpersonal Influence of Intrapersonal Processes,” pp. 262-263, emphasis added) To control communication is to hold sway over what is important, over how to define reality. The effect of holding sway is revealed in hypnosis, where if the hypnotist’s topic of regard is accepted, the world is so cleaved. (Ibid., p. 263)

Many people have wondered how it is that followers of Donald Trump disregard facts, logic, and even common sense. Why do they substitute his version of reality for what can be easily disproved or debunked? Though it may be improper to suggest that Trump is putting his followers into a hypnotic state (i.e., a trance), it is clear that they do permit Trump to “define reality” and to “cleave” their world; and he does this exclusively through the medium of words. This is why it is instructive to look to hypnosis as a model of how this communicative process may work.

It may also be helpful to view hypnosis not as an “on/off” phenomenon but rather as a dimmer switch, whereby followers when influenced are, at one end of a spectrum, somewhat affected, all the way to fanatical and fervent at the other, where they accept any and all things that Trump says as infallible and sacrosanct.

Also note that not all hypnosis is tranquilizing. At least one type, fractionation, is known to stimulate the system. It creates stress in the body via the sympathetic nervous system (via an increased cardiovascular response), without evoking a sense of relaxation or “going under.”

Vandenberg continued:

Hypnosis demonstrates, dramatically, that it is possible to convince individuals to abandon core beliefs and adopt radically new ones—often in a very short period of time. Hypnosis is a test tube experiment of the process of inculcating beliefs. It reveals that individuals can allow themselves to come under the influence of another who orients their attention, organizes their experience, and lends authority to a particular vision of reality. This is accomplished by carefully orchestrating communications, expectations and demands and by establishing uncritical trust, which offers a secure base for confidently investing in novel suggestions. The specific phrasing of the suggestions is essential, as are the metacommunicative messages about how the suggestions are to be understood. Social exchange involves multilayered communications; hypnosis exploits this by strategically managing what is said, how it is said, when it is said, and where it is said[.] (Ibid., p. 264, with additional paragraph spacing)

Hypnosis gives us a structure by which we can view, as through a prism, how radical and unusual ideas, often diametrically opposite of what a person held previously, may be taken up and absorbed as newly held, newly stubborn beliefs.

The main difference between what we see in a therapist’s office (with the patient temporarily “put under” and then brought back to awareness) and what we witness with regards to radicalization is that the pressure to substitute beliefs and to place absolute trust in the person inculcating these beliefs extends over a longer period of time. It is a slow burn.

Joost Meerloo, a psychoanalyst writing in the middle of the 20th century, mentioned this type of influence in the political context:

The process of brainwashing and political mental coercion can be explained as a strategic, slow hypnosis, aimed at breaking the will and personal convictions of the victim. In such a state of dependency a man can become a traitor to his own system of values, for inadvertently he has taken over the values of his inquisitor and political suggestor. (Meerloo, “Some Dangers of Hypnosis and Mass-Hypnosis,” p. 363)

This breaking is slower than clinical hypnosis, but it is noticeably quicker than what normally happens when a person reevaluates and chooses to discard elements of a long-held belief system. Taylor, in Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control (2004), asked us to consider the following:

Beliefs and personalities change continually as people grow. My belief about the existence of Santa Claus is now diametrically opposed to the belief I had when I was young. Was I brainwashed by the adult world? No. I simply grew up, gradually accepting along the way that there was no such person as Santa Claus. But consider my friend Keith’s extraordinarily strong belief in Christianity. If Keith were to vanish for a month and then reappear a fervent atheist I would suspect that someone had been exerting undue influence, whereas if I hadn’t seen Keith for ten years I would be much more likely to attribute the lapse to natural causes. In other words, the shorter the time of transition—between old and new beliefs—the more likely that some form of brainwashing has occurred. (pp. 15-16)

So speed—the rapidity of change—is a factor, as is the rigidity, the fixity, of that change.

Absorption, along with imaginative involvement and mental imagery, is recognized as a fundamental aspect of the hypnotic experience. Noting the similarities between hypnotizability and a specific form of diminished ability to sense one’s own emotions, Fred Frankel and colleagues defined absorption:

Absorption is interpreted as a disposition for having episodes of ‘total’ attention that fully engage one’s perceptual, imaginative and ideational resources. This kind of attentional functioning is believed to result in a heightened sense of the reality of the object attended to, imperviousness to distracting events, and an altered sense of reality in general, including an empathically altered sense of self. In the study by Tellegen and Atkinson[,] absorption was consistently correlated with hypnotizability. This kind of attentional functioning depends upon rich fantasies that can endure, that become indistinguishable from reality, and that withstand the demands of logic. (Frankel et al., “The Relationship Between Hypnotizability and Alexithymia,” p. 173, with additional paragraph spacing)

When one reads of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s description of fanatics captured by fascism, that they are stupid—in a stupor, unreachable and impervious to reality—the passage recalls what is delineated above: a person with resilient fantasies that cannot be reproached by argument because those fantasies have risen to a level that the person holds as equivalent of that of reality. (“Fixed, false beliefs undeterred by disconfirming evidence,” as it stands, is the textbook definition of delusion.)

Frankel and colleagues furthered their description:

We understand that in addition to the essential and varying ability to distort perception by means of engaging the attention in imaginative fantasy, hypnotizable subjects are willing, to a varying extent, to become emotionally involved in the experience, and seem, also, to relate to the hypnotist with a varying degree of trust associated with near magical expectations. Hypnotic behavior is also marked by an ability to tolerate illogic in a most dramatic way, and can often be associated with memory changes, namely, either hypermnesia or amnesia. (Ibid., p. 176)

In eight short years, we have witnessed these followers call to mind most vividly how much they love and trust Trump, and forget how much they love America. When Trump tasks these people to “make America great again,” he’s tampering with their recall process, contaminating their memories by asking them to remember a time that never really existed. As a result, those supporters project backwards an idealized version of their past, thus creating exactly what is required for fascism to work: the grand myth of a glorious past that justifies sacrifice today for a utopian future. As Erich Fromm, in Escape from Freedom (1941), informed us (p. 193), “The authoritarian character worships the past. What has been, will eternally be.”

This manipulation of time is central to fascism’s mechanisms, accomplished by drawing upon nostalgia and other forms of worship of the past in order to turn people’s attention away from the present moment. Such a maneuver of time regression parallels that state which is brought on by suggestions of the therapist (meant to coax the recipient of the words to cooperate with the communicative strategy and send them into such a state of backward vision).

When Trump’s followers ride the lilt and cadence (or, more often lately, the rough, disjointed roller-coaster jerks) of his rhetorical oratory, they may to varying degrees permit those words entrance, thus allowing a transfer to occur. This process—a transfer of trust and agency—is effected by this very particular communicative strategy, this asymmetrical relationship between Donald Trump (the speaker) and his audience (the receivers).

Much could be said about the inherent relationship between speaker and receiver, but one thing I would note at this point would be the structure of the aural / oral relationship and the types of signals that are sent. The relationship is one-way: top-down and unidirectional. The lines of communication are such that Trump enjoys being the focal point of attention, while his audience plays a decidedly passive role. The structure recalls that which illustrated how radio worked in the early 20th century, where the announcer broadcast to an unseen throng and those persons were pure listeners, not able to send any signals back to the speaker. The design could be drawn like this:

This is a powerful asymmetry, whereby Trump as speaker holds tremendous sway over his audience’s imaginative resources. The audience members, in contrast, have very little ability to participate in this relationship; thus they are awash in any and all of the words that Trump decides to pour over them. They are immersed in whatever picture he paints of reality, much as listeners at home would find themselves in the storylines of Perry Mason or War of the Worlds.

Returning to the attribute of absorption, Auke Tellegen and Gilbert Atkinson (1974) expanded the definition, stating that it references “episodes of a special attentional object relationship which can be described by such terms as ‘absorption’ and ‘fascination’”:

These terms suggest the state of “total attention” during which the available representational apparatus seems to be entirely dedicated to experiencing and modeling the attentional object, be it a landscape, a human being, a sound, a remembered incident, or an aspect of one’s self. (Tellegen & Atkinson, “Openness to absorbing and self-altering experiences (‘absorption’), a trait related to hypnotic susceptibility,” pp. 273-274)

That Tellegen and Atkinson noted that a human being may be at the center of this total attention is instructive, as it links the types of mechanisms involved in hypnosis to what we see with the adoration and veneration that Trump’s followers bestow upon him.

Indeed, this “aspect of one’s self” can be transferred. A classic psychological mechanism, transference is “a patient’s displacement or projection onto the analyst of those unconscious feelings and wishes originally directed toward important individuals, such as parents, in the patient’s childhood” (American Psychological Association Dictionary). Recall that, earlier, we spoke of Freud abandoning the practice of hypnosis and thereby discovering the process of transference. It would appear that the two have an intrinsic, though indirect, link.

Moreover,

“Objects of absorbed attention acquire an importance and intimacy that are normally reserved for the self and may, therefore, acquire a temporary self-like quality. These object identifications have mystical overtones.” (Tellegen and Atkinson, op. cit., p. 275)

This explains the crowd fascination with Trump, who in this case is an attentional object. The members of the crowd identify him with themselves while in this state of total absorption. Trump assumes a level internally as that of the self for these people, becoming for the time something akin to a little Trump conscience.

The adoration those people feel is what allows for such a fusional relationship. Ines Schindler (2014) spoke of adoration and the type of relationship it engenders:

Adherents perceive adored others as superhuman or sacred. The other embodies an ideal state of being that is forever out of ordinary people’s reach, but that these people would like to share in and benefit from. The only way to accomplish this is to please or to unite with the adored other. The central action tendencies of adoration are to seek to establish a relationship with the other (if only in thought), to make him or her a part of one’s identity, and to adopt the ideals, values, and meanings which are transferred by the other. (Schindler, “Relations of admiration and adoration with other emotions and well-being,” p. 2)

The crowd applies this transference in a very particular way. As Viola Bernstein (1979) described:

The leader has the role of idealized object and the function of protecting the group members from loss of self-esteem . . . . The leader functions as a self-object to the narcissist and borderline patient, as well as some of the members of the group. This is narcissistic transference-like activity, using fellow members or the leader as part of one’s own Self or structure.” (Bernstein, “Narcissism: A Theoretical Overview and Brief Application to Group Therapy,” pp. 100-101)

The idea of the leader as a self-object also occurs in Daniel Kriegman and Leonard Solomon’s outline of the inner workings of a cult structure. Touching upon the theory of narcissistic personality disorder, they hypothesized that this specific subgroup of persons,

because of early traumatic disappointments in one or both parents, have not optimally internalized their selfobjects and thus suffer from structural defects in their personalities. In adult life they attempt to remedy these defects in structure by seeking out new idealized objects with which to merge and complete the self. This yearning to merge with a powerful figure has its origins in a developmental "fixation on the omnipotent object.” (Kriegman & Solomon, “Cult Groups and the Narcissistic Personality: The Offer to Heal Defects in the Self,” pp. 241-242, paragraph spacing added)

They added:

The parallels between the particular type of transference which develops during the clinical treatment of narcissistic personality disorders and the idealization of the cult leader are so striking that when one reads [Heinz] Kohut's descriptions of the "idealizing transference" it seems as though he might be describing the typical relationship between a cult member and his leader[.] (Kriegman & Solomon, ibid, pp. 241-242)

This is one way in which Donald Trump functions as a cult leader—precisely due to his function as a self-object for these audience members. In occupying this role, Trump is able to receive the transference from the audience members via this special communicative relationship, thereby effecting his particular form of persuasion upon them. This band of communication mimics or approximates hypnosis so as to be a close cousin of it, if not functionally the same thing.

So it would seem that followers of Trump—those in his cult of personality—become absorbed in him and utilize his person as an object of fascination. The representation of Trump in the true believer’s mind would be all-encompassing, not allowing for caveats such as, “Trump is a well-known actor” or “It has been shown that Trump has uttered at least 30,000 lies.” None of those course-correcting statements would have room to exist alongside the full representation of Trump in the engrossed, absorbed mind.

Trump, narcissist that he is, offers himself up as a self-object to these people. These people take him up as a self-object, thus projecting back to Trump a new level and a new source of narcissistic supply. This is a key-in-lock feedforward process.

The ego-expansion and self-aggrandizement that the follower experiences as a result of taking such a bottomless narcissist as a self-object could mean that this enlargement is experienced as a bodily state and, as such, it could not be refuted. But also that aggrandizement could be felt somatically as an ecstasy due to this inter-identification, possibly as a dopamine or oxytocin rush. This literally could be narcotizing.

So what does this mean? Does this mean that Trump is somehow magical? Not in the conventional sense. But it may mean that he seems to have such power over his followers because they imbue him with such power and expectations. They trust him implicitly; they give him a part of themselves that they see reflected back ten-, perhaps a hundred-fold. And it’s in this alchemy that the dynamism occurs between leader and follower, one where both parties benefit from the exchange. The followers get to meld into a figure they consider to be all-powerful and worthy of admiration, because the leader, so invested, mirrors this back to them. This registers as infatuation.

References

Viola Furst Bernstein, “Narcissism: A Theoretical Overview and Brief Application to Group Therapy,” Group (1979), Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 99-105.

Hadley Cantril and Gordon W. Allport, The Psychology of Radio (1935). Harper & Brothers. Reprinted 1971 by Arno Press, Inc., New York. (Figure II found on page 12.)

Leon Chertok, “Relation and Influence,” American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis (1986), Vol. 29, No. 1, pp. 13-22.

Fred H. Frankel et al., “The Relationship Between Hypnotizability and Alexithymia,” Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics (1977), Vol. 28, No. 1 / 4, pp. 172-178.

Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1922/1959). James Strachey, translator and editor. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York.

Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (1941). Avon Books, New York.

Daniel Kriegman and Leonard Solomon, “Cult Groups and the Narcissistic Personality: The Offer to Heal Defects in the Self,” International Journal of Group Psychotherapy (1985), pp. 239-261.

Joost Meerloo, “Some Dangers of Hypnosis and Mass-Hypnosis,” Acta Psychotherapeutica et Psychosomatica (1962), Vol. 10, Iss. 5, pp. 361-371.

Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1942/1970). Mary Higgins, editor. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York.

Ines Schindler, “Relations of admiration and adoration with other emotions and well-being,” Psychology of Well-Being (2014), Vol. 4, No. 14, pp. 1-23.

Kathleen Taylor, Brainwashing: The science of thought control (2004). Oxford University Press, Oxford, Great Britain.

Kathleen Taylor, Cruelty: Human Evil and the Human Brain (2009). Oxford University Press Inc., New York.

Auke Tellegen & Gilbert Atkinson, “Openness to absorbing and self-altering experiences (‘absorption’), a trait related to hypnotic susceptibility,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology (1974), Vol. 83, No. 3, pp. 268-277.

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