Barry Richards - The Psychology of Politics-Routledge (2019)

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF POLITICS
How do some political leaders capture popular support? What is the

appeal of belonging to a nation? Can democracy thrive?
The Psychology of Politics explores how the emotions which underpin
everyday life are also vital in what happens on the political stage. It
draws on psychoanalytic ideas to show how fear and passion shape the
political sphere in our changing societies and cultures, and examines
topical social issues and events including Brexit, the changing nature
of democracy, activism, and Trump in America.
In a changing global political climate, The Psychology of Politics shows
us how we can make sense of what drives human conduct in relation
to political ideas and action.
Barry Richards is Professor of Political Psychology in the Faculty of

Media and Communication at Bournemouth University.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF EVERYTHING
People are fascinated by psychology, and what makes humans tick.

Why do we think and behave the way we do? We’ve all met armchair
psychologists claiming to have the answers, and people that ask if
psychologists can tell what they’re thinking. The Psychology of Everything
is a series of books which debunk the popular myths and pseudo-
science surrounding some of life’s biggest questions.
The series explores the hidden psychological factors that drive us,
from our subconscious desires and aversions, to our natural social
instincts. Absorbing, informative, and always intriguing, each book
is written by an expert in the field, examining how research-based
knowledge compares with popular wisdom, and showing how
psychology can truly enrich our understanding of modern life.
Applying a psychological lens to an array of topics and contemporary
concerns – from sex, to fashion, to conspiracy theories – The Psychology
of Everything will make you look at everything in a new way.
Titles in the series:

The Psychology of Grief The Psychology of Conspiracy
Richard Gross Theories
Jan-Willem van Prooijen
The Psychology of Sex
Meg-John Barker The Psychology of Addiction
Jenny Svanberg
The Psychology of Dieting
Jane Ogden The Psychology of Fashion
Carolyn Mair
The Psychology of
Performance The Psychology of Gardening
Stewart T. Cotterill Harriet Gross
The Psychology of Trust The Psychology of Gender
Ken J. Rotenberg Gary Wood
The Psychology of Working The Psychology of Climate
Life Change
Toon W. Taris Geoffrey Beattie and Laura McGuire
The Psychology of Vampires The Psychology of Celebrity
David Cohen Gayle Stever
The Psychology of Chess The Psychology of Dog
Fernand Gobet Ownership
The Psychology of Music Craig Roberts and Theresa Barlow
Susan Hallam The Psychology of Social
The Psychology of Weather Media
Trevor Harley Ciarán Mc Mahon
The Psychology of Driving The Psychology of Happiness

Graham J. Hole Peter Warr
The Psychology of Retirement The Psychology of Politics

Doreen Rosenthal and Susan M. Moore Barry Richards
The Psychology of School The Psychology of the
Bullying Paranormal
Peter Smith David Groome
For further information about this series please visit

www.thepsychologyofeverything.co.uk
THE
PSYCHOLOGY
OF POLITICS
BARRY RICHARDS
First published 2019
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
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© 2019 Barry Richards
The right of Barry Richards to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
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explanation without intent to infringe.
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CONTENTS
1 The heart of politics 1
2 Leaders 23
3 Nations 45
4 Ideologies 65
5 Prospects 87
Further reading 95
Notes97
References101
1
THE HEART OF POLITICS
The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing.

(Blaise Pascal, Thoughts, 1670)
OUR PSYCHOLOGICAL ERA

By the end of the last century, it had become clear that, in many
countries around the world, we were living in a psychological era.
Psychology had become one of the most popular subject choices
amongst university students, and it had become normal in many the-
atres of everyday life to take an interest in psychological issues. What
is this person feeling? Why is that person behaving like that? How
are we affected by different sorts of experience? Can people really
change themselves? Not everyone thinks that the trend towards ask-
ing such questions is a good thing, and indeed it is not always done
in good ways. We will touch on some of the current debates later in
the book. But overall, there are many reasons to welcome this major
shift in our culture, which we can see as laying the basis for growth
in our collective reserves of self-understanding, sensitivity, resilience
and – above all – concern for others. We will use the term emotional
capital to refer to these shared assets, which are of great importance to
the future of our societies.
2 The heart of politics
Yet despite the growing influence of psychology in education,

in some professions and in popular culture, it has had little impact
on politics – on how we understand politics, let alone on political
practices. The turn to psychology is happening differently in differ-
ent areas of life. It happened very quickly in some areas of popular
culture, where there were pre-existing preoccupations with romantic
love and family life. In politics, however, we may readily assume that
economic interests and military strength are the ultimate forces at
work, and that they leave little room for our psychologies to influence
events. Also, amongst academics and other intellectuals, the desire to
hold on to un-psychological explanations of human behaviour has
been particularly strong when it comes to politics.
Take, for example, the idea that our voting choices are primarily
based on the state of the economy, and so are determined by our cal
culations of which party or candidate would be best for our individ-
ual economic self-interest: ‘Under which party would I be best off?’
This model of the citizen as a rational homo economicus may sometimes
capture one element in the mix of factors determining some people’s
electoral decisions, but it is of no use as a theory of how democracy
works psychologically.1 Other broader models of the individual, which
weigh up more complex issues than economic self-interest, may still
rely on an underlying conception of the citizen as a fundamentally
rational agent, untroubled by any tumult of feeling. This rationalistic
approach cannot dig deeper into the emotions which are often fun
damental to voting choices, and to other political behaviours, and
which need to be understood psychologically. Despite the growing
interest in emotion across the social sciences in recent decades, the
continuing influence of the old philosophical tradition of rational
ism has slowed the development of a fully psychological approach
to understanding politics, inside and outside academia. We remain
impressed by the certainty of ‘It’s the economy, stupid’.
One reason for this is the disturbing uncertainty of where we
might end up if we were to open the door of politics to psychology –
to open it so fully that we might then see the ostensibly hard-
headed business of politics as a maelstrom of passion and fear. The
The heart of politics 3
hyper-rationalist self needs to feel that it knows itself, and a psychol-

ogy which challenges the claim to self-knowledge will probably be
unwelcome, especially if it focusses on the more difficult aspects of
human nature. This book argues that there are reasons to be more
optimistic about human nature than many people are at present, but
also that there are destructive forces in our internal worlds which
our societies often do not manage well, and which in fact they often
amplify.
We also discuss how a psychological understanding of politics
must get away from any idea that there is a clear separation between
mental health and mental malaise. There are sensitivities today around
using the diagnostic terms of psychiatry, and the general language
of psychopathology, to refer to conditions of distress and dysfunction,
since such language is held by its critics to stigmatise the people to
whom it is applied, and to medicalise what are actually ‘problems in
living’,2 usually with social causes. The whole field of mental health
is still bedevilled by its capture by medicine in the nineteenth century.
Notwithstanding the excellent work that many psychiatric profes-
sionals do in supporting and caring for people with mental health
difficulties, the basic idea that mental health problems can be seen
as equivalent to physical illnesses is seriously unhelpful. What psy-
chiatric language suggests are discrete disease entities or structural
deformities of the mind (e.g. ‘paranoid psychosis’ or ‘borderline per-
sonality disorder’) are actually the consequences in an individual of
the complex psychosocial processes that constitute living in a society.
However, while it is absolutely right and necessary to stress the
basic continuity and sameness between those described as ‘mentally
ill’ and those who are officially not ‘ill’, this does not mean that psy-
chopathology is a fiction. Disturbed and perverse states of mind do
exist, and they bring damage to individuals and to society. The impor-
tant point for our purposes here is to note that when we have to use
terms such as ‘narcissistic’, ‘psychotic’ and so on (which we do across
many areas of political psychology), we are not trying to explain
something by seeing it as the result of a disease from which some
people suffer, and others don’t. We can explain what individual people
say or do (whether they are ordinary citizens or national leaders)

only by studying the particular lives they have lived in their contexts.
But we can describe the psychological qualities of what we all say or
do by using some of the terminology of psychopathology, as long as
we remember that the processes and states of mind we refer to are
found in all of us, as part of our make-up, and are not alien diseases.
Political psychology should have no hesitation in stating that
pathological states of mind can be mobilised in any of us, and that
mental health is therefore a political issue in the widest sense – not
as an area of policy that demands higher priority (though it is that),
but as something which is constitutive of the public and of society,
and therefore of politics. Actually, our collective mental health (our
emotional capital) is likely to determine the future of democracy.
Fortunately, a spirit of psychological enquiry is now growing in
relation to politics, partly owing to the continued spread of psycho-
logical awareness, but unfortunately also to adverse developments on
the world stage. We are now seeing a number of major phenomena
which clearly demand an understanding of their roots in the emo-
tional and irrational dimensions of human conduct. Some of these are
new, for example, the rise of global terrorism, and the de-stabilisation
of hitherto stable liberal democracies; others are re-emerging, or being
noticed more clearly, such as the proliferation of crudely authoritarian
regimes, and the damaging effects of poorly regulated markets. The
influence of the destructive, often self-destructive, sides of human
nature is now calling for our attention, whether we are specialist stu-
dents of politics or ordinary people trying to make a bit more sense
of the world in order to be less blind in our role as citizens, and to see
a little more of the prospects facing coming generations.
The psychology of politics is a growing specialism in academia,
and could be on the threshold of a step-change in the scope and influ-
ence of its contributions to political discourse. This short book is an
attempt to formulate an approach to understanding the psychology of
politics which focusses on the emotional and unconscious drivers of
human conduct. In doing so, it draws heavily on ideas from the psy-
choanalytic tradition, which more than any other school of thought
has tried to confront and understand the sources of destructiveness.
But this does not take us entirely into a world of darkness, because
in looking deeply into the psyche we will also encounter the deep
roots of the capacities for empathy, concern and generosity. And those
positive capacities are as emotional and as ‘irrational’ (at least in a
narrow sense of ‘rationality’) as are the impulses towards destruction.
So, as the seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal had
suggested in the now often-quoted line from his posthumous work
‘Thoughts’, we need to come out of the falsely dichotomised world of
early modern philosophy in which rationality, intellect and progress
stand on one side, with irrationality, emotion and backwardness on
the other. Psychoanalysis transcends that dichotomy, and it enables
us to see that the question is not whether reason or emotion is the
driver, since both are always involved, but what kinds of emotion are
involved, and therefore to which purposes reason is put.
THINKING PSYCHOSOCIALLY
The psychology of politics is basically the same as the psychology of
anything else. Our experiences and actions in the political domain are
shaped by the same fundamental emotional needs and resources as
we find at the centre of our personal lives, and in our work and leisure
activities. Political psychology is therefore the study of how these
basic forces play out in the context of politics. In different contexts,
different parts of our selves come more into play, which is why psy-
chological inquiry should always be linked with a study of the social
context – the fundamental principle of psychosocial analysis, which this
book will hopefully illustrate. In political contexts, whether we are
voters, activists, leaders, or ordinary people just trying to decide what
we think and feel about the news, it is our selves as members of wider
communities which will be in the foreground. And these ‘citizen’
types of self may differ in some ways from one’s self as friend, partner,
parent, sibling, colleague and so on. Still, all our selves are rooted in
the psychological fundamentals which we all share.
In the approach to be taken throughout this book, these funda-
mentals will be seen as needs and resources – emotional needs for certain
kinds of experience and certain kinds of relationship, and emotional
resources for meeting life’s demands. This approach is based primarily

on contemporary psychoanalysis and its understanding of psycho-
logical development. Not all psychologists would take this approach,
because psychology is not a unified discipline. Its different schools
of thought can differ quite radically on important issues. The popular
idea that psychology is a ‘science’ may hide this disunity from public
view. We know that scientists within a discipline may argue, but we
expect them to speak the same broad language. Yet psychology is
actually a profusion of different languages.
Some academics in the field of ‘political psychology’ would not
regard this book as part of that field, because it does not speak in the
language of evidence that they use, which typically is a language of
quantitative analysis – of measuring aspects of our psychological lives
in numerical terms, and using statistical analyses of those numbers
to try and figure out what is going on in our minds. There are many
critiques of that approach, on the grounds that it too often seems
to come up with fairly obvious conclusions which we might have
reached anyway, and that it is rarely able to capture the depth and
complexity of our emotional and social lives. There are also critiques
of the qualitative approach to be taken here, with its psychoanalytic
focus on exploring states of mind using a theory of the unconscious,
and of how our minds develop and function under the influence of
unconscious processes. For some psychologists this is too reliant on
how the researcher chooses to interpret the words and actions of the
people under study.
It is not the purpose of this book to examine those debates,
though they are important. The aim here is to set out the basics of
a psychosocial and psychoanalytic approach to understanding the
psychological dimensions of politics. Even within the psychoanalytic
tradition, there are different views of what the key ideas are. The ones
I offer have a broad base in contemporary psychoanalytic thinking,
in the particular tradition of what is called ‘object relations’ theory.
This may seem an odd name, since this approach is very much about
us as persons not as ‘objects’ in the common sense of the word. The
reason for this phrase will become clear a little later in this chapter.
THE SAFETY PRINCIPLE

Our starting point is the proposition that there are two fundamental
needs which underlie all our psychologies: a need for safety and a
need for dignity. These needs lie at the heart of politics. The impor-
tance of the experience of safety is central to the tradition of think-
ing about psychological development known as attachment theory,
an offshoot of psychoanalysis initiated by the psychoanalyst John
Bowlby in the 1940s. His theory begins with the biological phe-
nomenon of hard-wired attachments between parents and infants
in all mammalian species, which normally ensures that the parents
are attentive to the young and that offspring stay close to parents.
This is necessary for species-preservation, given the helplessness and
vulnerability of the young. Possession of a ‘secure base’ is also crucial
for psychological development in humans, as it gives a platform for
exploration on which a capacity for independence can be built.
Bowlby (1988) observed that in human infants this built-in need
for attachment is not always adequately met by the infant’s caregivers,
with the result that a feeling of safety is not securely achieved. He
described several patterns of ‘insecure attachment’ which could
result, seen in different emotional and behavioural difficulties. These
are likely to leave their mark in the formation of adult personality.
Insecurities are therefore handed down the generations, as those with
a weaker inner belief in a secure base are less likely to be able to create
a sense of safety for their own children.
The sense of safety depends on trust in the environment – specifically
in the adult(s) who are the superpowers in the infant’s environment.
The centrality of trust in the first months of psychological develop-
ment was made clear by psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, who was one
of the originators of psychosocial thinking. In his book Childhood and
Society, first published in 1950, he saw resolving the ‘conflict of basic
trust versus basic mistrust’ as the ‘first task’ facing the baby and its
caregiver. He suggested that religions, with their faith in a benign
power, are institutional expressions of basic trust – though of course
they can also be seen as illusions of a trustworthy universe which
does not exist. Much more could be said about this, but for our
purposes here the point is that a measure of trust in its environment
is necessary for the infant to develop psychologically in a good-
enough way. Because of its total dependency on others, it must be
able to trust that others will meet its needs. Without that trust, it
would be continually exposed to panic and terror at the awareness
of its own helplessness.
The psychoanalyst Joseph Sandler (1987) suggested that the primary
principle governing mental life was the ‘safety principle’, according to
which securing an experience of safety is our overriding objective.This
is not the same as a ‘survival instinct’ with the simple goal of physical
safety, though it may include that. We are psychological creatures, so
the safety we need is a mental one, a feeling safe. The most fundamental
type of this kind of safety is feeling safe in one’s own mind. That
may seem like an odd suggestion: how could you not be ‘safe’ just
in your own mind? The answer is to be found in the sufferings of
mental disorder: the fears and panics of neurotic anxiety, the feelings
of internal deadness in depression, and the terrifying experiences of
disintegration in psychotic states of mind, show that we cannot take
the stability or integrity of our own minds for granted.
Psychoanalytic investigation of early psychological development
has suggested that our earliest experience as babies, before our
selves have achieved a substantial degree of integration, can easily
be dominated by a fear of falling apart, of annihilation. The best
antidote to such fear is the experience of being ‘recognised’ by
another person, that is of having your fears acknowledged, and
your self affirmed and accepted, by another. The provision of such
experiences for the human infant naturally falls to the infant’s main
carer(s). A leading figure in post-Freudian psychoanalysis, Donald
Winnicott, wrote extensively in the mid-twentieth century about
the role of the ‘ordinary, good-enough’ mother in attuning to her
baby’s needs and fears, from the mild to the overwhelming, and so
facilitating the development in the infant’s mind of a stable sense
of self inhabiting a reasonably supportive environment (see, for
example, Winnicott, 1988). Thus a basis is laid for the experience and
the expectation of safety. The work of the mother, and other primary
care-givers, in helping to create this vital sense of safety, was captured
in Winnicott’s concept of ‘holding’. In part this is a physical holding,
in an attentive and empathic way that enables an infant to feel safe
in the external world and in its own body, but it is more than that –
Winnicott talks of the ‘holding environment’.
Yet no caregivers, however loving and attuned, can provide perfect
and instant administration to the baby’s needs. No matter how devoted
the parent, there will be distracting demands on their attention, delays
in feeding or changing, interruptions and separations. There will be
pain and frustration. So there will be recurrent occasions for feeling
unsafe, for doubting that the world is trustworthy. One of the major
projects of psychoanalysis has been to explore this area of development
and its legacies in the adult mind. Insofar as a basic sense of safety
was established in infancy, this will be a resource that can contribute
to emotional well-being throughout life. But while the experience
of safety remains brittle or weak, or access to it is unreliable, the
individual may be vulnerable, or dysfunctional, perhaps at risk of
exploitation or manipulation by various promises of safety.
The connection here with politics is clear, especially in times when
even citizens of stable and lawful democracies have reason to feel
unsafe. So when political leaders strive to win the trust of the people,
they are entering territory where powerful and complex forces are at
work. Adult voters, trying to decide whom to trust, are judging what
they think they can see of the candidates, but are also unknowingly
comparing the candidates with their own buried memories or hopes
about what trustworthiness looks, sounds or feels like. We will explore
more of that later, but here we must stay for a little while longer in
this territory of difficult psychological theory, to meet some more of
the ideas which will be applied in subsequent chapters.
SPLIT WORLDS
There has been much psychoanalytic investigation of how infants
and young children deal with feeling unsafe, which has partly
10 T h e h e a r t o f p o l i t i c s
built on, and partly transformed, the foundations which the first
psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud laid for understanding the mind. This
work has produced a number of concepts describing the defences
which we employ in our minds to try to obliterate the unsafety, and
so avoid the anxiety associated with it. The most basic of these is
the process of splitting, in which all the objects of our experience (of
which people are of course the most important) are divided into
two categories, the absolutely ‘good’ and the absolutely ‘bad’. These
dramatically split objects of experience in the baby’s mind exemplify
what psychoanalysts call ‘unconscious phantasies’ – hidden internal
templates which shape our experience of the external world, and
determine its meaning for us. The rudimentary way of making sense
of the world by splitting it may to some extent be a spontaneous
feature of the infant mind – good = warm, satisfied, held, etc., while
bad = cold, hungry, alone, etc. Perhaps the polarity of good/bad is
its only way of ordering experience until it develops cognitively and
is able to make other and more complex discriminations.
But the lasting significance of splitting is in its power as an active
defence. It enables the infant – and later the adult – to find an object
of its experience which is entirely good, something in which it can
trust and in relation to which it therefore feels safe. Typically, this is an
image of the mother or primary caregiver, comprising only positive
elements of the infant’s experience of her. Those other sensations
and impressions of her which are associated with unsafety (via
negative experiences of pain, frustration or anxiety) are organised
into a separate object, the source of bad experience. In this way, our
inner world is structured by ambivalence. Our early experience of
the one reality outside us is split into two, so there is a good object,
which is loved, and a bad one, which is feared and hated. Both are
phantasies, though linked to elements of reality. Over time, this
duality of an idealised, perfect object and a denigrated, bad one will
be broken down by the cumulative effects of exposure to reality, by
experiences which demonstrate that there is actually just one person
out there who is the source of both types of experience. However, that
achievement depends on the infant having developed enough trust in
the goodness of the mother to be able to continue to trust her when

she is no longer experienced in a split, idealised way. If the ‘integrated
object’ is not experienced as fundamentally good and trustworthy, it
cannot be fully trusted, and so there will be a tendency to revert to
splitting and to seek safety in an idealised object.3
This may be as true of the adult as it is of the baby and young
child. We will be coming across many examples in politics of the
influence of split views of the world. The developmental shift to more
integrated perceptions occurs through the early years of development
in infancy and childhood, but is never complete and permanent. Even
when, as adults, we may feel we have become fully aware of the com-
plexity of the world, we can at an unconscious level be pulled towards
the safety to be found in the simplifications of splitting and the starkly
ambivalent, ‘schizoid’ state of mind it produces.
The development of the concept of the early, primitive defence
of splitting is one of the contributions of the Kleinian tradition in
psychoanalysis, based on the mid-twentieth century work in London
of the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein. A distinctive contribution of
this school is the emphasis it places on the destructive tendency in
human nature, which it sees as intrinsic to our make-up and not
as something which appears only in response to bad experience.
In this connection, Kleinians see splitting as typically operating in
conjunction with another defence, one which Freud identified but
which has been much elaborated in post-Freudian theory: the defence
of projection. This is the process whereby we imagine that some aspect
of ourselves which we find intolerable does not actually belong in
our internal world, but exists in somebody (or something) in the
external world. We project this quality out, onto some external object.
Thus an aggressive or destructive impulse felt to be in the self can
be projected outwards and experienced as being lodged out there,
where it is then felt to be a threat. This process is the basis of the
phobias, in which something in the external world becomes the focus
of irrational fear, and of states of mind we call paranoid, in which
there is felt to be an active threat to the self from outside itself. In
both cases the threat is actually within, and so projection is necessary
to preserve an experience of the individual’s mind as a safe place.4

We may also project outwards the idealised parts of the self, when we
need to create for ourselves an experience of someone in the external
world as ideal (as we may with a lover, or a leader).
Another major defence against terrifying unsafety, one which we
will frequently encounter in following chapters, is that of narcissism.
This is best pictured as a composite defence, resting on specific varia-
tions of splitting and projection. The splitting involved is not between
the good and bad elements of experience of objects that exist out-
side the self (such as good and bad mothers, good and bad leaders
or political parties), but between self and other, such that the self
is idealised while all negative qualities are located outside the self,
having been placed there by the evacuative work of projection. The
purpose of this is to experience the self as sufficient unto itself, and
therefore as invulnerable to the terrors of dependency on an untrust-
worthy other. This idealisation of the self is a far more complex and
deceptive phenomenon than the popular idea of narcissism as vanity
and egotistical self-regard. For example, narcissism as an unconscious
mindset can underlie an exterior personality which is apparently self-
deprecating and interested in other people. The narcissistic refusal to
acknowledge any need for others may be buried quite deeply in the
personality.
THE DIGNITY PRINCIPLE

This principle holds that another predominant psychological need is
for an experience of dignity. Psychoanalysis has had less to say directly
about dignity than about safety, and surprisingly nor has psychology
as a whole focussed much on this important dimension of human
experience, with the exception of the work of Evelin Lindner (2006)
and others on dignity and humiliation. Dignity and the related
concepts of respect and esteem have been discussed more in the
social sciences than in psychology, as in the works of the sociologist
Richard Sennett on ‘respect’ (2003), the sociologist and political
scientist Liah Greenfeld on dignity (as we will see in Chapter 3), and
the philosophers Axel Honneth on ‘recognition’ (1995) and Avishai

Margalit (1996) on ‘decency’. Margalit argues that a decent society
is one which does not humiliate any of its members. What follows is
a brief summary of a psychosocial view of dignity, drawing on the
same psychoanalytic perspective we used to consider safety.
While the need for safety can be linked to a universal, geneti-
cally coded imperative (albeit one that culture extends and refashions
in complex ways), the need for dignity may be more generated by
socio-historical forces. In the very broad context of modern soci-
ety, where ‘modern’ means all those societies in which the forces
of democracy and liberalism have shaped fundamental beliefs about
what and who we are, some notion of the free and responsible indi-
vidual has become a defining criterion of a good enough life. Conse-
quently the need for individuals to feel that they have some autonomy
and personal dignity in the world has sunk deeply into their psyches.
In societies with more collectivistic traditions, dignity may be more
defined by acceptance within the group, although the influence of
‘Western’ individualism seems to be increasingly global.
While the need for a sense of dignity, and the pain at its absence,
may be embedded in the societal context, when considered as an ele-
ment of psychological development it can be seen as an expression of
the universal need to be loved. Comfortably sustaining the experience
of dignity is difficult without some external confirmation, but the
capacity to feel a sense of dignity is fundamentally one of self-respect,
which in turn is built on an experience of the self as being of value,
and worthy of love. This is closely tied, like the safety principle, to our
starting situation of dependence. The situation of total dependence on
others is a threatening one, not only because physical survival may
be at stake but because it is one of helplessness in the face of others’
power. What prevents this early experience from being one of scar-
ring fear and humiliation is the infant’s experience of being loved,
and its creation from that of a core sense of itself as worthy of love.
So we arrive again at the emotional content of the earliest caring
relationships, and the development of trust – in the caring other, and
in the lovability value of the emerging self.
Under that influence, the humiliation of dependency can be

accepted, and emotional development can proceed without the bag-
gage of resentment or rage, and with a sense of being valued by
another, which is the platform for the sense of dignity. Paradoxically,
then, the acceptance of humiliation leads to a capacity for dignity.
In situations of reduced or absent trust, dependency is difficult to
experience as a tolerable condition, especially when the trust deficit
has led to the development of a narcissistic defence, under which any
acknowledgment, let alone toleration, of humiliating dependency is
impossible. It is therefore not surprising that we find many examples
(particularly in war and terrorism, as well as in some apolitical crime)
of actions driven by a sense of intolerable humiliation. There are also
many social contexts in which parenting practices throughout child-
hood can add a surplus of humiliation to the normal experience of
growing up. Parenting which is coloured by domineering or con-
temptuous ways of relating to the child, or which instils a sense of
shame about bodily functions or sexuality, may complicate or sabo-
tage the task of developing dignity.
INSIDE AND OUTSIDE: THE IDENTITY

BRIDGE
Many complications also beset the processes by which the capacity to
experience safety and dignity becomes established, and is then either
strengthened or eroded in later development and adult life. A psy-
chosocial approach would try to distinguish between ‘internal’ and
‘external’ factors determining the levels of both safety and dignity in
particular situations. External factors are those present in the current
environment, while internal factors are those brought to the situation
in the minds of the people under consideration – many of which
may be the product of earlier external forces. For example, a group
unhappy with its lot as a minority within a nation governed by mem-
bers of the majority group may feel both unsafe and lacking dignity.
A major external factor would be the extent to which the government
is actually threatening it or discriminating against it. Internal factors
might include a precarious sense of safety, or low standing levels

of personal dignity, such that some members of the group had low
thresholds for believing themselves to be threatened or excluded. This
might be the result of historical experience of threats or exclusion
(possibly even affecting the previous generation), or of other factors
more related to the culture of the minority group (e.g. authoritarian
family structures). Of course, the presence of internal factors does not
reduce the need for the external ones to change.
One concept which bridges between internal and external is that
of identity, which is increasingly important in political analysis not
only because of the rise of ‘identity politics’ but also because of its
use in psychosocial inquiry, as a link between inside and outside,
between who I feel I am and the social forces which have shaped me.
The concept began with Erik Erikson, for whom it was the confident
possession of a sense of inner coherence and continuity, acquired in
adolescence when the developing self seeks to locate itself in wider
society. Identity also links safety and dignity, since people seek dignity
in their social and cultural identities, while also finding some psy-
chological safety in the social belonging which an identity implies.
‘Identity’ is therefore a rich psychosocial concept which we can
use to examine both psychological and societal processes and how
they infuse each other. It also denotes a force in modern society which
is both very positive and potentially very destructive. Our predomi-
nant associations to the term tend to be positive; in Erikson’s initial
formulations, a strong identity is the precious acquisition of an indi-
vidual developmental process that has gone well. It implies a sense
of meaning in life, and of integration into society. It is the mark of
secure individual selfhood. A coherent and meaningful sense of per-
sonal identity is psychologically, and therefore societally, beneficial.
An important component of personal identity is derived from the
large social groups to which we belong and with which we identify –
the identifications we make with region or nation, religion or class,
political or lifestyle ‘tribe’. The Turkish-American psychoanalyst Vamik
Volkan, whose work (e.g. 2004) is foundational to the approach taken
in this book, argues that large group identity is a vital component of
the self – it is what he calls a core identity, which means that its stability
is of importance to the individual’s sense of well-being, even though
it is usually in the background of self-experience. The most important
large group identity for many people is national identity, though
active awareness of that is not a major feature of everyday life for
most people. Yet in his analyses of various national identities, Volkan
focusses more – inevitably perhaps given that his specialism has been
the understanding and resolution of conflict – on the regressive
potential of these large group identifications, and their role in the
creation and maintenance of conflicts. And generally, when social
scientists have turned to look at collective identities, they have often
found them to be at best mixed in their consequences. One of Volkan’s
many contributions has been to show how large group identities
become problematic when they are constructed or deployed defensively,
as a way of maintaining a sense of safety and/or dignity in response
to a crisis, loss or threat of some kind.
As well as its role in violent conflicts, the idea and the experience
of collective identity has functioned to support divisive and fragment-
ing political trends in recent years. While this is a complex area, and
benefits have come from ‘identity politics’ in the basic voice and dig-
nities it has brought to social groups which were hitherto effectively
excluded from the public sphere, a constant focus on sectional identi-
ties and interests can have a corrosive effect on democratic culture. If
a self-selected ‘identity’ is enough to merit a platform and proclaim
an agenda, then anyone can pile in and make demands. There is also
a telling irony in the way that the ‘identitarian’ movement of various
‘alt-right’ and anti-Islam groups in present-day Europe and the US
appears to have named itself after one of the signature concepts of
the 1968 generation of radicals, whose legacy of liberalism it sees as
deeply damaging and seeks to overturn.
The key point psychologically, however, is that defensive
mobilisations of large group identity (in which aggression is often
the chosen means of defence) do not arise spontaneously. They are
the result of threats to that identity, whether very real at political and
material levels, or very real in the shared phantasy life of the group.
In some cases, depending on the nature of the perceived threats, the

safety-related themes of territory and security may be the priority;
in others, it could be a dignity agenda of rights and equality which
is most prominent.
THE PSYCHO-CULTURAL CONTEXT AND

EMOTIONAL CAPITAL
It may be evident now what the emotional resources mentioned at
the start of this chapter are. Most of the discussion above has been
about the needs for safety and dignity, and the problems which arise
when those needs are not met. But it has implied that when they are
adequately met, especially in the course of early emotional develop-
ment, powerful emotional resources are created: individuals acquire
a strong internal sense of safety and reserves of confident dignity. And
there is a further, vital resource which is built on these and which
once established also acts to enhance the well-being of others, which
is the capacity held by individuals across a society to contain difficult
emotions, both in themselves and in others. We have partly intro-
duced this earlier, with reference to the concept of ‘holding’ used by
Donald Winnicott, but it is worth spelling it out more fully.
The capacity for containment is an important concept in psychothera-
peutic work and in the understanding of the relationships between
individuals and the organisations, communities and societies of
which they are a part. It refers to the process by which difficult feel-
ings such as anxiety, guilt, loss and anger can be managed most con-
structively for the individual concerned, and for others with whom
that person may be in contact. The feeling has to be acknowledged
rather than defensively denied or disowned, and it has to be tolerated
without recourse to any action or psychological manoeuvre which
would distract from or obliterate it. We learn this capacity for emo-
tional self-management very early in life, from the ways in which the
caregiver conveys an empathic recognition and soothing toleration of
the baby’s distress and anger. Anxious, depressed or distracted parents
may have trouble doing this well enough. Feelings which cannot
be faced and contained must then be dealt with using one of the
defence mechanisms which psychoanalysis has studied, two of which
have been mentioned above (splitting and projection), and others of
which will be described later. Defences are maladaptive and generate
problems both in an individual’s personal life and, when we deploy
them collectively, at organisational and societal levels.
These psychological resources of safety, dignity and containment
can be seen as the bases of the ‘emotional capital’ available in any
given society or community. The depth of these resources in a soci-
ety will depend on how much the adult individuals in that society
are in possession of them, which in turn will depend primarily on
what kind of growing up they experienced, how much it left them
able to feel safe, self-respecting and strong. A considerable burden in
trying to sustain emotional capital falls on the caring and therapeutic
professions who are charged with dealing with and trying to remedy
the consequences of damaged psychological development.5 Still, the
main factor will be how well the psycho-cultural make-up of a soci-
ety facilitates good emotional development, i.e. how the patterns of
family life, social relationships and everyday behaviours impact upon
the child’s development. In particular there is what we might call a
‘parental matrix’, comprising the cluster of primary caregivers (the
one, two or more people providing the main childcare, whether or
not they are actual parents) and their personalities, how they relate
to the baby/child, the situations of care, and the child’s experience
of it all. This matrix shapes what kind of people we are, how we
experience the world and feel about it, and therefore what levels of
emotional capital we can contribute to our society. Of course, societ-
ies are not homogeneous in this regard; there are huge variations in
emotional capital between families, let alone between different social
and cultural groups. But the overall levels of societal provision for
well-being, and cultural traditions, will affect every individual for
better or worse.
A society’s emotional resources will be especially called upon
when it is under stress or threat, as when a nation is in conflict with
another nation, or internally. Our emotional capital will influence
what kinds of outcome to a conflict we are able to imagine and to

accept. The basics of an in-depth psychological approach to violent
conflict can be described in relatively simple terms. It involves three
foci of exploration: how involvement in the conflict is an attempt
by its protagonists to meet their basic psychological needs for safety
and dignity; why these needs were not being met in more construc-
tive ways; and how they might be met in a process of negotiation
and conflict resolution. This basic approach is of equal relevance to
understanding many forms of political violence, from urban riots and
local wars of secession to genocides and large-scale regional conflicts.
It will be of more importance in some situations than others,
depending on factors such as how protracted the conflict has been
(and how much it has thereby sunk into the psyches of the peoples
involved), how central it is to the identities of the antagonists, and
how pressing the non-psychological issues are: is the existence of a
group at risk, will the outcome of the conflict have quick and major
impact on the health or safety of a community, or determine its
long-term wealth and welfare, and so on. Some ‘conflict’ situations
may be better called situations of ‘infliction’, because there has been
stark oppression of one group by another, typically involving routin-
ised violence. The ‘conflict’ emerges clearly on the world stage only
when the oppressed group finally takes up arms against the oppres-
sor group, perhaps with wide moral support from the international
community (subject to what form the violent resistance takes). In
such situations (for example, in apartheid-era South Africa, or the
ongoing displacement of Palestinians) the word ‘conflict’ may not
be the best descriptor, implying as it might do that there is basically
bilaterally equal responsibility for a situation which is based on the
fact that something has been inflicted on one party. It will probably
not be long, however, before the psychological damage caused to the
‘inflicted upon’ group will bring them to play their own part in cycles
of retaliatory and gratuitous violence.
Like other forms of capital, emotional capital can be deployed or
invested in different directions, depending on choices made at both
individual and institutional levels. After a terrorist attack, or a disaster
with fatalities, a lot of emotional effort may be invested in helping

those traumatised or bereaved, e.g. through professional counsellors,
community and volunteer initiatives, attentive media coverage, etc.
This might help some of those affected, and society as a whole, to
contain the emotional damage. But continuing terrorist attacks may
stretch the emotional resources to a point where the sense of loss and
of threat has become intolerable, and more defensive responses may
ensue. Or over time, perhaps over generations, the emotional capital
of a community may be depleted by persistent poverty and neglect,
eroding the sense of both safety and dignity, and the capacity to con-
tain. Many political problems can be seen as consequences of failures
of containment, just as approaches to dealing with them need to call
on the community’s emotional capital.
‘POPULISMS’: A KIND OF EMOTIONAL

INTELLIGENCE
It is not hard to see how the two principles of safety and dignity are
currently playing an important role in the politics of many coun-
tries. Political commentary in recent years has become full of talk
of ‘populist’ parties and leaders. In every continent there have been
examples of surges in popular support for candidates whose ideolo-
gies and manifestos focus on restoring both safety and dignity to their
national publics, and in some cases that support has been sufficient to
carry those making these promises into government. Donald Trump’s
signature campaign promise to build a wall on the Mexican border
offered a material symbolisation of safety, while the key slogan ‘Make
America Great Again’ is clearly a demand for the restoration of a lost
dignity. In Poland the name of the party currently in power echoes
the two principles. The Law and Justice Party offers safety in laws
defending traditional values (and in NATO), and claims dignity in
the reclamation of Poland’s Catholic heritage from the corruptions
of communism. The surprising British majority vote (albeit by a very
small margin) to leave the European Union appears to have been
driven by fears that the free movement of labour was making Britain
unsafe, and by a yearning for the dignity which some people felt they
had lost as Britain became a post-industrial and less cohesive society.
This link in populist rhetorics between the principles of safety
and dignity on the one hand, and culturally conservative and divisive
politics on the other, may lead some people to be suspicious of a psy-
chological approach which argues for the importance of those two
principles. Surely we don’t want politicians to be encouraging us to
be fearful and preoccupied with safety. Nor do we want them pump-
ing us up with unexamined pride. This is an important point, and
sometimes a complex one, and we will encounter it again in his book.
But the main point here is that politics has to address psychological
realities as much as it does military and economic ones. Just a few
decades ago, it would not have seemed likely that some ‘inconvenient
truths’ about environmental change would be contesting for priority
in political agendas. And in this psychological age, politics has to cope
with a further major expansion of its core agendas. The global spread
of democracy, the proliferation of media, and the rise of ‘soft power’,
have added the inconvenience and intransigence of the human psyche
to the list of political ineluctables.
Understanding what people feel, and why they feel it, is a core task
of politics. If the experiences of safety and dignity are basic needs,
then feelings of unsafety and of indignity will not melt away if they
are ignored, not even if there are attempts to distract those suffering
from them by pointing to other things which they should be glad of.
In the British referendum of 2016, the Remain campaign, concen-
trating solely on economic arguments, completely failed to address
those feelings. There was perhaps a failure to respond to the fact that
many people could not see how EU membership brought them any
economic benefit, but in any case this strategy could be described
as emotionally illiterate: it failed to read the emotions of the public,
which were such that for many people the economic arguments were
not the most important.
In contrast, a key feature of populist politics is its tendency to
home in precisely on feelings of unsafety and humiliation in sections
of the public. Although in itself this falls far short of what we might
properly call emotional intelligence, typically in its lack of empathy

for other sections of the public, its dogmatisms and its sentimentali-
ties, it could nonetheless be seen as having a degree of attunement to
public feeling lacking in many other forms of contemporary political
rhetoric.
THIS SHORT BOOK

In the chapters that follow we will consider how the two principles
of safety and dignity, and the other core concepts of containment,
defences, identity and narcissism, can be applied to three key topics:
leaders, nations, and ideologies. The selection of these three areas
reflects both their fundamental status in human society and also their
particular prominence in contemporary politics. Still, it may seem like
an old-fashioned list: what about social movements, climate change
and the environment, the impact of social media on politics, etc.?
These indeed are important topics, and there are others. Yet they all
exist in a world in which we have leaders, we are citizens of nations,
and we live in societies shaped by different ideas and values. Also, this
is a short book, and much material that is fundamental and topical
is not covered here. There are many sites at which we can work on
understanding the connections between the great power and com-
plexity of globalised political forces on the one hand, and the intri-
cacies of the individual ‘heart’ and its development on the other. But
hopefully those readers who find the broadly psychosocial, ‘object-
relations’ approach presented here to be interesting will take away
some ideas for thinking about the emotional heart of any area of
politics.
2
LEADERS
RAGE AND RETRIBUTION

You bleed for those sons of a bitch. How many? Three thousand? I will
kill more if only to get rid of drugs.1
When I say, ‘I will kill you if you destroy my country’, and ‘I will kill
you if you destroy the young of my country’, I am asking everybody to
find me a fault in those two statements.2
If I make it to the presidential palace I will do just what I did as mayor.
You drug pushers, holdup men, and do-nothings, you better get out
because I’ll kill you.3
These are statements made during a successful campaign in 2016 by

a candidate for election to the presidency of a country of more than
100 million people. Rodrigo Duterte is a middle-class, university-
educated career politician, currently president of the Philippines, who
was explaining his strategy for tackling the country’s major drugs
problem. He is an extreme example of a politician, well-known for
the violence and misogyny of his language, but is head of state in one
of the world’s largest democracies. Later in this chapter we will dis-
cuss what responsibility leaders have for the climate of feeling in their
countries – in this example, why is the rage about drug trafficking so
focussed on savage retribution? But first we must walk through some
more general ideas about, and analyses of, the dynamics of leadership.
24 L e a d e r s
AUTHORITY AND THE SUPEREGO

Leadership is a central issue in most aspects of human society, perhaps
most obviously so in areas such as organisational life and politics.
Yet it is one aspect of a wider and perhaps even deeper topic, that
of authority. Authority is at the centre of all human relationships,
including personal and intimate ones, because it is intrinsic to the
questions of how we conduct ourselves, and how we make deci-
sions; what rules we choose to follow, or to break; what standards we
seek to achieve, or to subvert; what we expect of people, including
ourselves. All such moral questions are at one level about authority,
because they are about which or whose rules and standards we relate
to, and about how we experience ourselves as moral agents able to
act on our own authority.
These are not only questions about which people we respect and
which codes we try to adhere to. They are also about a more subter-
ranean area of human life, in which forms of pre-verbal relating to
the world hold sway. These are laid down early in our psychological
development, when we learn who or what to trust, and what we have
to do to keep safe and to fit in with the world. In the technical lan-
guage of psychoanalysis, it is the area of early superego development.
The superego is that part of the mind in which the restraints and
rules of the culture are embedded, transferred from one generation of
superegos to the next (though with modifications along the way), and
which is therefore core to our development as civilised beings. Out of
the ‘parental matrix’, which was described in Chapter 1, there emerges
a constellation of feelings and capacities in the developing person
which we can call their ‘superego’, and which define that per-
son’s relationships with authority. This includes their own sense of
personal authority, the capacity to make judgments and to act inde-
pendently. So the superego is deeply linked to the individual’s experi-
ence of both safety and dignity.
In the over-simplified versions of psychoanalysis sometimes found
in general psychology textbooks, the term ‘superego’ can mean much
the same as ‘conscience’. It is usually painted in severe terms, as a
Leaders 25
punitive enforcer causing much painful guilt. Undoubtedly, guilt is

a major source of pain, and the superego can in some persons be
capable of great cruelty. However it is important to see it as a much
broader and more complex region of the self, including not only fear-
ful images of a forbidding censor, but also impressions of authority as
caring and supportive. Indeed the capacity to feel guilt and remorse
will not develop authentically if driven by fear alone, and needs a
trusting and loving connection with whoever is doing the prohibit-
ing or commanding.
What does all this early psychology have to do with the psychol-
ogy of politics? The superego is a core part of the self which is not
only an internal regulator but is also a set of powerful templates,
deeply embedded in the adult mind and able to shape our experience
throughout life of people and organisations we encounter which in
one way or another represent authority to us. Our experiences of
these authorities will carry the stamp of that early parental matrix,
and any social institution or person carrying some meaning as a
source of authority will occupy a quasi-parental place in the life of
the adult citizen. Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean it will be
trusted or followed. As we saw in Chapter 1, there is much ambiva-
lence to be overcome in relationships with parents.
THE EXTERNALISED SUPEREGO

One of the earliest psychological theories of leadership is still a rich
source of understanding its dynamics. It was set out by Sigmund
Freud in his 1921 essay on group psychology. He noted that when
individuals inhabit a collective identity, they merge a part of them-
selves into that identity. The part in question is what Freud a little
later came to call the ‘superego’. His crucial observation was that
group members were often prepared to hand over their superego
functions, at least in part, to the leader of the group, and so were
prepared to act in ways that as individuals they would probably not
allow themselves. Group membership is therefore a reversal of the
process of emotional maturation. Having spent the years of growing
26 L e a d e r s
up in efforts to internalise restraint, and to build our own internal

capacity for self-regulation, we project that back out there, to some-
one (or something) in the external world, when we commit to a
group which is emotionally significant to us. In return for this loss
of full selfhood, of psychic autonomy, the individual can gain the
safety and the dignity of belonging to a group, under the protection
and blessing of its leader. This experience may however be illusory,
and so be a long-term threat to the well-being of the individual.
Moreover, there is another more obviously dangerous consequence
of this dynamic of group membership, in that group members may
find themselves acting on feelings or impulses which are destructive
or self-damaging.
There are many ways in which this dynamic can play out, with very
different consequences, depending on what feelings the group leader
is giving permission to group members to release, or what actions
the leader is demanding of the group. In criminal gang cultures, the
permission or demand may often be for violent behaviour. In bohe-
mian communes, it may be for promiscuity and other hedonistic
activities. In political parties or movements, it is a demand for belief
in what the organisation stands for, and for action to promote its
aims. The content of that demand will vary according to the ideology
involved. The demands may conceal permissions as well – to engage
in antagonistic behaviour, for example, perhaps even violence, or to
take yourself away from your relationships with family or friends.
As was noted in Chapter 1, we are more familiar with the nega-
tive versions of this phenomenon. Freud’s model of group dynam-
ics has influenced many attempts to explain the rise of Nazism and
the Holocaust. Indeed, a general implication of the model is that
group membership is intrinsically a form of diminished selfhood, a
condition into which people with less integrated superegos (i.e. less
psychic maturity) are more likely to fall. Freud was influenced by
the rise of totalitarianism, in response to which he and many other
intellectuals held a suspicion of the collective and an idealisation of
the autonomous, fully self-possessed individual who would be less
vulnerable to the seductions of leaders.
Leaders 27
However, developments in psychoanalytic thinking since Freud

about the superego and about groups enable us to expand his model
such that we can see leader-follower or leader-public relationships in
terms of a wide range of possibilities. Our perceptions of and feelings
about leaders may be the result of various aspects of the self being pro-
jected onto them, with different elements in leaders’ personalities acting
as the hook or target for those projections. So to an important degree,
we create our leaders through projection. But a leader must be willing
and able to inhabit and to own the projected feelings and identities.
What about the leaders themselves? The choice to become a politi-
cal leader may, in the person’s internal unconscious, be an attempt
to inhabit a superego role in the external world. At its worst, this
might mean gaining the power to inflict on others whatever punish-
ments the person feels they have been threatened with by their own
superego. (Our discussion of terrorism in Chapter 4 will explore that
scenario.) At its best, it might mean the leader becoming a benign
and protective authority, thereby either reproducing their own good
developmental experiences of superego figures, or filling a gap in
their personal development. Justin Frank’s (2012) psychoanalytic
study of Barack Obama links both merits and flaws in his leadership
style to – amongst other factors – his early loss of a father. His parents
separated when he was one, and his father moved away. In later life,
including in his role as president, Obama sought to be the father he
had missed while also being very ambivalent in his relationship with
his internal image of father.
There are a number of ‘psychobiographies’ of leaders which
try to trace their emotional development and its shaping of their
adult characters, and to examine the fit (or sometimes the lack of
fit) between the person and the office occupied, with its political
demands and opportunities to respond to the emotional profile of
the public. Some recent American presidents have been the subject
of interesting psychobiographies; as well as Frank’s study of Obama,
and an earlier one by him of George W. Bush, there is also one by
Vamik Volkan on Richard Nixon’s very difficult childhood and his
subsequent narcissism and self-destructiveness (Volkan et al., 1997).
28 L e a d e r s
In the rest of this chapter we will however focus more on the ‘fol-
lowership’ side of leadership. We will consider how broad changes in
society have affected leadership styles, by modifying what we want
and need to see in leaders. These changes bring the psychological
dimensions of leader-follower relations more into focus. We will dis-
cuss the question of whether leaders are made in the image of their
followers, or vice versa. Then we will look at some examples of how
leaders respond to their public’s needs for safety and dignity, and of
what containment they can offer of the anxieties around those needs.
AMBIVALENCE TOWARDS AUTHORITY

Perhaps the most obvious form of authority in everyday life is that
of the law. The law is easily pictured both as an external superego in
both a patriarchal, punitive mode, as something designed to oppress
rather than protect us, and also as a fundamentally benign source of
collective strength and rectitude. There may be many specific situa-
tions in external reality which fit one or the other of these dichot-
omised images of a ‘good’ law and a ‘bad’ one. We may consume, in
rapid succession, media reports about the heroism of some police
officers and the corruption of others. An ‘official’ and widely shared
rhetoric about the goodness of the law and those employed to enforce
it exists alongside many narratives that assume the opposite. This cul-
tural ambivalence towards the law reflects the mixed nature of reality,
but also echoes the ambivalence towards parental authority which
is especially noticeable in adolescence and its oscillations between
needy dependence and resentful hostility.
The psychological basis of ambivalence towards authority, in the
process of development from infancy through adolescence, is pres-
ent in us all, though as individuals we are able to resolve it to varying
degrees, and express either or both sides of it in endlessly varying
ways. These will be strongly influenced by our social environments.
It seems that social media have hugely expanded the scope for public
expression of negative feelings about politicians, sometimes testing the
Leaders 29
legal proscription of hate speech. However there is reason to think

that expression of the negative side of the ambivalence was gaining
strength some decades before social media, due to a number of factors
but in particular the broad cultural trend over at least the last half cen-
tury of falling levels of trust in traditional institutions and professions,
and growing scepticism about some types of expertise. Politicians have
been especially affected by the weakening of deferential trust in their
integrity and competence. They are the least trusted profession in the
UK, according to IpsosMORI’s annual Veracity Index of 2017,4 which
reports that only 17% of the public trust them to tell the truth.
Globally, the overall picture of trust in politics is complex. Trust
in politicians is not quite the same as trust in government, and both
differ from trust in political institutions, so recorded levels of trust in
politics will depend on the questions asked. And as the 2018 Edelman
Trust Barometer shows,5 there are international year-by-year varia-
tions, with some countries such as Argentina, France and Germany
showing surprising increases in trust in government since 2012, with
fluctuations in between. So some positive attitudes towards authori-
ties remain, but negative ones towards politicians are probably on
a long-term rising trend, with some people becoming relentlessly
disparaging of them. To be cynical about politics (‘I don’t trust any
of them’) seems to have become for many people a criterion of basic
worldliness. Amongst other people, positive attitudes may be inflated
to the point of idealisation, in denial of a disappointing reality. If
we try to understand all this psychologically, we can see it as regres-
sive splitting, a difficulty in holding on to a complex, mixed view
of vital social institutions, instead retreating to the simplicities of a
black-and-white world. This may suggest that some erosion of our
general capacity to trust has occurred, a diminution of emotional
capital in society as a whole. In representative democracies, there
is obviously risk to the democratic process when attitudes towards
elected politicians are dominated by splitting and the negative side
of the ambivalence is becoming stronger, a situation facilitating the
rise of ‘populist’ leaders.
30 L e a d e r s
THE CHANGING STYLES OF LEADERSHIP:

INFORMAL, EMOTIONAL, PERSONAL
Another cultural trend of relevance to understanding the changing
dynamics of leader-follower relations has been called the informalisation
of everyday life (the sociologist Cas Wouters [2007] has led the way
in defining this trend). This refers to the fact that social formalities
and conventions, including those related to differences in status and
authority, no longer regulate social exchanges to the extent that they
used to. For example, dress codes are much more relaxed than they
were, and less indicative of rank. First name address is common even
across wide gaps in age and status. This trend may sometimes mislead
by obscuring the hierarchies that continue to exist, but overall must
surely be a positive development: it signals that respect should flow
‘down’ as well as ‘up’, it may reduce the timidity of younger or
more junior people, and it facilitates inclusiveness. It can reduce the
distance between politicians and the people, though politicians must
be careful in this area, since as they know, affecting an informality
which does not come naturally can make for bad publicity.
Informalisation is linked to two other broad cultural changes
which are impacting on political leadership: personalisation and
emotionalisation. Emotionalisation is a complex cultural phenomenon
which is linked to the rise of psychology we noted earlier. At its core
is an increase in emotional expressivity in everyday life, but amongst
many other things it also involves an increased popular interest in
emotional experience, and in the intimate lives of celebrities and
public figures. Leaders are now permitted a much wider range of
emotional expression than previously – in fact, this is now desired of
them. The changing leadership styles in a more emotionalised cul-
ture have been explored in Candida Yates’ study of British political
culture from the late 1990s to 2015. The public’s interest is partly
served by, and partly generates, media content in which politicians
are presented as emotional persons as well as, or even rather than,
the bearers of policies.
The trend to personalisation is therefore closely linked to emotionalisa-
tion.There has been a tendency amongst politicians and commentators
Leaders 31
in the more stable democracies to underplay the importance of lead-

ers. What matters, we have often been told, is policies not personali-
ties. It is as if an attraction to individual leaders sets us on a dangerous
path which could lead again to the horrors of twentieth-century fas-
cism. Yet this fear sits in a cultural environment in which there are
endless invitations in our media to experience and consider politicians
as persons, and to focus on the personalities of our leaders. Two devel-
opments have facilitated this personalisation of politics.
One is the process of ‘dealignment’ – the dissolution of the links
between socio-economic position and political affiliation. While in
the past the industrial working class could have been expected to vote
en masse for parties of the left, the dissolution of clear and stable class
structures has led to much more complex and unpredictable patters
of voting. Ideologies grounded in class identity have much weaker
influence, and the ‘Left-Right’ distinction can no longer organise the
diversity of political opinion. In this context, more space is avail-
able for the personal qualities of candidates to become important in
electoral choice.
The second is to be found in socio-technical developments in
media. The arrival of television in the 1950s and 1960s brought the
personal presence of politicians into everyday experience. The first
televised debate between presidential candidates in the US, between
John Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960, was seen as a turning
point in the campaign. Kennedy subsequently won the election by a
narrow margin, with many commentators and polls suggesting this
was due at least in part to his much more telegenic presence and
performance in the debate. The later rise of the web and of social
media, and of the global 24-hour news environment, have afforded
deeper audience involvement in many aspects of politics, with the
domain of emotional responses to politicians expanding and being
of focal interest for many people. There some negative sides to this.
The intensive visual presentation of leaders on television and online
can have distracting or trivialising effects on political debate, and it
may negatively affect the leadership prospects of very capable people
who do not have distinctive screen appeal.
32 L e a d e r s
However, while this is clearly a mixed development, we might wel-

come it as being more positive than sinister. It can help to sustain public
interest in politics, in times when the sterile ritualism of party competi-
tion and the remoteness of political elites has turned large numbers of
people away from it. What interests many people most is other people,
and what matters most are our relationships with other people. Pas-
sionately focussed though some people are on issues like the environ-
ment or human rights, productive emotional engagement with politics
is for many most likely to develop when it is somehow personalised.
This may come about through an issue being dramatised by the case
of an individual (say, stories of an individual migrant, CEO or terrorist
coming to represent the broad issues of migration, business governance
or terror), or through the media presence of an appealing leader (or
perhaps through an aversive response to an unappealing one).
Many members of the public have perhaps always ignored the
advice to stick to policies, and have instead been heavily influenced
by how they relate to leaders and aspiring leaders as people, even
though they mostly have only ‘para-social’ contact with them (i.e.
via the media) so that relating is based on impressions gained from
media content alone. Certainly, before the age of television some lead-
ers were acutely aware of their emotional impact on their followers,
and of how their personal character and its presentation was crucial
to their political support. Reflecting this, in the classic sociological
theory of charisma, academics have also registered the power of the
emotional tie between leader and follower. For the sociologist Max
Weber in 1919,6 the appeal of the charismatic leader rested on per-
sonal qualities, distinguishing that style of leadership from ‘tradi-
tional’ and ‘bureaucratic’ types, which were based on respect for roles
defined by custom and by law respectively (say, tribal elder or high
court judge) not on the emotional appeal of a person. Perhaps aca-
demic theory, which across the social sciences this century has been
undergoing a ‘turn to affect’, is only now just returning to Weber and
catching up with reality. Yet reality is also moving, and political lead-
ership is becoming more explicitly personalised and emotionalised,
as is culture as a whole.
Leaders 33
THE LEADERS WE DESERVE?

This focus on the emotional dynamics of leadership points to a way
of answering the old and fundamental question of whether – for bet-
ter or worse – we get the leaders we deserve. In societies with some
degree of functioning democracy it is hard to avoid the conclusion
that yes, we do – though in a limited sense, as we will see. While
the capacity of wealthy and influential elites to manipulate elections
through propaganda and other forms of influence, if not outright
corruption, should not be underestimated, voters usually have some
choice, and exercise it. On this view, leaders may articulate public
opinion, but do not radically shape it.
Insofar as we do exercise choice, it is not in the simple way that
rationalist models of democracy would have it. Rational and evidence-
based comparative analysis of policy alternatives on offer may play a
part amongst some voters, but ‘voter competence’ levels (how much
electorates know about the issues and can make rational, informed
judgments about them) are not high even in the most educated
societies. So recourse to an intuitive summary judgment of candidates
is common, and is likely to be heavily influenced by a voter’s emotional
responses to the candidates. As we’ve observed, their judgments
may be based on what voters project of themselves onto the public
personae of candidates, and therefore on how much they can identify
or feel a bond with one candidate more than others, or on how much
they are repulsed by a candidate onto whom they have projected some
very negative qualities. Or voters may be searching out the candidate
who they feel can best meet their needs to feel, say, more safe or more
respected. In these circumstances, the successful candidate may likely
be the one who, irrespective of competence and even of ideology,
has a public persona which best fits the emotional needs of a crucial
segment of the public.7 So we the public are choosing, albeit for what
may be largely unconscious reasons, the candidate whom we have
ourselves largely constructed. Some would see the role of the media
as crucial in that process of construction, although again there is a
debate to be had about whether we get the media we deserve. Do the
media simply articulate public emotion, or shape it?
34 L e a d e r s
LEADING BY EXAMPLE
Let’s continue to test the view that neither the media nor leaders
actually create their publics, but simply reflect them. Is this true at
moments of crisis, when there may be clear choices available to lead-
ers about how to lead? There are always different structures of feel-
ing8 present in the pool of public emotion, and at times of acute
disturbance and uncertainty when leaders are looked to for guidance
they may be able to choose which of these to express and support.
After a major terrorist attack, for example, there is grief, fear, rage and
resolve, and leaders’ choice of language in the aftermath shapes and
modulates some of these feelings more than others, with differing
consequences on a number of fronts, especially in relation to social
cohesion and to support for counter-terrorism policies. Two days after
77 terrorist murders in Oslo and on the island of Utoya in Norway
in July 2011, the then Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg in
a national memorial address spoke powerfully about the victims, and
then struck a remarkably positive note of optimistic resolve.
Amidst all this tragedy, I am proud to live in a country that has

managed to hold its head up high at a critical time. I have been
impressed by the dignity, compassion and resolve I have met. We
are a small country, but a proud people. We are still shocked by
what has happened, but we will never give up our values. Our
response is more democracy, more openness, and more human-
ity. But never naïvety. No one has said it better than the Labour
Youth League girl who was interviewed by CNN: ‘If one man can
create that much hate, you can only imagine how much love we
as a togetherness can create’.9
We can compare this with the quotations at the start of this chapter,
a few of the many statements made by the Rodrigo Duterte about
the ongoing crisis of massive drug use in his country, the Philip-
pines. The contrast between these two leaders demonstrates the fun-
damental role of public emotion in shaping leadership. Neither set
Leaders 35
of statements could conceivably have been made by a national leader

in the other country. So something about Norwegian culture and its
shaping of the psychology of the Norwegian public produced the
Stoltenberg statement, while making it impossible for the Duterte
statements to have been uttered in Norway. Nor could Duterte’s vio-
lence have been released amongst the Philippino public without
their substantial collusion. In fact, with his reputation and style as a
political leader already established from years as a mayor, he received
16.6 million votes, 39% of the votes cast, in his victory in the presi-
dential election of 2016.
However these examples also indicate the role of individual lead-
ers in giving voice to reserves of particular feeling at particular times.
There are politicians in Norway who after Utoya would have spoken
in a different tone from that adopted by Stoltenberg. While subscrib-
ing to the general horror at this atrocity, the anti-immigration Nor-
wegian Progress Party had a different version of the resolution not to
be led into losing its values: it affirmed the importance of retaining its
policy priorities. And of course there are many in the Philippines who
speak differently from Duterte on how to deal with the drug problem,
including Benigno Aquino III, who lost the presidency to Duterte.
Stoltenberg’s speech had a strong effect on the Norwegian public,
who rallied around his words, and his approval ratings improved
considerably. This was not a long-term effect, but the speech seemed
to play a major role in containing public feeling during a critical
period. However, the difficulty for national leaders is that national
publics are emotionally diverse, and finding an appropriate response
for all the feelings that may be present in the public at the time is an
impossible task. Still, good emotional governance requires as wide a
containing response as possible. The speech did not address the fear
and the rage which many Norwegians must have been feeling, even
if they did so against their better judgment. The Oslo/Utoya attack
was a major assault on the sense of safety, and on the dignity of Nor-
way as peaceable and cohesive country. The prime minister’s speech
tended to idealise the Norwegian public as extraordinarily resolute,
leaving little space for anything more complicated or ambivalent
36 L e a d e r s
to be expressed. It followed a claim that this was not naïve with a

statement that could be seen as naïve. All this may explain why its
unifying effect was short-lived. Most people urgently wanted to
regain the experience of safety and dignity, and Stoltenberg’s words
offered a noble way towards that. As such they offered some con-
tainment of the shock and anxiety, in modelling a composed and
resilient response. To speak at all at such a time must be extremely
hard, and this was a deeply felt and eloquent speech. It would be
unrealistic to expect one speech to give voice to all reactions to the
killings. In the longer run, however, a more variegated picture of
the Norwegian public would need to be presented if the polarising
forces which had given rise to the attacks were to be more compre-
hensively managed and contained.
Duterte also must have ‘struck a chord’, though in the opposite
of a containing way. How can a national presidential candidate brag
of murdering people, and then be elected? The Philippines does not
only have a drug problem; it also has a major terrorism problem. In
the year before Duterte’s election as president, several groups with
allegiance to or similar aims as ISIS were involved in bombings, burn-
ing of villages, extortion, kidnappings and beheadings. The police
have been unable to deal with the problem, so the army was continu-
ously deployed against the terrorist paramilitaries, who were espe-
cially strong in the region Duterte came from. Later, in 2017, Islamist
fighters actually took control of a city in the south of the country, and
a military battle involving nearly a thousand deaths was necessary
to reclaim it. The country’s politics for most of its history have been
turbulent and bloody, and the thousands of extra-judicial killings in
Duterte’s war on drugs are integral to its violent history. This is the
kind of situation where one would expect emotional capital to be
at very low levels, with the sense of safety seriously depleted, and
dignity minimal except in privileged strata of the population. In that
context, it is plausible that a population habituated to violence, yet
also desperate to escape it, might turn to a violent leader promising
to demolish one key part of the ruin that is their society. Potentials for
(often sexualised) violence therefore awaited the arrival of a Duterte,
Leaders 37
though his particular character was perhaps also necessary to break

the taboo on a president openly glorifying and promising violence.
At the moments of potential flux occasioned by an election, it is
very possible for an incumbent to be replaced by a very different
leader, perhaps quite suddenly. This reminds us that a public is never
monolithic – there are bodies of feeling present in it other than that
expressed in the current regime, such that given the availability of a
potential leader with a different emotional appeal and an effective
way of communicating it, one of these other structures of feeling
may take hold of government. So while leaders must work within
the psychological limits of their publics, they can play crucial roles
in the complex processes which bring about switches of government
from one emotional base to another, by mobilising a particular con-
stituency of feeling, a particular segment of the emotional public. As
was suggested in the previous chapter, the ‘leave’ campaigners in the
UK’s 2016 ‘Brexit’ referendum were able to do this, by an articulation
of anxieties about the loss of British identity or its dignity, and thus
overturning a long-standing (if narrow) majority of public sentiment
in favour of remaining in Europe.
So we should not overlook the active role of the leader in making
history. Leaders are not only chosen by the public to act out the col-
lective will, and it would be misleading for us to rest with a simple
assertion that therefore we get the leaders we deserve. A national
public is a hugely complex phenomenon, psychologically, so much
so that to speak of a ‘national psyche’ is bound to be a major simpli-
fication. Many different structures of feeling within it are available
for mobilisation, and through their words, images and deeds some
political leaders will, deliberately or not, be working to identify and
bring some of those structures to the surface and to foreground or
amplify some feelings rather than others. So we have come to the
overall conclusion that publics and leaders make each other; there
are endless complex interactions involving expressed feelings and
unconscious phantasies amongst the public, their representations in
mainstream and social media, the internal worlds (the motives and
perceptions) of political leaders at all levels, and the external world
38 L e a d e r s
demands of economic life, diplomacy, and so on. While the default

position in psychoanalysis is more towards seeing people as respon-
sible for managing their own feelings, perhaps in the political context
we should give a little more emphasis to the opportunities that lead-
ers have to influence how their publics do this, and to help build up
emotional capital.
LEADING INTO BATTLE

This influence of leadership may be most clear, and most consequential,
in some conflict situations, especially those of potential violence,
military or other. Alongside the classical non-psychological causes of
inter- and intranational conflicts (such as who governs a territory and
its people, or has access to its resources), there are the psychosocial
processes by which our internal needs and anxieties fasten themselves
onto some aspects of the conflict and rigidify the minds of those
involved. The Israeli psychologist Daniel Bar-Tal (2013) has developed
the concept of ‘conflictive ethos’ to describe a situation in which,
whatever is objectively at stake in the conflict, the parties involved
have come to experience it in certain ways. For example, they see
it as fundamental to their identity, and as a zero-sum affair, such that
any benefit to their enemy must be a loss to themselves. Those and
other related perceptions lock them into pursuit of the conflict,
and paradoxically enable them to bear it carrying on, so that it then
becomes intractable. In a different theoretical language, Vamik Volkan,
through many studies of conflicts around the world, and the roles
of leaders within them, has written about how a process of ‘large
group regression’ can take place, involving the majority of people in
a society and resulting in the intractability which Bar-Tal describes.
This is most likely to happen when a leader emerges whose own
personality is dominated by a malignant narcissism, and who encour-
ages large sections of the public into regressed states of mind in which
the world is grossly simplified. The large group’s identity (typically
that of a ‘nation’) is idealised, and the process of splitting, on which
that idealisation depends, also produces demonised enemies, and a
Leaders 39
number of other adverse effects. A large group is vulnerable to this

process, says Volkan, when it is unable to process and tolerate the level
of anxiety to which its members are subject. In terms of the ideas
which are outlined in this book, this would mean that an insufficient
experience of safety and/or dignity has raised levels of anxiety to
a point at which the group will seek a defensive response. This is
offered by a leader who promises safety and dignity, linked in more
toxic cases to an image of a purified national community, of which
more below.
THE ‘POPULIST’ PHENOMENON

Much discussion of political leadership around the world in recent
years has focussed on the concept of ‘populism’. Typically this involves
a charismatic leader who seeks power on the basis of offering an end
to politics as we know it. This leader is presented as of a new type,
either because s/he is not a professional politician, or is one who
somehow claims exclusively to know and understand the ‘people’ and
promises to champion them against the political ‘establishment’, the
‘elite’ who have been in power for so long and achieved so little. There
is an overlap with the much older category of ‘strong man’ leader, the
protecting father who is not a populist in today’s sense but in whom
the ‘people’ have a confidence that transcends their broken trust in
political institutions and democratic process.
Not all forms of contemporary populism are of the ‘Right’: ‘Left’
populisms can and do occur, as the era of Chavez and Maduro in Ven-
ezuela can be seen to illustrate, and perhaps also the 2016 electoral
campaigns of Corbyn and Sanders in the UK and US respectively,
though neither of these posed a sharp ‘us the people vs. the elite’
dichotomy. Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain are seen by some
as examples of ‘Left’ populism, while the Five Star Movement (M5S)
in Italy defies placing on that axis (which as we have noted is of lim-
ited usefulness in describing politics today). Leftist populism can be
seen as at least partially adhering to the principles of safety and dig-
nity, though in different ways to Rightist versions: material security
40 L e a d e r s
rather than border security is often the guarantee of safety, via state
provision for health and welfare, while dignity may also be materi-
ally defined in terms of better pay, secure employment and housing,
rather than being seen culturally.
One feature which all varieties of ‘populism’, including the M5S,
have in common, and which therefore is often taken in academic
discussions of the term to be its defining characteristic, is a deep
disaffection with the political ‘establishment’. The populist leader’s
appeal is that of the outsider, someone untainted by the complacency
or corruption of the elite, someone who can be in touch with the
‘people’, and so really offers something different. Psychologically, this
is the wish for purity, a narcissistic impulse of reaching for the perfect
world, in response to a collapse of trust in politics in the real world.
As such, the enthusiasm for the new order, the ‘Golden Dawn’ prom-
ised by the extremist party of that name in Greece, is condemned to
eventual collapse, as the promise of purity cannot be delivered.
The extent to which contemporary populism is a new develop-
ment in leader-follower relations is debatable. Has there not for a long
time been an us vs. them at the heart of human society, ready to be
stirred up by leaders who believe in themselves as forces of renewal,
and now more easily stirred via the direct and fevered channels of
social media? Or are we seeing a new kind of leadership, facilitated
by modern communications but with a new emotional dynamic?
At the psychological level, there is nothing new about today’s pop-
ulisms. Their basic dynamic appears to be one in which the parental
figures (the incumbent political class, the ‘elite’) are felt to have com-
prehensively failed, even to have betrayed those for whom they are
responsible. A deep, amorphous anger fills the political air and people
feel various combinations of abandoned, deceived and exploited. As
we saw in Chapter 1, feelings of distrust and rage against parental fig-
ures of early life are universal. So how can we understand the rise of
cynicism and anger in popular attitudes towards politics, to the point
where elections are won by parties or leaders whose key promise is to
overthrow the establishment, to replace the actual, bad parents with
an ideal, good one?
Leaders 41
For many, economic recession is the key explanation, bringing as

it does attacks on the well-being and dignity of the unemployed and
the low waged, and a sense of insecurity to many others. Others see
globalisation and rapid cultural change as the main problem, disrupt-
ing the stable communities which offered a sense of safety and self-
respect. So combine austerity regimes with the surge in migration,
and you may have the two crises which bring to a head long-standing
popular disaffection at the underlying trends of growing inequality
and increasing globalisation. There may seem to be little need for
expert psychology to contribute to understanding where the swell
of anger comes from.
But there is still important psychological work to do. Nations
similarly affected by the two crises have responded in different ways,
which psychosocial analysis may help to explain. And the specific
content and focus of public feeling in individual countries is impor-
tant to understand. Just how do people experience their difficulties,
what troubles them most, who do they blame, what do they want
most? The core argument of this book would suggest that the cen-
tral issues are ones of safety and dignity: somehow people feel that
their societies now are unsafe for them, and do not endow them
with dignity. Without reliable understanding of the emotional profiles
of regressive populist movements, it is difficult for political leaders
opposing them to develop the best strategies for doing so.
Also, feelings of safety and dignity are gained and lost in many areas
of life, not only in the political sphere. What changes might there have
been at deeper levels of society, in family life and everyday culture, and
in the various societal provisions that bear on early development, which
may have been impacting on our early experience and making us more
insecure in our core emotional selves? At least since the 1970s, there
have been suggestions that, for various reasons, the presence in many
societies of narcissistic traits has been increasing. If that is so, then even
without economic crisis and cultural fragmentation there would be
an increasing need amongst the public for leaders who would collude
with or invite narcissistic defences, and promise painlessly and simply
to deliver the safety and dignity which people feel they lack.
42 L e a d e r s
AND SO TO TRUMP AND KIM JONG-UN

Speaking of which, at the time of writing the most obvious and con-
sequential example of a populist leader is Donald Trump, elected as
president of the US in 2016. Trump, perhaps like Duterte, also elected
in 2016, and some others in the wave of populist arrivals, brings a
new dimension to the idea of personalised politics. The idea of ‘per-
sonalisation’ as we encountered it earlier usually refers to the way
in which citizens ‘consume’ their politics, with the personalities or
personas of leaders being of as much or more interest to voters than
the policies they are attached to and the parties and ideologies they
represent. It is something that happens in the media sphere, and it
reflects an important change in how citizens relate to their political
leaders, as well as in the increased attention which many politicians
pay to their appearance and social behaviour. But Trump seems to have
brought his personality through and beyond style into the content of
politics, so that strategy and sometimes objectives are defined by who
he is. So there is a mutation of leadership best described not as per-
sonalisation but as a ‘personisation’ of statecraft, similar in some ways
to a kind of autocracy. To some extent, in Trump’s case this involves a
fragmentation of strategy and objectives, due to his emotional lability
and superficiality and also, a recent report by Bob Woodward sug-
gests,10 to ad hoc restraints which some of those around him are able
to impose.
Thus when Donald Trump met Kim Jong-Un in June 2018, it was
not a summit in the usual sense of the term, that is, a meeting at
which the participants represent large and complex bodies of strate-
gic interests and expertise. This was a meeting that somehow sprang
from the self-centred calculations of two highly narcissistic individu-
als, aided it seems by more conventional diplomatic efforts on the
part of South Korea to transform the unhappy situation on the Korean
Peninsula. The calculations of the two men converged in that both saw
a dramatic mould-breaking meeting being to their individual advan-
tage. It would not actually have to change anything, but would enable
each to offer their own people a better world, any subsequent failure
Leaders 43
of which to arrive could later be blamed on the other, or explained in

some other way (perhaps riskier for Trump as the US has free media).
The meeting in Singapore was an encounter between the two major
types of narcissism of the twentieth century, continuing into the pres-
ent. Trump embodies the narcissistic tendency inherent in market-
based societies, while Kim is the apotheosis of the collectivised form
of narcissism generated by totalitarian societies. But the psychological
root of each man is the same. We must remind ourselves that narcis-
sism is not a simple excess of self-regard, but a defence against fear,
against what would otherwise be an overwhelming internal sense of
vulnerability and weakness. It is a mode of experience in which the
intrinsic dependency of the self on others is so terrifying that it has
to be denied. We all engage in this manoeuvre to some extent, but
when narcissism becomes the founding principle of a personality, the
fear against which it defends is firmly sealed off in the unconscious.
Trump’s contemptuous intolerance of the complexities and uncer-
tainties of politics was clear in the abrupt and aggressive manner of
his departure from the G7 summit en route to the Singapore meeting,
which was more of his own, simpler design, based on the perfor-
mance of success rather than its achievement. Narcissism in leaders
does not necessarily bring disaster; on the contrary, some measure of
it may be necessary for the self-belief required to succeed in the ardu-
ous work of progressive politics. But for that to happen the leader’s
narcissistic self must be identified with some ideal of the common
good – a vision of real reconciliation, say, in a leader whose task is
to resolve a conflict. In the cases of Trump and Kim, their narcissistic
selves appear to be expressed through visions of their own importance
as paragons of what they believe their societies to be about – Trump,
the feral property developer; Kim, the dynastic godhead. In this case,
whatever the consequences of the ‘summit’, it demonstrated that in
this psychological age, the importance of a psychological understand-
ing of politics has never been so great.
3
NATIONS
NATIONS AND NATIONALISMS

Human civilisation is presently organised into nations, 193 of them
on the current count of United Nations member states. Some com-
mentators think the end of the nation is in sight: national govern-
ments are overwhelmed from without by the global forces of finance
capital, multinational corporations and consumer culture, and under-
mined from within by increasingly divided and disaffected popu-
lations, less willing to tolerate self-serving or corrupt ruling elites.
Viewed politically and economically, many nations do seem to be in
shaky condition. But what about the psychology of nations? Are our
attachments to them waning as a direct reflection of globalisation?
And as we see in many nations the rise of aggressive and regressive
nationalisms, do we think that the sooner nationalism is part of his-
tory, the better?
Here we will examine some key themes in the psychology of
nationalism. We will unavoidably confront the worst of nationalism,
which can be a very toxic force, and sometimes a psychotic one.
However, we will also find some more positive qualities and poten-
tials in it, and end with the suggestion that viewed psychologically,
the problem now is not basically that there is an excess of nationalism,
but that there is not enough nationalism of the right sort.
46 N at i o n s
Firstly, some definitions. By nationalism, we will mean a state of

mind in which there is:
a A sense of belonging to a particular nation (national identity);

b An emotional attachment to that identity;
c A political concern for the interests of the nation and its
people.
This definition begs all sorts of questions, particularly about how

a nationalist will relate to the peoples of other nations. It does not
assume that nationalists will always see politics primarily in terms of
national interests, nor that they will always want to prioritise the
interests of their own nation. This definition would probably find
‘nationalist’ feeling in many people who would not want to be called
‘nationalists’, some of whom might prefer that we called them ‘patri-
ots’. These semantics are very important, though we cannot go into
them further here. The rationale for this broad definition is that the
nature and strength of nationalism as a political force will depend on
the full spectrum of feelings about the nation amongst its population,
and many of these feelings are very different from those associated
with xenophobic and aggressive forms of nationalism.
There is one other definition we must consider. What do we mean
by a ‘nation’, the object of nationalist feeling? There is a large and
complex body of scholarship in the social sciences on this question,
which we will dip into here in a very restricted and simplifying way.
Early theories emerging in the nineteenth century saw nations as the
natural products of long histories, reaching powerfully and deeply
into the minds of their peoples. These theories may be called ‘essen-
tialist’, because they see the nation as having an essence, a definitive
core, from which its meaning for us derives. On this view, nationalist
feeling flows naturally from the inherent meaningfulness and vener-
ability of the nation. In the most emphatic view of this sort, nations
are part of the fundamental natural order of things, a view described
as ‘primordialist’ by one of the leading theorists of the nation and
nationalism, Anthony Smith.
N at i o n s 47
Essentialist theories of the nation and its ancient roots were rejected
later in the twentieth century by a second wave of theories, called
‘modernist’ by Smith (2009) because they see nations as the product
of the ‘modern’ period of history, to have come into being from
the seventeenth or eighteenth century on, without older historical
roots. Various accounts have been given of this process, for example,
those emphasising the role of capitalist economic development and
competition, or those which focus on the role of nationalisms as
reactions to global imperialism. In recent decades perhaps the most
influential have been what we can call ‘constructionist’ accounts,
according to which nations have emerged as a consequence of particular
socio-cultural changes. Foremost amongst these are the theories
of political scientist Benedict Anderson (1983) and philosopher/
anthropologist Ernest Gellner (1983), who considered the emerging
forces of, respectively, print media in the eighteenth century and
public education systems in the nineteenth century as major origins
of national consciousness in the first modern nations. While a people
may have lived under the same jurisdiction, they did not know they
were a ‘nation’ until their schools or their newspapers told them who
they were. In analyses of this sort, a sense of national identity and unity
is to some extent an artefact. It is an imaginary construction which has
been engineered in people’s minds, whether as a by-product of other
developments or as part of a deliberate strategy intended somehow to
serve the interests of political or economic elites.1
Illuminating and important though modernist theories may be,
from a psychological point of view we have to agree with Smith’s
judgment that they are limited by their neglect of the powerful affective
dimensions of nations and nationalism, a power seen abundantly in
international contests in sport, in diverse forms of political rhetoric,
and in many wars. There is a crucial imaginative component in all our
social experiences – a principle at the heart of the approach taken in
this book – but it is hard to explain the depth and intensity of national
feeling if we see the nation as an artifice, which can be de-constructed
and de-mystified. While there are many determinedly cosmopolitan
people who opt out of national identities, viewed globally it seems
48 N at i o n s
that essentialist views capture more of the psychological reality of

popular experiences of the nation.
THE ETHNIC-CIVIC DISTINCTION IN

THEORIES OF NATIONALISM
In the social-scientific literature on nationalism there has been much
discussion of what some have seen as a distinction between its ethnic
and civic forms. The former can be loosely linked to essentialist
theories of the nation, in that it is the kind of nationalism you would
expect to find amongst citizens who held a broadly essentialist view
of their nation. The ethnic type of nationalism typically reveres the
nation as a strongly defined community stretching back through the
generations, with a specific way of life and shared values. People use
the term differently, but ‘ethnic’ can mean pertaining to culture, rather
than its current meaning in everyday and administrative languages of
‘racial’ group, as in the terms ‘ethnicity’ and ‘ethnic minority’. So we
might see an ‘ethnic’ nationalism as defining its nation’s essence by
culture and territory rather than blood and lineage. The US is a very
strong example of this. But ethnic nationalisms frequently tend to
restrictive, racialised definitions, and can be co-opted into divisive
and xenophobic political stances. They have often given nationalism
a bad name amongst liberal and cosmopolitan publics.
The civic type of nationalism can be linked, though only partially,
to modernist theories. In the purest civic models of nationalism,
there is no organic body of culture or tradition which the citizen
must feel part of. Positive feeling about the nation is in the form of
respect for its present laws and institutions, and is expressed in the
form of participation, however minimal, in its democratic processes.
It is a cool, Enlightenment style of nationalism, with an appealing
inclusivity. Anyone can choose to adopt the identity of a nation by
living in it and abiding by its laws. Attachment to the nation is basically
rational and pragmatic, contractual rather than visceral. A believer in
a modernist theory of nations might see this as the most appropriate
way of relating to one’s nation (although another modernist response
N at i o n s 49
would be to turn away altogether from what may be seen as the whole
fraudulent business of nationhood and nationalism).
THE NATION AS A MODERN PASSION

The psychology of a purely civic nationalism would be much less
dramatic than that of ethnic varieties. Indeed, it may require very
little psychological explanation beyond a model of rational behaviour.
However, many writers have argued that there is no such as thing as a
purely ‘civic’ nation, that there is always some form of cultural com-
munity inside lived experiences of the nation, and that the ethnic-
civic dichotomy is therefore a false one, since ethnicity at least in a
cultural sense is always present.
However, this does not mean that modernist theories of the nation
are wrong. There are many reasons to see our modern nations as mod-
ern phenomena, and a psychosocial approach requires us to under-
stand things in their socio-historical context. So we need to combine
some sort of ‘modernist’ approach to understanding how and when
nations developed with an appreciation of the power of what may
seem to be ancient, and sometimes regressive, qualities in the emo-
tional attachments many people have to them.
We have a starting point for this task in a third type of answer to
the question ‘What is a nation?’, the type which seeks to combine
the useful elements of essentialist and modernist theories. Smith,
for example, set out an alternative paradigm which he called ethno-
symbolism. He suggested that modern nations have typically formed
around pre-existing communities which he called ‘ethnies’. Although
strongly shaped by genealogical descent, these communities were
basically cultural ones, defined by myths of common ancestry, shared
historical memories, and elements of everyday culture (such as lan-
guage or religion) symbolically linked to a particular homeland ter-
ritory. When modern nations were formed, the major ethnies they
incorporated were the sources of their majority cultures.
This historical perspective recognises national identity both as an
authentic dimension of self-experience, and as a major territory of
50 N at i o n s
public feeling which will be the subject of intense political competition

and manipulation. Smith, and some other writers, have thus occupied
the theoretical space between essentialism and modernism, showing
the inadequacy of those polar positions and setting a background for
in-depth psychological investigation.
THE DISTRIBUTION OF DIGNITY FOR ALL

As a bridge into fully psychological territory, we must refer to the
work of another leading theorist of the nation and nationalism. Liah
Greenfeld2 offers a very different historical account from that of
Smith, on the face of it a very modernist one (albeit early modernist).
She argues that the idea of the nation was born in the aftermath of
the Wars of the Roses in fifteenth-century England. Those protracted
and bloody wars, between two royal ‘houses’ contending for the
throne of England, had decimated the ruling aristocracy. So when
Henry VII emerged as the victorious king and established the Tudor
dynasty, it was necessary to repopulate the ruling elite (on whom
the monarch depended to carry out many practical and political
functions) through the upward mobility of leading members of the
non-aristocratic strata. This required a radical change in how people
understood their social world. The existing order was one of fixed
‘estates’, God-given social ranks which people were born into and
could not fundamentally transcend. Large-scale social mobility was
simply not possible within that theologically grounded worldview.
To achieve and consolidate the inconceivable change required, the
idea of the nation as a community within which all were equal sub-
jects of the monarch was born. This meant that social mobility could
be understood as entirely possible, and that a new basic self-respect
could be felt by all deemed to be subjects.
This account is of particular interest to us here because although
it fits the modernist template in seeing national feeling as an artefact
which emerged to serve a socio-political purpose, it has a persuasive
explanation for the depth of the nation’s psychological appeal. It iden-
tifies a psychological need that is met, and benefit that is brought, by
N at i o n s 51
the definition of oneself as a subject or citizen who is in a fundamen-

tal respect the equal of all others in the nation. This is summed up in
the concept of dignity, which we have identified as a key theme in the
psychology of politics. The concept of the nation which, according to
Greenfeld, crystallised in sixteenth-century England, had at its centre
the principle of an irreducible individual dignity for all, irrespec-
tive of whatever inequalities, oppressions and privations may have
dominated the lives of many. And, argues Greenfeld, it is this deeply
attractive feature of national identity which has driven the spread of
nationalism around the world, although the conditions and conse-
quences of its uptake differ widely according to context.
Overall, Greenfeld sees national identity and its democratisation of
dignity as the basis for the subsequent global development of demo-
cratic institutions. She goes on to see it also as the basis for the spread
of capitalism, and for the individualism (both its freedoms and its
costs) of the modern and post-modern world. But whether or not
we might agree with her broader conclusions, or indeed with her
specific theory of the Tudor origins of national identity, we can sug-
gest on the basis of her work that an important element in the love of
nation is – whatever particular nation we might be considering – to
be found in the dignified equality of membership it can be felt to
confer. This equality might exist more in principle or in hope than in
reality, but as support for an inner sense of self-worth it is of major
psychological value. We can therefore understand why changes in
national identity, if felt to de-value the dignity it confers, can produce
fearful and aggressive responses.
THE INSECURITY OF DIGNITY

Let’s look at this a little more closely, and consider how the universal
endowment of dignity may interact with individual differences in per-
sonal reserves of dignity. We saw in Chapter 1 that the inner foundations
for robust self-respect are laid in early development. Individuals with
a relatively secure, inner sense of their personal worth may appreciate
their membership of a nation which appears to reflect and to strengthen
52 N at i o n s
that sense by recognising them as dignified citizens. But they will be

able to take a critical stance towards their own nation when they think
that is necessary.This is because they have sufficient personal reserves of
‘dignity capital’, to use Greenfeld’s phrase, and so they are not seriously
threatened by the (perhaps temporary) reduction of dignity which a
voluntary and partial dis-identification with their nation may involve.
Individuals with a less secure sense of their personal worth may
have turned to a national identity as a source of basic dignity supply,
and if so any threat to that supply will be a more serious psychologi-
cal challenge. Such threats may come in various forms (real and/or
perceived), including internal challenges to the principle of equality,
or external threats to the existence of the nation. Individuals with the
least secure sense of their personal dignity may have also inflated the
dignity which they believe themselves to be granted by their national-
ity, by aggrandising the nation and so increasing the imagined dignity
value of belonging to it.
This inflation of dignity is to be found in some cases of what
Vamik Volkan describes as ‘chosen glories’, elements of national con-
sciousness focusing on a past historical or mythological event which
symbolises the greatness of the nation. This national triumph will
typically be a battle won, whether at the founding or early life of the
nation or in its more recent history. The Battle of the Boyne could be
seen as such an element in the British national identity of Protestants
in Northern Ireland. In 1690, in what is now the Republic of Ireland,
an army led by William of Orange defeated one led by the former
King James II of England. The battle consolidated the joint monarchy
in England of William and his wife Mary, and ensured continued Prot-
estant domination of Ireland, and its union with England. Although
developments in the twentieth century restricted the union to the
northern six counties, Protestant Unionists there continue to celebrate
the Battle with annual marches which have been major flashpoints in
decades of tension and conflict with Catholic Republicans.
It could be argued that the World War II Battle of Britain, a period
of aerial warfare across several months in 1940, became a ‘chosen
glory’ in British national identity. Although it was early in the war, it
is seen by military historians as a major setback for Nazi Germany,
N at i o n s 53
and by many of the British public as a demonstration of their own

resilience, continued under the ‘Blitz’ of German bombing raids, and
of the valour of their aircrews.
However, it is a matter of debate whether, in the celebration of
these battles, there is an inflation of the dignity of the national identities
concerned. May the British public not feel rightful pride at Britain’s
role in the defeat of Nazism, and even be allowed a little idealisation
of it? How long ago may an event be before it should lose its role in
defining and bestowing dignity on a present-day community, or at
least fade into the background? And how much can the celebration of
a glorious triumph be at odds with the historical reality of the actual
event or situation?
Once we begin to look at particular examples it becomes clear that
psychological evaluation inevitably becomes entangled with political
and social values. How we view a ‘chosen glory’ mythology depends
on the significance of its representation in present-day politics as well
as on the extent to which it embodies the psychological processes of
splitting and delusional idealisation. Present commemorations of the
Battle of the Boyne involve a more desperate and divisive striving for
dignity than do commemorations of the Battle of Britain, although
some dim resonance of the latter may be a factor in contemporary
negative British attitudes towards the rest of Europe. Given the very
small margin in Britain’s ‘Brexit’ referendum in favour of leaving the
EU, that outcome could well have been determined by the need of
some voters to recover or defend dignity by fending off perceived
encroachments by, or attacks from, mainland Europe. If so, however,
it is not the chosen glory of Battle of Britain mythology which is
responsible, but the low reserves of dignity capital amongst sections
of the British people, and their consequent vulnerability to an ‘easy fix’
of their dignity deficit which they imagined that Brexit would bring.
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE COIN:

HUMILIATION
We cannot consider dignity in isolation from other states of mind
to which it is connected. The deepest connections are often between
54 N at i o n s
opposites, so we must now turn to indignity or humiliation. (A dignity

deficit can also take the form of indignancy, as recognised in the naming
of the Indignados movement in Spain in 2011.) We find, perhaps
surprisingly, that humiliation is a theme in much nationalist discourse.
Indeed, it is in some cases at the heart of national self-consciousness.
Again, Volkan (2001) has led the way into this territory, with the other
side of his coin of chosen mythologies. The inverse of the chosen
glory is the ‘chosen trauma’, a deliberate focus (if unknowingly so)
on a defining experience of catastrophe, whether that is a clear matter
of historical fact or a more mythological construction.
While humiliation and trauma have clearly different meanings,
for our purposes here these concepts converge. Humiliation of many
kinds may be traumatic for the humiliated one. Trauma of any sort
usually involves vulnerability and a loss of control, and the traumas
of nations typically also involve defeat, subjugation or persecution.
So national trauma, whether in present reality, the distant past or
mythology, is likely to evoke some sense of humiliation in the victims,
and in those identified with them.
In a number of cases, the identity of a nation is tied to a chosen
trauma, a mythology of defeat and humiliation, sometimes based on
an event many centuries ago. One of Volkan’s examples is the impor-
tance in Serbian nationalism of the Battle of Kosovo, at which, back
in 1389, a Serbian army was defeated by an Ottoman force. This laid
the way for Serbian territory to be completely taken into the Ottoman
Empire in the fifteenth century. Volkan notes how this distant humilia-
tion was used by Serbian leaders in the 1990s to justify the genocidal
massacres of Muslims. The German experience of humiliation in the
1919 Treaty of Versailles, and its influence on the emergence of the
Nazi movement, is well-documented, as is the similar Hungarian
experience of the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, a grievance nurtured by
fascists in the interwar period and still a powerful force in Hungarian
politics today. And if 9/11 was for many Americans a traumatic dem-
onstration of their vulnerability at home, after decades of superpower
status which encouraged the experience of a kind of invulnerability,
that helps to make sense of the apparent power of the rallying call
N at i o n s 55
to ‘Make America great again’ in Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign for

the presidency. So it is not difficult to find examples of a shared trau-
matic experience, or perhaps less dramatic erosions of the sense of
safety and dignity, being followed, either directly or down the years,
by surges of aggressive nationalism which create conflict with other
nations and/or within an existing nation.
Post-colonial national liberation movements are bound to be
marked by the insecurities and indignities of being colonised, and
they may carry the impulse to pass those bad experiences on to oth-
ers, or to return them to the colonisers – or their representatives.
Post-colonial conflict in Sri Lanka has been between the majority
Sinhalese and the minority of Tamils, with the latter seeking inde-
pendence for the north-east region where they are concentrated. The
view of many Sinhalese was that the Tamils had been preferred by the
British (in educational provision, recruitment to government service
and political representation), and so had contributed to the humilia-
tion of colonisation, and this fed into the conflict that developed after
independence in 1948, although that had other older and deeper
roots. In the case of the Rwandan genocide of 1994, the Tutsi victims
were a minority who had been preferred by the Belgian colonial
power and had dominated the Hutu majority for decades – though
not since a Hutu-led republic had been established in 1962. There
had been a long history of conflict and savage violence between the
two groups before and since 1962, with and without fomentation
by European powers. So while post-colonial revenge was one long-
standing factor, it seems that generations of competition and violence
undermining safety and dignity on both sides had destroyed what
emotional capital might once have existed to moderate the intensity
of the hatreds. A fuller understanding of this atrocity would have to
describe how that history had shaped the minds of the Hutu leaders
who planned and organised it and those who carried it out, and why
the culture and institutions of Rwandan society had been unable to
contain the murderousness.
Some recent traumas are immediately present in the experience of
a people, while others are still felt with some directness but have been
56 N at i o n s
transmitted across two or more generations. In a process whereby

the children of direct victims are shaped by their experiences of
traumatised parents, and their children affected in turn, a shared sense
of still-active collective trauma is sustained. Israeli national identity is
closely tied to the Jewish trauma of the Holocaust, and to the long
history of the Jews as a persecuted and dispersed people. And of course
the international attempt to repair the damage of this traumatic history
has inserted a massive trauma into the heart of Palestinian identity.
Taking humiliation into account as well as dignity we can now
revisit, in the context of understanding nationalisms, our general
account of early psychological development. In early life we are all
totally dependent on others, a situation of need and humiliation
which generates extreme anxiety. In good-enough development, we
are able to develop trust in our significant others, and so to tolerate
the awareness of our dependence, and the anxiety and the humiliation
which it involves. This acceptance of humiliation, because it is realistic
and because it basically welcomes the connection with the other, paves
the way to a self-experience of security and thereby of dignity. Trust
in others will also be linked to an experience of the self as worthy of
others’ care, and so enhance self-worth. This emotional capital enables
the person in adult life to tolerate situations of dependency, threat and
potential humiliation.
Those with less secure self-worth and internal sense of dignity will
be more susceptible to intolerable feelings of humiliation in a range of
situations of real or perceived dependency or threat, and thus be more
likely to try and defend against those feelings. This may be by reaching
for a more aggrandised sense of self, including the ‘national self’, as
noted above. Or it could be by fixating angrily on the need to avenge
the humiliation, which appears to be a key factor in the case of some
post-colonial nationalisms (it is also a major driver of contemporary
‘Islamist terrorism’, as we will see in Chapter 4).
One way or another, the relative strengths of internal states of dig
nity and humiliation, in an individual mind and in the aggregated
national psyche, are important factors in determining the politi
cal profile of that individual citizen or that national public. In the
N at i o n s 57
dignity/humiliation dynamic as played out in national and interna

tional politics, the reckless grandiosity of some nationalisms does
not stem from an excess or over-valuation of national dignity, but
from an inner feeling, or fear, of humiliation – that is, from a dignity
deficit.
This dynamic is a major presence in the ‘ethnic’ content which
is at the heart of most nationalisms. However we have seen that the
idea of the ‘civic’ is necessary to round out the content of much
contemporary nationalism, by infusing it with principles (such as
the rule of law and universal suffrage) which are essential to liberal
democracy. This does not mean, however, that civic is the good form
of nationalism and ethnic the bad. It is more a question of what
kinds of feelings and ideas are involved in any particular form of
nationalism – what psychological needs it meets, and what impulses
or emotional resources it mobilises. We have seen how dangerous it
can be when reserves of dignity capital are low in the national public.
But we must also give brief consideration to some other important
themes in the psychology of nationalism, and look at how they
interact with the dignity/humiliation dynamic.
NARCISSISM, MERGER AND SAFETY

It is not difficult to see the imprint of narcissism in many nationalisms,
especially in the extreme versions of what is now often called ethno-
nationalism, that is, nationalism with an emphasis on ethnic identity
in the racial sense of ‘ethnic’.3 This is a typically a visceral and angry
variety, in which the nation is intensely idealised (often around
parental imagery, of which more below). The intensity of connection
to the nation of which national anthems often speak suggests that
the nationalist citizen experiences a kind of merger, in which the self
has disappeared into the national body. The psychological basis of
this nationalism lies in the collective use of narcissistic defences. As
we have seen, narcissism is always a defence, which in this political
context may be against any humiliation, abandonment or annihilation
which the nation might face.
58 N at i o n s
However, individuals are likely to become involved in such

collective narcissism only when they have their own personal
reasons for employing its defensive functions, so the specific
dynamics and objects of the defence will differ from person to
person. The narcissistic investment in the nation is like a final
common pathway for a host of individual anxieties, with everyone
in the angry crowd turning to the idealised nation as a balm for
their separate woes. The threats to the nation which they perceive
are likely to be projections of the threats which (unconsciously)
they feel to their own selves. In the fullest dose of the hoped-for
medicine, there will be a total dedication to the cause, a merger with
the nation in terms of everyday life, relationships and aspirations,
as well as at the level of unconscious phantasy in which the self is
identified with the body of the nation.
While other ethnic nationalisms do not necessarily involve
primitive phantasies of merger, they often involve a phantasy of
the nation as an ideal home: safe, trustworthy and pure. When the
nation’s essence is defined, wholly or partly, in terms of blood or
genes, then we have an intellectual rationale for xenophobic or racist
forms of nationalism. Other nations are correspondingly denigrated,
even demonised, and at its most dangerous, this kind of nationalism
demands that the lost purity of the nation be restored, at whatever
cost to those deemed to represent the impurities. The search for purity
is a search for a trustworthy object; only the pure can be trusted.
As such it is an endless and hopeless task, because it is not reality-
oriented. It is not driven by a scarcity of trustworthy objects, but by
an anxious inability to trust, so any imagined purity that is found soon
becomes untrustworthy and impure. There is always a threat of further
impurity, and thus a risk that another category of people will emerge
as the target of the next round of purification. (In Chapter 4 we will
see this process at the heart of fascism.) In a similar way, the endless
fragmentation of extremist sects is also based on this delusional,
impossible search for the safety afforded by a trustable object.
N at i o n s 59
THE NATION AS IMAGINED FAMILY

As we saw in Chapter 1, Volkan suggests that we all need some large-
group identity as a core part of our selves. Not everyone would agree
with this from their own experience; some people may feel that their
core self is entirely defined in their interpersonal and small-group
relations. So the ‘core-ness’ of national identity is not universal. None-
theless, the strength of national identity for many people, and its
importance in their self-definition, is often evidenced in the language
and imagery associated with it. There are numerous examples of the
nation’s representation as a parent-figure, suggesting it is of deepest
emotional significance.
The terms Fatherland and Motherland are familiar references to one’s
home nation, and although the words for parents do not always carry
major significance when used metaphorically, in the context of national
feeling it is likely that they do. Interestingly there are several examples
which suggest an effort, through the words, to imagine the nation as a
combined parental figure, fusing the assets of both parental genders, as in
the French word ‘patrie’, a feminine noun based on the root of the word
for ‘father’, which can be translated as both motherland and fatherland,
as can the equivalent words in Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.
An interesting recent study4 of national anthems revealed the
major place in their lyrics of familial imagery – over half of the
200 anthems studied had some familial imagery, confirming the
researchers’ hypothesis that nations are better seen as ‘imagined
families’ than as ‘imagined communities’. Over one third had paternal
or patrilineal imagery, compared to 12% with maternal, showing
the predominance of masculinity in the gendered composition of
nations. Gender-neutral and androgynous images of the nation do,
however, exist, so single-gendering is not essential to the idea of
nations. Sibling references are also common.
As well as being its creators, parent-nation figures are often pre-
sented as the defenders of the nation, its values and its people, e.g. in
60 N at i o n s
artistic representations of the mother-figure as warrior or formidable

authority. At the same time, the language and imagery of parental
symbolism may evoke a desire amongst citizens to protect the parent-
nation. This can be a very powerful impulse, based on gratitude felt
towards the parents who have given us life and protection, and also
on guilt relating to the anger and envy which all children have felt
towards their parents, as we saw in Chapter 1. There could also be an
element of fearful intimidation by such overwhelmingly powerful
figures. (The 85-metre high statue in Volgograd of the Motherland
calling, sword in hand, would seem to invite a measure of fear, as
at one time the imposing figure of Britannia with long trident and
shield might perhaps have done.)
The protective impulse obviously can be exploited by propaganda
of various sorts, especially insofar as it is driven by guilt, which is
more likely to be unconscious, and therefore undermanaged. Not
only propaganda to drive up a war effort, but appeals to rise up
against any others seen as destroying the nation, as portrayed in much
contemporary populism, may be well-received by minds anxious to
preserve or repair relationships with parent-figures in relation to
whom much guilt is felt as a legacy of the aggression felt towards
them in earlier development.
This brings us again to the toxicity of nationalism. To its cosmopol-
itan opponents, the danger of national feeling is nowhere more clear
than when it comes dressed up in parental imagery. The association
of this imagery with Nazism, the irrationality of equating something
as huge and complex as a nation with a parent, the unhealthy mix of
adoration, submissiveness and belligerence which often surrounds
such imagery, all point to the sick heart of nationalism as perceived
by its many critics. And indeed these are serious points.
THE NATION AS SAFE CONTAINER VS.

THE ‘SECURITY STATE’
However, that is not all there is to be said about the nation as par-
ent or family. That imagery may now belong to previous centuries
N at i o n s 61
(except perhaps in national anthems); it is arguably part of a largely

departed culture of deference and melodrama. However, it lingers,
and we need to evaluate it as a more complex phenomenon than the
critique of it allows. While family is for some an image of patriarchy,
or claustrophobia, in reality it is the place where most of us come
from, and to which we owe a lot of our emotional capital as well as
our problems. To symbolise one’s nation as a family could therefore
be an expression of gratitude towards the society in which one has
been nurtured, and a commitment to reproduce its provision of care
and protection. It is also an acknowledgment of a dependency need,
and carries a hope, an expectation even, that the need can be met by
a ‘containing object’.
As we have seen, containment is a fundamental process on which
sanity and society depend. In its purest and strongest form, contain-
ment is a process between two people – which initially means a
caregiver and an infant. The one acknowledges the anxieties and other
difficult feelings of the other, and conveys that they can be faced, and
survived. A parent figure is thus the prototypical containing object,
but later in life we can find containment in cultural experiences which
offer opportunities to confront threatening feelings (via music, art,
sport, etc.) while demonstrating to us that they can be tolerated and
managed. The projection of parental imagery onto an object such as
a ‘nation’ suggests that it is felt, or hoped, to have containing power.
This power of the nation rests in part on its symbolisation as home,
the place where we come from and where we can find some kind of
safety, however rudimentary. While physical security cannot readily
be expected in many nations, at the symbolic level there is a measure
of safety in familiarity. Despite the globalisation of consumer goods,
there are still national specificities in food and other aspects of material
culture, such as vernacular architecture. So our daily experiences of
food and shelter arrive through the medium of national culture. This
is a statement of the obvious, yet its psychological implications can
be ignored. Language is usually a key component of national identity,
because the sound of the ‘mother’ tongue is an important element in
an experience of enfolding familiarity. (For the same reason, language
62 N at i o n s
is often a fault-line of intra-national differentiation and conflict within

bi-lingual nations such as Canada and Belgium.) Familiarity can be
containing not only because we recognise things around us, and thus
can experience them as containing objects, but also because we are
can anticipate being recognised and accepted by them.
In its role as the fundamental unit of government, the nation is
able to gather to itself additional sources of containing capacity. Even
in a neo-liberal world, the nation-state is the ultimate protector and
provider for its citizens, so is in a material sense the heir to paren-
tal authority and responsibility. In its provision of public utilities,
health care and welfare (insofar as it takes responsibility for these),
it offers material responses to anxieties concerning illness, incapacity
and death. The state is probably the closest match of any institution
to the parental matrix (as we used that term in Chapter 1), in that it
incorporates all the core parental functions of providing for, protect-
ing and restraining and guiding the behaviours of its charges.5
ANTIPATHIES TOWARDS
THE NATION-STATE
So except in those cases where a self-identified nation is not a state,
our attachments to nations are closely linked to our dependencies
on states. However, the state is the institutionalisation of leadership,
and so we have as deep an ambivalence towards the state as we do
towards leaders. Like many ambivalences, this is typically managed
by a division of emotional labour. Some people in a society spring
to the attack, while others leap to the defence. The most full-frontal
attack on the state has come from ‘neo-liberalism’, which we will
look at more closely in the next chapter, and focusses on a critique
of the state as the antithesis of freedom, especially the freedom for
markets to operate without restraint. However, libertarianisms of the
Left and the centre have also contributed substantially to spreading
suspicion of the state, for example, in opposition to what they see
as a sinisterly encroaching ‘security state’ which wants to establish
regimes of surveillance and control over all its citizens. Proposals for
N at i o n s 63
identity cards, where these don’t already exist, and the introduction
of counter-terrorism intelligence gathering, are foci for libertarian
protest, while security leaks and ‘whistle-blowing’ are applauded. In
the UK, the government’s counter-terrorism programme ‘Prevent’
has been the object of particular hostility as an intrusive ‘snooper’s
charter’. It is ironic that for some people ‘security’ now connotes the
opposite of its literal meaning, in that ‘securitisation’, for example,
refers to extensions of the state’s reach which are believed to put the
freedom and privacy of citizens at risk.
As well as fears of intrusion, the spectre of corruption is an
important component in many people’s perceptions of the state,
and one that is becoming more common in the established liberal
democracies where until recently the lack of trust in politics focussed
mainly on charges of incompetence, infighting and duplicity. For
example, in 2009 there was an outbreak across the UK of huge
opprobrium directed towards the chief political representatives of
the UK state, Members of Parliament, when some were found to have
used their expense accounts to pay for personal purchases which
should not have been covered by public funds. The amounts involved
were trivial compared to the bonuses which many people in the
private sector have been receiving for years, but the dishonesty of
the payments led to sustained moral outrage.
So the nation-state, and the ideas of ‘the government’ or
‘politicians’ or ‘the establishment’ with which it may be conflated,
are somewhat short of friends at the moment, and under attack from
various directions, at least in the liberal democracies. It could even
be suggested that a hatred of the state has become normative across
the West. There certainly is an ambivalence towards the nation-state,
which is the source of much tension and conflict within societies.
Psychologically, however, we find it easier to line ourselves up on
one side or the other, for or against the nation or the nation-state,
than to experience the ambivalence within ourselves, since that
brings all the discomforts of uncertainty and inner conflict. Turning
our internal ambivalences into external conflicts is often more
comfortable.
64 N at i o n s
But in principle, the nation or the nation-state can be a ‘good

object’ for its citizens – a realistic one, not grossly idealised, which
can meet needs for a sense of dignity, home and safety. Accordingly, a
benign nationalism, in the sense of a positive view of one’s nation, a
wish for its continuation and a desire to contribute to it, coupled with
equal respect for other nations, should be possible. Still, any attempt
to reach an optimistic conclusion here has to be qualified. While we
should not underestimate the presence of nationalist feeling of that
sort in many countries today, it cannot be said that benign nationalism
is a dominant force in the world.
Building on earlier discussion in this chapter, we can identify
two reasons for this. Firstly, it has been discredited and displaced by
virulent forms of ethno-nationalism, which feed off the increasing
inequalities across the world (to be examined later), and the deple-
tion of dignity capital and other forms of emotional capital. Aggres-
sive and divisive ethno-nationalisms are not caused by the search for
dignity and safety through national identity; the problem is rather
in the perversion of that search by the strength of other factors: the
intensity of the inner sense of humiliation, of fears of abandonment,
or of terrifying phantasies of annihilation. These can dictate the terms
of the search, and result in narcissistic and other defensive forms of
nationalism emerging.
Secondly, benign nationalism is stymied in its development by
the weakness of the most basic condition for its development: that
the nation-state can be experienced as a familiar and safe home. For
many people the pace of social change, and the level of social tensions
(where again rising inequalities are partly responsible), are such that
the nation is not always seen as a strong force in the world, nor as a
coherent object, a recognisable and effective moral community which
can offer some containment.
4
IDEOLOGIES
THE CORE PSYCHOLOGICAL QUESTION

Ideology is sometimes seen as the main root of political evil. Espe-
cially in classical liberal views of the world, an ideology is a rigid
and toxic set of ideas, with the power to command the minds, and
the behaviours, of those people who for some reason are enthralled
by it. It is based on falsehoods, though ones which are passionately
believed, so it is in the realm of delusion or illusion rather than lies
or corruption. As such it is frequently intertwined with naïve and
missionary forms of idealism; it typically claims to be showing the
way to a better world.
Marxist theory offered a different use of the term. It proposed that
our ideas about the social world and how it works are determined
by our place in society. As such, they always embody ideology: they
tend to reflect the outlook and interests of the social class to which we
belong. This is not a relativist view, for which ideologies are expres-
sions of different points of view, and all could be at least partly true. It
sees proletarian ideology as the only correct one, because the working
class are in a position to understand that capitalism is both exploit-
ative and unsustainable. Bourgeois ideology is set of self-serving illu-
sions about the system clung to by those who benefit from it.1
66 I d e o l o g i e s
While both of these approaches now seem dated, they continue

to influence some political debates, in that opponents’ ideas may be
dismissed as ‘ideology’, or as the wrong ideology. We will use the
term ‘ideology’ here in a broad and neutral way, to mean any set of
ideas which purport to explain key features of society, to advocate
certain principles or policies derived from those ideas, and thereby
to shape political behaviour. On this definition, most people have got
some sort of ideology.
The best known and most impactful ideologies have mostly been
‘-isms’, such as socialism and fascism. Nationalism is often seen as an
ideology, though in itself it does not have any specific ideas or politi-
cal content beyond the assertion of the nation. Similarly, ‘authori-
tarianism’ may be very important politically, but can be linked to a
wide range of political agendas and programmes. Neo-liberalism and
Islamism are frequently referenced in discussions of politics today,
and both have abundant political content, though both are confus-
ingly named, particularly ‘Islamism’, which has little or no intrinsic
relationship to the religion of Islam.
Ideology and ideologies have been much studied in the social
science disciplines, which overlap with ideologies, since both are
concerned with explaining society. Knowledge of how and where an
ideology has developed, which groups have taken it up, with what
consequences – all that is important in understanding its place in
the world today. The core psychological question about any ideol-
ogy is about its appeal: what attracts people to vote for it, promote
it, march for it, perhaps to become violent in its service. And why
does it appeal to some people and not to others who might seem
to have the same reasons for supporting it? In its study of ideology,
much political psychology has tended towards socialisation approaches
to those questions – that is to say, it has placed the emphasis on the
individual’s environment and the social influences to which we have
been exposed, family and peer group pressures, the opportunities to
become involved with particular groups or movements, etc. While
these factors must all be examined, this type of approach risks missing
Ideologies 67
the internal drivers of political outlook and action – which should be

the core target of psychological inquiry.
The main idea offered in this chapter is that we can ‘read’ an ide-
ology as a state of mind, as an expression of feelings or of phantasy
(as we defined that term in Chapter 1). We can then understand its
appeal to those individuals who take it up: it reflects and validates
their own states of mind, and affords some expression of feelings
(which may or may not also have other expression in their lives). The
states of mind in question could be based on powerful unconscious
phantasy, a legacy of early emotional development, and if so the indi-
vidual’s relationship to the ideology will be intense. Seeing ideology
this way enables us to explain why particular individuals are drawn
to particular ideologies. The pathways of emotional development are
varied, and even within close communities can produce a range of
outcomes in the emotional lives and characters of the adults who as
children shared the same social environment. Thus we have the pos-
sibility of explaining why one person becomes a centrist politician
while someone from the same street with a very similar socio-cultural
background becomes a violent extremist.
Notably, this variability within communities is probably increas-
ing as social cohesion diminishes under pressure from globalisation,
and neighbours vary more in the cultural and emotional legacies
they inherit.
NEO-LIBERALISM
At the centre of most ideologies is a statement of something which
is good, and a complementary identification of something which is
bad. An ideology consists, essentially, of a set of ideas in which the
good object is praised, and the bad object is criticised. The term ‘neo-
liberalism’ has become ever more widely and loosely used, but we
will employ it here in the hope that it does still denote a meaning-
ful phenomenon: a political standpoint or philosophy in which the
central principle is that free markets should be the basis of human
society, from which follow prescriptions about, at the least, economic

management, with other areas of life – welfare, education, security,
culture, etc. – probably also seen as needing to be more fully organ-
ised along the lines of marketisation.
It is clear what the central good object is here: a concept of the free
market. In the writings of the twentieth-century economist Friedrich
Hayek (1944), an unregulated market was seen not only as the best
basis for economic life but also as embodying an ideal vision of free
individuals able to act independently and make their own choices in
life. This vision of a good society as one comprising sovereign indi-
viduals (sometimes seen as acting with or on behalf of their families)
is at the heart of most varieties of contemporary ‘neo-liberalism’. The
competitiveness which markets engender is typically seen from this
standpoint in simply positive terms, as the driver of efficiency. The
major inequalities of market-based societies are accepted, either on
meritocratic grounds (‘ability and/or hard work bring just reward’)
or on a sub-Darwinian assumption of their inevitability (‘that’s life’).
This idealisation of the free market is inextricably linked with a
damnation of the state and all its works. The state is basically a threat
to the liberty of the individual; while claiming to act in the general
interest it imposes damaging restrictions on markets and individuals,
depriving them of choice and making oppressive demands via
taxation and bureaucracy. It also encourages dependency and greed
amongst weaker citizens.
This last point is a clue to the psychological meaning of the ide-
ology. If we consider neo-liberalism as a state of mind, what stands
out firstly is the denial of dependency. The unfettered individual of
the neo-liberal imagination has no dependency needs. S/he wants
to be free to act in the autonomous pursuit of self-interest, to which
all relationships with others are secondary, and s/he has little or no
responsibility for those people who need support in life. Human soci-
ety is not a network of interdependencies, but a fortunate aggregation
of freely acting individuals/families.
In psychological terms, this insistence on the independence and
self-sufficiency of the individual is a narcissistic defence against
Ideologies 69
dependency, and as such it can deliver an experience of both safety

and dignity, albeit in false form. (The psychic benefits arising from
the use of any defence are very likely to be false, since the defence is
built on an untruth.) The illusion of self-sufficiency can produce the
illusion of safety, as there is no need for risky dependence on others.
And a measure of dignity may be found in the image of the proud
individuals who are able to take responsibility for themselves and to
thrive in the marketplaces of life. In the middle of the last century
the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm had captured much of this tragically
shrunken and lonely mode of experiencing the world, in his concept
of the ‘amoral marketing orientation’.2 The political philosopher C.B.
Macpherson’s concept of ‘possessive individualism’ emphasised how
the cornerstone of this view of the world was the idea that we are
the inalienable owners of ourselves, and owe nothing to society for
this ownership. ‘Society consists of relations of exchange between
proprietors’,3 beyond which we have no obligations to others.
As we saw in Chapter 1, a narcissistic defence is likely to become a
significant part of the adult character when in earlier life the capacity
to tolerate dependency could not develop, because it was difficult or
impossible to achieve a trusting relationship with a caregiver. Another
legacy of that situation is likely to be a reserve of deeply negative
feeling towards parent-figures. We have also seen how in adult life
the state takes on a sort of in loco parentis role in the public uncon-
scious. It therefore makes psychological sense that, in the realm of
ideology, a narcissistic idealisation of the marketised world of free
and independent individuals will be coupled with a suspicious and
resentful attitude towards the state. Critiques of the state as remote
and self-serving, or as intrusive and domineering, may or may not
reflect aspects of the actual state in the real world, but they can cer-
tainly draw on memories or phantasies of parents who did not meet
the child’s needs.
The unconscious template of an uncaring or oppressive parent can
be made even more toxic by the addition of an element of sibling
rivalry. There is presently an important convergence between the neo-
liberal rejection of the state and the perceptions of sections of the
public who in other respects can be much more positive about the
state, and negative about markets. This convergence is seen in hostile
working-class views about the state’s indulgence of so-called work-
shy citizens, its weakness in tackling benefit fraud, and its excessive
generosity towards immigrants, at the expense of the nonimmigrant
population. The villainous figure of the parent who neglects their
own child yet provides for other children, or perversely favours the
least deserving amongst its own, is the psychological source of some
of the rage around the state’s allocation of housing and benefits.
This critique of neo-liberal ideology does not uniquely patholo-
gise its proponents. A measure of discomfort around dependency is
common enough, and there are other ways of dealing with it apart
from converting it into a political outlook. So neo-liberalism is not
alone in the psychological defence it expresses or draws upon. Nor
does our critique demolish it intellectually, or invalidate it as a politi-
cal project. There are important and complex issues around the nature
of markets and their relationship to the state, which obviously can-
not be condensed into psychological analysis. The value of psycho-
logical work of this kind is that it offers a way of understanding the
emotional needs and the defences which people bring to the table
of politics. This is especially important when we do so in such a way
that the emotional dimension then becomes the predominant one
in determining our opinions and actions. And even when that is not
the case, to have some insight into the links between our politics and
our more hidden selves should nudge us towards a more thoughtful
political discourse.
COMMUNISM
While neo-liberalism as we know it did not emerge until the second
half of the twentieth century, the ideology of which it is the clearest
‘opposite’ was already on the wane by then, though it still exerts some
influence today – the ideology of communism. In the communist
countries of the twentieth century, the state was, in its fusion with
the Communist Party, a massively revered parental object, at least in
Ideologies 71
official ideology – more ambivalent relationships with the state must

have prevailed in many people’s minds. State control of the economy
did, of course, mean that the state was a provider, with fully socialised
health and welfare systems able to underwrite at least rudimentary
levels of care, and therefore of at least some measure of both safety
and dignity. Especially when life experience has not been reassuring
about the reliability of other people, the impersonal state may seem
a safer option, if only at the level of ideology and policy (when it
comes to actual care, we all seek a personal ‘human’ touch). And the
possibility of being part of a glorious story of deeply shared societal
advancement is a powerful dignity developer. Even in the 2011–2015
Five Year Plan of the Communist Party of China, reflecting as it does
this present era of deep marketisation and widespread corruption,
there is affirmation of the principle of unity in one set of ideas, and the
primacy of Party and state: ‘we should hold high the great banner of
socialism with Chinese characteristics. Under the guidance of Deng
Xiaoping Theory and the important thought of Three Represents’.
The ‘Three Represents’ is a doctrine continuous with Mao Zedong
Thought, i.e. the ‘masses’ and the ‘people’ are the objects with which
it is imperative to merge oneself. The doctrine demands that:
‘Party officials, especially leaders at all levels, must be incorruptible

and self-disciplined and share weal and woe with the masses. At
all times and under any circumstances, Party officials must follow
the Party’s mass line, adhere to the objective of serving the people
wholeheartedly, and take benefiting the people as the starting and
end points of all their work’.4
The ‘people’ is a monolithic object of worship. Similarly, tradi-

tional western communist positioning of working-class people as all
brothers and sisters to each other points to an element of idealised
sibling relationships in the picture of class ‘solidarity’, a term which
carries a resonance of being fused with the revered collective. Words
and images which suggest these kinds of merger should ring warning
bells; they point to a regressive wish to lose the self in the imagined
safety and strength of the perfect collective, built around an omnipo-

tent parent.
Here we have one example of an issue which arises repeatedly
in trying to understand the psychology of politics. This critical
analysis of the term ‘solidarity’ must not be taken to delete other
things which can be said about it. ‘Solidarity’ with others need not
convey a regressive impulse, but a genuinely selfless commitment to
the legitimate interests and well-being of others in one’s group. In
pointing to the possible unconscious meanings of our actions, we
are not saying that the political and moral reasons people may have
for acting as they do are always superficial rationalisations concealing
the unconscious needs which are the real drivers of behaviour. In the
complexities of human behaviour, moral principle and unconscious
need may act side by side. Indeed, the capacity to act in a principled
way is as much based on inner psychic life as is the capacity to act
in selfish or destructive ways. What is crucial is the strength of the
secure and realistic parts of the psyche relative to that of the insecure
and defensive parts, and the prospects for strengthening the former
and containing the latter.
So insofar as communist ideology has been seen by some as an
idealistic vision of a good parent/state protecting and respecting its
citizens, it is not difficult to understand its appeal. However, in the
Stalinist realities of communism in practice, the safety on offer came
to be conditional upon conformity or quiescence, with a consequent
erosion of dignity. But the regime persisted, supported as massive
orthodoxies often are, not only by coercive means but psychologi-
cally by splitting. For every idealised good object there is always a ‘bad
object’, sometimes hidden, sometimes dominant. Once communism
came to power, the bad object was divided into two: the capitalist
enemy without, and the enemy within, manifest in deviation and
disloyalty.
Still, amongst the conforming there remained some genuine belief
in the ideology, in the experience of full identification with an image
of the state as an omnipotent, idealised parent, who knows what is
best and must be obeyed. And despite the wide dissolution of such
Ideologies 73
attitudes across the former ‘communist bloc’, there is continuing

influence of socialist ideologies in the twenty-first century, which,
when psychologically understood, suggest a phantasy of a good par-
ent emerging and taking beneficent charge of things.
FASCISM
Interestingly, that could also be a description of the state of mind
expressed in fascist ideology. There, the longed-for ideal object is once
again linked to the state, although in fascism there is typically a char-
ismatic leader into whose persona the state (and party) is absorbed,
as is also the case in some communist examples, such as Mao Zedong
or the Kim dynasty. In his merger with the state (whether there could
be a female fascist leader is an important question we will touch on
shortly), the leader is mandated by the people to use the power of
the state to protect them and to make them strong. (The term ‘fas-
cism’ is derived from the Latin word fasces, bundles of sticks with an
axe projecting which were carried into the Roman court by officials
to represent the authority of the state.) The glorified, omnipotent
leader/state is a perversion of a protective father. The ‘goodness’ of the
fascist leader is an illusion based on splitting, but is seen by some to
offer a promise of safety in membership of the societal family.
So acute is the fear that even this family may not be safe that it
has to be defined in very restrictive terms, to keep out all possible
sources of threat. All totalitarian mindsets are sustained by a vision
of safety in purity. Potentially overwhelming anxieties about con-
tamination, collapse or some other threat to the self are managed
by projecting the threat into others who must then be kicked out or
kept out of the family. Even then, they can remain a threat, and so
the need for a final solution. While fascism has its enemies within
its own camp, its construction of an external bad object which must
be annihilated is one of the most extreme and destructive states of
political mind, though as other genocides show, this catastrophic phe-
nomenon can also develop without much of the rationalisation which
an ideology provides. ‘External’ in this context does not necessarily
mean physically outside of a national boundary; in the anti-semitism,

apparent homophobia and hatred for groups (such as the Roma)
often associated with fascist and neo-fascist groups, the enemy is very
much within the fascist’s community, though ‘outside’ of the group
defined as ‘us’.
Overall we can therefore see how a deeply anxious state of mind
may be vulnerable to fascist propaganda. Another point to note about
the psychology of fascism is the likely role that sexuality and gen-
der play in its development. The hatred of women in Nazism, and
the Nazis’ preoccupations with perverse sexual fantasies, are well-
documented.5 The fascistic hatred of weakness and dependency can
be seen as part of a desperate hyper-masculinisation which is staving
off fears of a collapse of the masculine self. The possibility of a female
fascist leader is therefore small, unless it was a woman who could
save the fascist male self by somehow donating to it the experience
of invincible power.
VIOLENT TAKFIRI ISLAMISM

Our next example is remarkably similar to fascism in its psychologi-
cal base. The form of political violence which has emerged in recent
decades and rapidly become the major security threat in many parts
of the world has no single source and may be hard to understand
in its apparent randomness and meaninglessness. This, of course, is
international terrorism, which at present we know mainly though
not exclusively in its ‘Islamist’ variety. Actually we should not call it
‘Islamist’, unless we add some qualifying adjective such as ‘takfiri’
to indicate the connection with a very regressive, dogmatic form
of Islam. Even then, the link with the religion of Islam is conten-
tious. Certainly, the connection of terrorism to religion in the sense
of spirituality is very limited. Islamist terror has connections with
subcultures in Muslim communities, because that is where most of
its purveyors and supporters come from. But there is no evidence that
terror in the name of Allah is committed as the result of a spiritual
Ideologies 75
experience of any sort, let alone a specifically Islamic one, nor as the
outcome of studying Islamic texts.
For most people, it is barely comprehensible that such a creed
could attract as many people as it has done, and continues to do,
across the world. However, we can get closer to an understanding of
its appeal if we analyse it as an ideology reflecting a state of mind. If
we can get beyond the fear and loathing which it inevitably produces
in us, we can see that it gives voice to an overwhelmingly fearful
condition.
The appeal of ‘Islamist’ ideology rests on two psychological foun-
dations. The first is an internal state of great fear. The terrorist does not
feel at all safe, and the infliction of terror on others is an attempt to
prevent the terrorist’s own self being consumed by terror. At the core
of this state of mind is a fear of punishment, not in a reality-oriented
way as the consequence of something which the individual has actu-
ally done that is wrong, but as a background state of mind rooted in
unconscious phantasy. The phantasy is of a brutal and infinitely pow-
erful superego figure, which is constantly seeking absolute obedience
and is ready to punish savagely any deviation.
In their exhortations to potential recruits, and to each other,
Islamist terrorists refer constantly to the absolute necessity of obey-
ing the will of Allah. The rewards of doing so are unending, as are the
punishments for not doing so. Their Allah is a monstrous god who
insists on the annihilation of all non-Muslims, and who provides,
where it may be useful to do so, for this to be preceded by their sub-
jection to unspeakable torture. The category of non-Muslims includes
those many Muslims who takfiri Islamists do not recognize as ‘real’
Muslims (because they do not accept the terrorists’ primitive defini-
tion of Islam), so simple profession of faith is not enough. Safety
can be found only by obeying those who say that Allah demands this
commitment to the violent creation of the global caliphate, since
any Muslims who object that this is not Allah’s will cannot be real
Muslims. Anyone listening to those dissenting voices will be booking
their own passage to hell.
You do not have to be a psychologist to think that anyone who

joins a group based on this ideology must feel angry and estranged
from the world around them, and must have some kind of impulse
towards violence. Again, though, there are many ways in which such
feelings can be expressed, most of which would not require the per-
son to subjugate themselves to the boundless power of a terrible god.
This subjugation is the specific psychological feature of this kind of
terrorism, which in many other respects is very similar to criminal
gang membership or, in some cases, to non-ideological mass kill-
ings (as in school and college shootings). Complying with Allah’s
wishes enables the recruit to feel safe. This is a psychic defence, one
which psychoanalysis has called ‘identification with the aggressor’.
It explains why the bullied child becomes a bully; it is as if there are
only two ways of being in the world. Either you are bullied, or you
are the bully. So you take on the aggressor role in order to escape from
being attacked. The escape for the individual here is to merge the self
into the merciless superego, and to do its work by trying to eliminate
the ‘kuffar’ (non-Muslims) and all apostate Muslims.
This does not require the presence of an actual external aggressor.
A person can feel threatened or persecuted by her or his superego,
that agency of the mind in which our capacity for moral judgment
resides. As we have seen, our superegos are based primarily on our
identifications with the authorities which are present in our early
lives – primarily caregivers but also other adults, and cultural and social
forces in the wider environment. In ‘good enough’ development, the
superego can take the form of a loving and protective presence in
the mind, as well as sometimes being a frustrating and judgmental
one. But in the absence of secure identifications with trustworthy
‘good objects’, the cruel and vengeful superego can become a
dominant force in the make-up of the individual. When projected
into the world outside the individual, it can create the experience of
a savage god, and drive someone into an active identification with
its mercilessness.
The second psychological foundation of Islamist terror is an
intense identification with other Muslims, particularly those who,
Ideologies 77
it is believed, have been the victims of ‘kuffar’ hostility to Islam.

This leads to the proud claim of revenge for past victims, and the
protection of potential future ones, by attacking the kuffar world. The
specific reasons for this identification may differ between individuals,
depending on their personality and their social context, but they seem
to stem from an internal sense of victimhood and humiliation, which
is then projected onto an abstract idea of ‘the Muslims’, and which
can be transcended through the heroic act of revenge. The lack of
any authentic connection with the actual community of Muslims is
reflected in the number of Muslim victims of Islamist terror, and in
the way that the terrorist ideology reserves the right to decide who
are ‘real’ Muslims and who are not.6
It may still be hard to understand how someone could go through
these mental convolutions on the path to murder, but ‘the heart has
its reasons’, and we must try to understand them – otherwise we are
faced with an incomprehensible evil, or an inexplicable reversion to
barbarism. While Islamist terror is easily seen as barbaric, it is also
a modern phenomenon, as the philosopher John Gray has argued.7
Psychologically, it must be seen as both. Its sometimes slick promotion
via social and online media, its global recruitment strategies, and
its calculations of effect in a mediatised world, are the works of a
contemporary organisation and a ‘postmodern’ outlook. Yet its
medieval combination of sadism and self-righteousness is regressive,
both psychologically and societally. It involves the return of a pre-
modern superego, and a degree of unravelling of the ‘civilising
process’ as the sociologist Norbert Elias called it,8 which has gradually
pacified human society over the ages.
POLITICAL VIOLENCE AND

PSYCHOLOGICAL DAMAGE
This analysis of the ideology of violent takfiri Islam finds it to reflect
a state of mind dominated by a fearsome, primitive superego. This
superego is projected out, onto the image of Allah who must be
obeyed. While it is true that a skewed reading of Islamic texts can
claim to furnish evidence of the existence of such a brutal god, the

driver within the individual to subject the self to that god is not the
Islamic text, but the individual’s unforgiving, punishing superego.
And to produce a violent terrorist there must also be, as we noted
earlier, some impulse to violence, which allies itself with the theolo-
gised superego, so that defending the god and the ummah, imagined
as a global community of Muslim siblings, becomes an excuse for
murder.
The connection with Islam is that Islamic texts are used, very selec-
tively, to elicit and justify the violence demanded of recruits by the
terrorist groups they have joined. But this could not happen without
those recruits being in states of mind that were hospitable to terror,
that were actually in need of an external system of ideas or code of
behaviour that could offer some safety and dignity by turning the
terror onto others and making a hero of the recruit. This is the under-
lying need common to terrorists of very different ideologies. The
perpetrators of the two most deadly attacks in the West by ‘extreme
right wing’ terrorists, Timothy McVeigh (Oklahoma City, 1995) and
Anders Breivik (Oslo and Utoya, 2011), shared with Islamists the
same preoccupations with purity and punishment (as revenge and as
warning to others) against a backcloth of what they saw as an epic
struggle for national or world domination. The overall phenomenon
of ‘international terrorism’ is ideologically diverse but psychologi-
cally has key features common to most cases, around the intensive use
of splitting and the strength of paranoid and omnipotent phantasies.
This suggests that this type of violence is the product of a convergence
or intersection between certain ideologies and certain types of psy-
chopathology. Damaged individuals, who are vulnerable perhaps to
many kinds of lies and delusions, come into contact with particular
lies and delusions organised as an ideology, which promises them
redemption from their pains through a cathartic attack on the world,
and the acquisition of hero status within a wonderful community.
The political purpose of the terrorist activity is typically imprecise
and distant compared with the powerful personal benefits which are
imagined.
Ideologies 79
The internet has obviously facilitated this toxic intersection

between personal unwellness and violent political extremism. The
scope for the conversion of psychological disturbance into politicised
violence was severely restricted when it depended on word-of-mouth
and the circulation of books and documents. Now, it is a global trend
generating ‘lone actor’ terrorists and people willing to act on behalf
of terrorist organisations, or to join their existing operations, as in
the international recruitment to the Islamic State.
One practical implication of this is that there is, or should be, a
strong mental health element in counter-terrorism work. National
counter-terrorism strategies such as the UK’s Prevent recognise this in
principle, though there is little or no elaboration of how that might
be best realised in practice. Or, to look at it from a longer-term,
more preventive angle, there is a counter-terrorism element in men-
tal health work, especially the work that is focussed on children and
families, in that therapeutic help brought to a child or young per-
son struggling with insecurity and rage may help to prevent poten-
tially violent impulses being given political expression later on – or
pseudo-political as we should call it in those (many?) cases where a
personal catastrophic deficit in safety and/or dignity is more important
as a driver of the violence than any external world situation.
Fortunately, not all those drawn towards violent groups are actually
going to be violent. Any one ideological destination may be reached
by a variety of different routes through personal psychological
development, since the ideology may have several different points
of emotional entry. Some recruits may focus on the utopian visions
which the ideology presents as the ultimate goal; others may be more
enthused by the idea of an apocalyptic and violent struggle with the
existing order. A psychologically diverse collection of individuals may
therefore find themselves united for a while under the same ideological
banner. However over time their different internal relationships to the
ideology may be a source of political differences. In the decades of
the 1960 and 1970s, Marxist and neo-Marxist ideology influenced
many millions of people world-wide in very different situations, and
for varying reasons. The political trajectories of those people in the
subsequent decades varied considerably, suggesting that they had

different psychological profiles underlying their earlier involvements
in Marxism which subsequently put them on different paths. The
person who has internalised some realistic, good-enough parental
and authority figures, and so has some internal reservoir of safety
and dignity, may be more tolerant of complexity and limitations in
the pursuit of political goals than someone for whom the ideology
represents a longed-for good experience which they have known only
in phantasy, and which must be grasped by any means if it is ever to
be attained.
THE VIOLENCE OF IDEALISM

Whereas classical communism found its idealised ‘good object’ in the
totalitarian state, the ideologies of socialism when it is an insurgent
force within capitalist societies find a ‘bad object’ in the allegedly
totalitarian system of international capital from which they demand
freedom. The ‘good object’ in an ideology of opposition to the status
quo must be less concrete, more a product of the imagination, which
opens up a very wide range of possible formulations of the political
objective. And if we look at the ideologies of many such groups, we
find something of wider importance in the psychological analysis
of ideology: the appeal of an ideology can be enhanced by the ease
with which it can give expression both to idealisation, as in idealistic
values, and to destructive impulses, as in the sanctioning of violence
to achieve the ideals and in the perversion of the ideals themselves.
This concerns a state of mind to which a regressive part of our
unconscious constantly pulls us: having the cake and eating it. We can
enjoy an idealistic fervour, and feel morally superior, while also giv-
ing ourselves permission to vent our destructive anger. Aggression
becomes the righteous pursuit of justice. A simple theory of the need
to destroy the existing order can legitimise the acting out of violent
impulses towards diverse authorities.9
Such legitimations often involve a theme of major importance
in many political conflicts, and one by no means restricted to the
Ideologies 81
ideologies of the ‘Left’, that of victimhood. As in most populisms, a

poorly defined ‘people’ are presented as the victims of the system,
and the violence of riots is justified as initiating the liberation of this
‘people’. An in-depth psychological analysis is not necessary for us to
see the arrogance of this ‘vanguardist’ approach: the activist is a self-
appointed saviour of the people. But with a psychological focus we
might also note that in these ideologies the sense of moral superiority
is strengthened by the identification with a victimised group. Once
again we see the importance of a rhetoric of victims and victimhood.
LIBERAL DEMOCRACY
Let us turn now to the ideology which those of us living in lib-
eral democracies may not spontaneously think of as an ‘ideology’,
because it is our ‘common sense’, a set of principles which we often
take for granted as defining the best kind of society. If we take the
same approach to it as we have done to the various ‘-isms’, will we
arrive at the same sort of critique, the same exposure of the defences
and perversions to be seen in the state of mind which the ideology
expresses? To some extent, the answer is yes. One feature of this ideol-
ogy is its tendency to underplay the more destructive sides of human
nature, a tendency which can amount to denial, a defensive refusal to
acknowledge the extent to which antagonisms can develop or persist
even in situations where there is no external reason for them to do so.
The internal drivers of negativity and conflict sit uneasily in the more
rationalistic versions of liberal democratic thought, for which the
continuation of tensions around religious and ethnic differences in
basically free and democratic societies is hard to explain.
We might also detect a measure of narcissism in the individualistic
tone of some strains of this ideology (which, like the other major
ideological formations we have discussed, is actually a broad collec-
tion of different positions). Liberalism can offer space to neo-liberal
refusals of collective responsibility, although this might be attenu-
ated or partially displaced by genuine concern for others and by an
accompanying rhetoric of ‘one society’, as in the philosophy of the
‘one nation’ mainstream of the Conservative Party in the UK and

similar parties in other countries. Overall, insofar as it merges on one
of its sides with neo-liberalism, the liberal democratic outlook should
attract the same psychological (and political) critique as applied to
its – misleadingly named – ‘neo’ offshoot.
It may also, on its ‘social democratic’ side, show a mild version of
the idealisation of the state we have noted in socialist ideology. In the
UK, the most stable feature of public opinion since regular intensive
polling began in the 1970s has been the idealisation of the National
Health Service (NHS). We could see it as a kind of ‘chosen glory’ in
British political culture. This has persisted despite severe cuts to its
resourcing, and despite many occasions when evidence has emerged
of the presence within it of professional malpractice, incompetence
and bad management. The basic principle of ‘cradle to grave’ care for
all continues to be for many people the touchstone of good politics,
a transcendent value represented on earth by the NHS and by other
socialised systems of health care. The flaws of such systems are more
likely to be attributed to inadequate resourcing than to the fallibility
or quality of some of their staff. Even politicians of neo-liberal
leanings subscribe to the NHS ideal (out of electoral necessity if not
personal commitment), overlooking that despite the deep inroads of
marketisation, it is governments which fund and manage systems like
the NHS, and it continues to be a branch of the state.
So idealisation does occur in liberal democratic ideologies,
whether the idealised object is society itself in its natural harmony,
the health service for all which it supports, or perhaps some aspect of
democratic process or its institutions. Just as the analysis of political
ideas finds a kind of idealism in most ideologies, so a psychological
analysis of ideology finds a measure of idealisation in all.
However these objections to some variants of liberal democratic
ideology can be raised from within other variants of the same broad
ideology. In some theories of liberal democracy, the inevitability of
conflict and the importance of community are basic principles, and
the liberal democratic polity is identified as the most effective frame-
work for the containment of human quarrelsomeness, and for the
Ideologies 83
assertion of human community and everyone’s responsibility to it.

These variants suggest that in particular form(s), liberal democracy
could emerge from our psychological analysis with a much more
positive evaluation than the others we have discussed.
Key to this is the question of splitting and the related processes of
projection and idealisation. Liberal democracy can avoid the process
of splitting because it does not demand belief in a perfectible world
or in the realisability of ideal institutions. It can own its bad parts, and
so does not have to project them and see them elsewhere. It does not
need to restore the purity of a lost past, nor to create a new utopia, as
it knows these cannot exist.
Many readers might object at this point. Do the preceding para-
graphs not reveal the inherent bias of the approach taken here? Surely
this is not objective science, when someone with a commitment to
liberal democracy employs a psychological analysis which finds in
favour of their own ideological position? And more specifically, is not
the psychoanalytic school of psychology, drawn on here, very much
a part of European intellectual traditions and so genetically related to
the dominant ideology of Western democracy?
There is only one way of answering this challenge, which is to state
that if psychology is a ‘science’, it is a moral one, and that in studying
the psychology of politics we are bound to make moral and political
judgments. If ideologies can be read as states of mind, then they can
be analysed in terms of how they express different modes of being
in the world and of relating to the people in it, modes which have
different moral qualities.
Furthermore, we can also reaffirm the principle that our basic
psychological needs are universally shared, and that whether or not an
approach can be described as ‘Eurocentric’, ‘Western’ or ‘Orientalist’ is
less important than whether it has succeeded in throwing some light
on how these needs are responded to in different political contexts.
(The same would go for approaches which might be described as
‘Afrocentric’ or ‘Occidentalist’.) Of course, some people would say
that the concept of psychological universals is itself a creation of a
Western ideology which sees the rest of the world in its own image.
The important debate around this question continues, though not in

this book.
In any case, it is not as if a psychological judgment in favour of
liberal democracy is the end of the matter. It is rather a starting point,
since the ideology of liberal democracy is far less prescriptive than
the others we have examined – it proposes a certain kind of container
for society, but not its contents. Depending on their broader cultures,
institutional histories, styles of governance and many other factors,
liberal democracies differ in how they provide psychologically for
their citizens – compare the US with Scandinavian countries, for
example. In particular the extent to which they address the core needs
for safety and dignity, and how they do so, will vary.
THE APPEAL OF VICTIMHOOD

There is a long-standing debate amongst psychologists and social
scientists about whether aggression and destructiveness are an
in-built part of human nature or the product of adverse experiences –
deprivation, frustration, separation and so on. Psychoanalytic
psychology has its own version of this debate, and its own methods
(such as the close observation of very young babies) for gathering
evidence relevant to it. Interesting though it is, we won’t be looking
into this debate in this book, for two reasons. One is that whatever
its original source, aggression is present in the human infant from
very early on, as psychoanalytic observational work has shown, so for
the purposes of political psychology we must accept its ubiquitous
presence in human affairs and proceed from there, rather than ponder
on whether we have fallen from a condition of primal innocence.
The second is that the intensity and quality of destructiveness in
individuals varies hugely in ways that are clearly related to cultural
and political conditions, so the most important task is for us to
understand the specific social drivers of the most damaging forms of
aggression if we are to improve the management of conflicts.
Nonetheless, there is reason to suggest that, primally innocent or
not, we all carry an internal conviction of our own innocence. This
Ideologies 85
can have been generated in experiences where we were actually the

recipients of some hurtful action by another, but more fundamentally
is an intrinsic quality of narcissistic experience. Acquiring the capacity
to acknowledge guilt is a key element in the developmental process of
growing out of the narcissistic defence. Within the bubble of narcis-
sistic omnipotence, the reality of another self who is capable of suf-
fering is at most faintly recognised, and so the question of whether
you have hurt another does not really arise. So at all those frequent
times when a state of mind might be heavily influenced by its narcis-
sistic underbelly, there may be a surge of belief in one’s innocence.
Hence we can all potentially claim ‘I am innocent!’ with an element
of subjective truth attached to it. Once, we were all innocent, though
not as in the idealised childhood of purity.
This account of the latent plausibility and urgency with which we
might claim innocence can help to understand the prominence and
potency we have seen in many ideologies of the theme of victimhood.
The Muslim as the global victim, the oppressed proletariat of Marx-
ism, the ‘left behind’ enthusiasts for certain types of populist rhetoric,
the neglected ‘people’ as the hero of all populisms, are all defined by
their positions as innocents suffering from others’ bad doings. The
importance of victimhood, and our surprising attachment to it, is a
major factor in the generation of conflict. Moreover, in the dynamic
of competitive victimhood, when opposing sides each claim to be
the greater victim in order to attract support from neutrals, and to
convince themselves of their case, they become more entrenched in
indignant aversion to negotiation and compromise.
5
PROSPECTS
If the current state of global politics is viewed with a psychological

eye, it seems no better – perhaps worse – than when surveyed from
more usual standpoints, from which we see failed and failing states,
environmental crises, burgeoning terror, rising authoritarianism and
so on. We have seen in previous chapters how some basic elements
of human nature lie within the recurrent tragedies of oppressive rule
and violent conflict, and how they complicate all efforts to move
towards better societies. At the risk of disheartening the reader, we
will move towards a conclusion by flagging up some major issues in
the current political landscape which we have not discussed so far
but each of which shows again the importance of our inner worlds
in shaping political developments.
ENVIRONMENTAL CATASTROPHE
There is widespread denial about climate change. This is not the
denial of the climate change deniers, who are relatively few in
number; rather it is the attitude of the many who do not dispute
there could be a problem but turn away from it or distract them-
selves elsewhere. This is not outright cognitive denial, but a denial,
88 P r o s p e c t s
through one’s behaviour, of the scale or urgency of the problem.

Since climate change, and other environmental problems, pose
threats to our physical home in the universe, and to our food sup-
plies, it would be reasonable to assume that we will have stabs of
deep anxiety about the potential losses involved. We project power-
ful images of fertility, strength and generational renewal into the
natural world, and then consume those images (‘reintroject’ them,
in the language of psychoanalysis) to support our confidence in the
world as able to support us. Visions of damage and contamination
across the whole world environment, and of wild and unpredictable
weather, can dissolve the sense of security which we gain from the
constancy of landscapes and oceans, and the routines of seasons and
harvests. Pictures of melting ice floes and plastic-infested waters
present us with damaged objects, for whose impending destruc-
tion we are responsible. And the subsequent guilt is about a planetary
catastrophe; climate change activists are, perhaps inevitably, in the
business of promoting apocalyptic scenarios.1
For some people there is an appeal in contemplating the drama of
apocalypse, but most of us just want to turn away, towards something
more hopeful. This is a matter of unconscious as well as conscious
anxiety. Psychoanalysis tells us of very primitive, catastrophic fears of
dying or disintegrating which can beset the baby in its helplessness,
and which we continue to carry inside us unconsciously throughout
life. Scenarios of threatened catastrophe can reactivate these primitive
fears, feeding a hidden, internal resistance to confronting the threat
as it exists in the external world. So our denial is not only at the level
of a conscious reluctance to change our pleasurable and easy habits of
consumption, in the service of which we deliberately marginalise our
awareness of how bad the problem is, and allow ourselves to think
that it may turn out to be not so bad. There is also an unconscious
resonance to the prospect of disaster which reinforces our avoidance.
We may adjust our behaviours a little (e.g. we recycle or try to shop
responsibly), but environmental issues remain on the edges of most
political contestation.
Prospects 89
FAKE NEWS
Our political cultures are awash with suspicion of, and often con-
tempt for, those involved in politics. There is a broad cultural context
for this in the decline of deference, a process which has been going
on at least since the 1960s era of protest and counter-culture. So
this is not a recent development; by the 1990s a cynical outlook on
politics was established amongst many journalists and reflected in
the tone of their coverage in the mainstream media. But this century
has seen the negativity about politics become much wider and more
emphatic, not least because, in an ironic twist, the political media
themselves have become objects of deep suspicion. The concept of
‘fake news’ brings a new level of threat to democratic politics because
it attacks the legitimacy not of particular politicians or policies, but
of the whole public sphere of debate and deliberation, leaving people
free to withdraw from argument with anyone they disagree with,
and to ignore any critical scrutiny of their actions. In the age of the
web and social media, falsities can obviously proliferate freely, and
pose a major problem for democratic deliberation by confusing and
misleading us. But the even greater threat probably comes from the
accusations of falsity made in order to close down debate and inquiry,
in effect to close down politics.
While there are many examples of politicians who have acted in
ways that deserve public opprobrium, and of mendacious journalists,
something further is needed to push people into the incoherence
of the radically anti-political politics which have emerged in recent
years. It is as if we have become collectively unable to trust, an
attitude which if it gained sway over the economic, transactional
sphere of life would bring most things to a halt. It may yet do so
in the political sphere. How do we understand this crisis of trust?
Drawing on the approach taken in this book, we would assume that
there is always some form of internal driver alongside the external
ones. As many commentators have suggested, cynicism and hostility
towards elites is partly grounded in feelings of abandonment and
betrayal. On some occasions, such feelings may be fully understood

and justified as responses to actual events and situations. On others, as
we noted in Chapter 2, we have to ask whether some residue of fears
and resentments from early development is at work. In any case, the
full extent and implications of the collapse of trust are not yet clear,
and the process is ongoing.
THE GROWTH FIXATION

In wealthier parts of the world, political publics seem to be mes-
merised by the ‘economy’ and particularly by economic ‘growth’.
Most mainstream political discourse takes growth to be axiomatically
good and necessary, such that there is a serious problem if it does
not occur at a vigorous rate. Headlines that say economic indicators
are ‘flatlining’ worry governments. Of course, the vision of human
civilisation proceeding to ever-greater abundance is attractive, and
economic growth is important, but strategies for the enrichment
of human societies should not be guided by a purely quantitative
index which does not discriminate much between different areas of
growth, and so lacks any kind of moral compass. Moreover, many
of the problems which, we are told, growth is going to enable us to
solve could also be tackled by redistributive measures. Despite the
increasing number of voices now calling for a basic re-evaluation of
growth ideology, we seemingly continue to subscribe to a phantasy
about the ‘economy’ as a huge force that surrounds us. It usually
evades our attempts to control it, and it demands that we pacify
and please it. If we can do its bidding, it grows and ‘booms’, and is
libidinally exciting and permissive. More often, it has an admonish-
ing, oppressive superego identity, telling us we have done wrong,
we have hurt it, and now we must suffer so that it can recover and
grow again. At all times, we are being asked to stay in an anxious
and compliant role in relation to the ‘economy’, as one might with
a demanding and volatile parent.
Prospects 91
GROWING INEQUALITIES
Finally, there is the problem of growing inequality, focussed on in recent
years by, amongst many others, the geographer Danny Dorling, the
economist Thomas Piketty and the epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson
and Kate Pickett. The general emphasis in this book has been away
from economic issues, towards questions of leader-follower relations,
cultural identity and ideological mindset. ‘Economistic’ approaches
to politics have been unfavourably compared here with psychosocial
ones, alongside which they seem simplistic and rationalistic. So it may
seem surprising that we should end on the topic of socio-economic
inequality.
In discussing how the psychological defences of narcissism, split-
ting, projection and so on can shape our experience of politics, we
noted the origins of these defences in experiences of unsafety and
humiliation. If it were possible to make early and skilled interventions
into the family lives of all babies and young children whose emotional
development was at risk, our politics, and societies as a whole, might
look a lot brighter. Hopefully, access to sophisticated psychotherapeu-
tic help will increase across the world, with benefits to individuals
and their communities in all areas of life, and this ought to be a strate-
gic political priority. But the problems we have been describing in this
book, though located in the minds of individuals, need addressing
at systemic and primary level; they are too endemic to be dealt with
otherwise. The most fundamental primary level is that of culture, and
how cultural values shape parenting and family life. While cultures
are always changing, changing them by design in specific directions
is likely to be a slow and uncertain process. However, some cultural
values can be strongly influenced by social arrangements, and some
of those can be directly changed through political action.
Specifically, economic inequality can be changed through politics,
and there are reasons to think that reducing inequality would impact
on the socio-cultural life of a society in ways that would change the
values and the experiences of people in that society. These changes
could lead on to experiences of enhanced safety and dignity, and the

political benefits which would flow from that. To illustrate this, we will
take a very brief look at the influential work of Wilkinson and Pickett
(2009), which unlike most of the other studies and sources we have
considered is a piece of number-crunching, mainstream social science.
It is of particular interest though because of the direct connections
they make between economic inequality, culture and psychology.
Common sense would lead us to think that all kinds of problems
are worse in poor societies than in wealthy ones, that the overall
wealth of a nation is the most fundamental factor in determining the
quality of life and contentment it can offer its citizens. Basic measures
of societal well-being such as life expectancy and the self-reported
happiness of the population are lowest in the poorest societies. But
once basic levels of material wealth are achieved, the links between
wealth and welfare disappear, and another piece of everyday wisdom
takes over: money can’t buy happiness, nor even health. The affluence
of the developed world sometimes seems to be a curse rather than
a blessing. So instead of comparing nations in terms of their overall
wealth, Wilkinson and Pickett approached the question of wealth
and well-being from a different angle. They took a sample of richer
countries, and compared them according to the distribution of wealth
within each nation.
Nations can be ranked using various formulae in terms of how
unequal they are on the dimensions of personal and household
income. Using one of these formulae, Wilkinson and Pickett found
many strong relationships between inequality and indices of social
and health problems. Life expectancy, infant mortality, the incidence
of mental illness, drug use, educational performance – all were sig-
nificantly worse in more unequal societies, no matter how wealthy
they were. This relationship found at the international level between
inequality and problems also appeared when the researchers com-
pared states within the US.
So how can inequality be more important than absolute levels of
wealth in determining the well-being of a nation? Wilkinson and
Pickett are not psychologists, but found that to explain their findings,
Prospects 93
it was necessary to take a psychological turn. They drew on research

in the field of health psychology, from which they took the concept
of ‘social-evaluative threats’. This refers to comparisons of the self
with others in which there is a risk of negative evaluation, that is of
feeling that one’s self or one’s life is not as good as others’. These are
potent health-damaging stressors. In more unequal societies there
will be more opportunities for people to make invidious comparisons
between themselves and others, and to feel that others are more
secure, more respected, more happy and so on. This is the basis of
the link between inequality on the one hand and health and social
problems on the other. Crucially, those in the upper strata will be
affected as much as those lower down the income scale. This is an
area for further research, but Wilkinson and Pickett suggest that
more unequal societies are likely to be more competitive, and to
produce higher levels of insecurity about status for everyone. Also,
as the psychoanalytic theory of groups would tell us, if disturbing
feelings of insecurity or humiliation are strongly felt amongst some
members of society, this will affect all. Those feelings can be projected
and shared widely, while the sense of being in a divided and unjust
society will seriously reduce the potentially containing influence
which societal membership, through the sense of belonging, can have
on all our anxieties.
They had also noted an apparent paradox in the survey data that
they had reviewed when exploring health trends. People often report
that stress levels of various kinds are increasing, yet another trend in
the data indicated that levels of self-esteem are rising. Surely under
greater stress, people will feel less good about themselves? This can
be explained, however, as Wilkinson and Pickett noted, by seeing
the measures of self-esteem as a reflection of an increasing recourse
to a narcissistic defence, in the face of intensifying social-evaluative
threats.
Their hypothesis and their data offer clear support for the ideas
advanced in this book about the key role, in shaping political outlooks
and actions, of the safety and dignity principles, narcissistic defences
and other regressive aspects of psychological functioning we outlined
in Chapter 1. So, at the end of a book on the psychology of politics,

in which the main argument has been for more attention to be paid
to the power of our minds and characters to shape our politics, we
come to the hopeful possibility that pursuing a particular political
agenda and focussing on socio-economic inequality might be one
contribution to shaping our minds, and to help build up our emo-
tional capital (which feeds back into politics). We have focussed on
the core psychological problems of unsafety and humiliation, and
how these play out in our relations to leaders, in our national identi-
ties, and in our views about how society should be organised (our
ideologies). It is likely that gross social inequalities are a significant
source of these problems, which can have very toxic effects when
mobilised in politics, whether in response to a leader’s malignant
charisma, in defensive-aggressive collective identities, in the brutali-
ties of terrorism, or in other ways. Against these toxins, we should
note that there are countervailing emotional resources which human
cultures around the globe spontaneously reproduce in their children,
to varying degrees – the capacities to feel safe, to trust, to tolerate
humiliation, and to contain anxiety, guilt and grief.
FURTHER READING
Bar-Tal, D. (2013) Intractable Conflicts. Socio-Psychological Foundations and Dynamics.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Influential theory of conflict, based
in social psychology not psychoanalysis but converges with Volkan’s ideas.
Bowlby, J. (1988) A Secure Base. Abingdon: Routledge, revised edn., 2005. Key
papers by Bowlby on attachment theory and its applications.
Erikson, E. (1950) Childhood and Society. Harmondsworth: Penguin, revised edn.,
1965. Erikson’s classical psychosocial text; includes an essay on Hitler’s
childhood.
Frank, J. (2012) Obama on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President. New York: Free Press.
One of Frank’s insightful series of psychoanalytic studies of presidents.
Freud, S. (1921) Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. In Penguin Freud
Library,Vol. 12: Civilization, Society and Religion. Harmondsworth: Penguin, revised
edn., 1991. A good place to start reading original Freud.
Fromm, E. (1949) Man for Himself. London: Ark, revised edn., 1986. Old-fashioned
in title and to some extent in content, but Fromm’s work on ‘social char-
acter’ is still well worth reading.
Greenfeld, L. (2016) Advanced Introduction to Nationalism. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Makes the case for the link between national identity and dignity.
Guntrip, H. (1971) Psychoanalytic Theory,Therapy and the Self. London: Karnac, revised
edn., 1977. Explains the major differences between classical Freudian
theory and the ‘object-relations’ development of psychoanalysis.
96 F u r t h e r r e a d i n g
Hoggett, P. (2009) Politics, Identity and Emotion. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. An exploration
in more scholarly detail of many of the key issues in this book and
others.
Lindholm, C. (1990) Charisma. Oxford: Blackwell. An integration of sociological
and psychoanalytic thinking about charisma, with case studies.
Lindner, E. (2006) Making Enemies: Humiliation and International Conflict. Westport, CT:
Praeger Publishers. One of the few psychological studies which puts dig-
nity/humiliation at the centre of its theory.
Mintchev, N. & Hinshelwood, R.D. (2017) The Feeling of Certainty: Psychosocial Perspec-
tives on Identity and Difference. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave. Psychoanalytic
essays on the psychic bases of prejudice, dogma and fundamentalism.
Mitchell, J., ed. (1986) The Selected Melanie Klein. Harmondsworth: Penguin. A col-
lection of many key readings in the Kleinian development of Freud.
Richards, B. (2007) Emotional Governance: Politics, Media and Terror. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan. Offers a framework for understanding public feeling, with
responses to terror as a case study.
Rustin, M. (1991) The Good Society and the Inner World. London: Verso. Essays on Klei-
nian psychoanalysis, politics and philosophy by a leading psychosocial
thinker.
Volkan, V. (2004) Blind Trust: Large Groups and their Leaders in Times of Crisis and Terror. Char-
lottesville, VA: Pitchstone Publishing. Volkan’s theory of large group
dynamics, with many major case studies.
Volkan, V., Itzkowitz, N. & Dod, A. (1997) Richard Nixon: A Psychobiography. New York:
Columbia University Press. Another demonstration of how psychoanalytic
psychobiography can help make sense of individual leadership.
Winnicott, D. (1986) Home Is Where We Start From: Essays by a Psychoanalyst. Harmond-
sworth: Penguin. Very readable and wide-ranging essays by a key figure in
post-Freudian psychoanalysis.
Yates, C. (2015) The Play of Political Culture, Emotion and Identity. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan. Links psychoanalysis with cultural studies in the analysis of
electoral politics.
NOTES
CHAPTER 1
1 For a number of critiques of this rationalism, see Hoggett and Thompson
(2012).
2 This phrase, famously coined by the Hungarian/American psychiatrist and
psychoanalyst Thomas Szasz in 1961, was at the centre of the critiques of
psychiatry which in the late twentieth century began to have some influ-
ence on professional practices in the mental health field, though medicalised
approaches continue to be predominant.
3 We can see here the meaning of the term ‘object relations theory’. It derives
from the philosophical terminology in which a relationship is seen as com-
prising a ‘subject’ who is in relation to an ‘object’. It is a view of the mind
as consisting of the set of relationships which different parts of the self have
with people and things in the external world and with each other, i.e. with
the various ‘objects’ of their experience.
4 This conjunction of splitting and projection is expressed in the formidable
technical phrase ‘paranoid-schizoid position’, which is the Kleinian term for
the earliest states of mind, and regression to which is the core problem in
adult psychological functioning.
5 For a searching examination of social work in this regard, see Cooper (2018).
98 N o t e s
CHAPTER 2
1 www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/02/duterte-kill-rid-drugs-170202073247
477.html, accessed 27.7.18.
2 www.reuters.com/article/us-philippines-drugs/philippines-duterte-says-
hes-been-demonized-over-drugs-war-idUSKBN1CU1QY, accessed 27.7.18.
3 www.hrw.org/tag/philippines-war-drugs, accessed 27.7.18.
4 See www.ipsos.com/ipsos-mori/en-uk/politicians-remain-least-trusted-
profession-britain, accessed 11.9.18.
5 See https://cms.edelman.com/sites/default/files/2018-01/2018%20Edel-
man%20Trust%20Barometer%20Global%20Report.pdf, accessed 11.9.18.
6 This was in his essay ‘Politics as a Vocation’, reprinted in From Max Weber. Essays
in Sociology.
7 For many of us there is some degree of difference between our outward per-
sona and inner character, and this difference is likely to be greater for public
figures whose public image is deliberately crafted. Still, the outside is usually
heavily influenced by the inside, so basically we are looking at the relationship
between leader character and public emotion. I choose to use the term ‘charac-
ter’ here instead of ‘personality’. In some contexts the two are synonymous, but
‘personality’, since it is often assessed by behavioural checklists and self-report,
may be less able to capture the idea of a deep inner self. Also ‘character’ has con-
notations of the person as a moral agent, and so is appropriate for psychological
analysis in political contexts, especially in the study of leaders.
8 This phrase, an important one in the psychosocial literature, was first
deployed by the cultural theorist Raymond Williams – see his 1977 book
Marxism and Literature.
9 www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/jensstoltenbergbombingmemorial.
htm, accessed 27.7.18.
10 Fear: Trump in the White House (2018), the veteran journalist’s intensively
researched book on the Trump administration, was an instant best-seller.
CHAPTER 3
1 The influence of this constructionist view is also due to the book The Invention
of Tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, in which historians
consider the construction of various nationhoods in Britain, the British
Empire and Europe.
2 Greenfeld’s very readable 2016 book, Advanced Introduction to Nationalism,
summarises the conclusions drawn from many years of research previously
set out in three major books, work which is inevitably over-simplified here.
Notes 99
3 While ‘race’ is not a scientific category for distinguishing between groups of

people, it has a strong hold on popular understandings of human difference.
Most of today’s ‘ethno-nationalisms’ are a specific subtype of ‘ethnic national-
ism’ as defined by academics.
4 See Lauenstein et al. (2015).
5 I develop this argument more fully in the book What Holds Us Together (Richards,
2017).
CHAPTER 4
1 Not all Marxists would agree with this simplification. Some have wanted
to define Marxism as a science, which complicates matters because science is
widely seen as the antithesis of all ideology. Some readers of this book will
want to know whether the psychology which it is based on is scientific or
not. That is a very reasonable question, since we should always be checking
the veracity of things we read or hear. But we would have to clarify what is
meant by ‘scientific’, some definitions of which are too narrow. In the human
and social sciences, different forms of inquiry should not all be subject to
the same methodological strictures. Ultimately, the main question is whether
they generate beneficial understandings of human behaviour which can help
to improve how we do things.
2 See Fromm (1949).
3 Macpherson (1962), p. 3.
4 http://cbi.typepad.com/files/full-translation-5-yr-plan-2011-2015.doc,
accessed 21.7.18.
5 See, for example, Theweleit (1987) and Wieland (2015).
6 This analysis is set out in more detail in my chapters in the books edited by
Adlam et al. (2018 Vol. 1) and Mintchev and Hinshelwood (2017).
7 See Gray (2003).
8 See Elias (1939).
9 See, for example, Gerodimos (2015), for an analysis of the belief and state-
ments of anarchist groups who rioted for three weeks in December 2008.
CHAPTER 5
1 See Hoggett (2011) for a discussion of some of the complexities involved in
this, and Weintrobe (2013) for a selection of articles on the psychology of
climate change.
REFERENCES
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Bar Tal, D. (2013) Intractable Conflicts. Socio-Psychological Foundations and Dynamics.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bowlby, J. (1988) A Secure Base. Abingdon: Routledge, revised edn., 2005.
Cooper, A. (2018) Conjunctions. Social Work, Psychoanalysis, and Society. Abingdon:
Routledge.
Elias, N. (1939) The Civilising Process. Oxford: Blackwell, revised edn., 1994
Erikson, E. (1950) Childhood and Society. Harmondsworth: Penguin, revised edn.,
1965.
Frank, J. (2004) Bush on the Couch. Inside the Mind of the US President. London:
Politico’s.
Frank, J. (2012) Obama on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President. New York: Free Press.
Freud, S. (1921) Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. In Penguin Freud
Library,Vol. 12: Civilization, Society and Religion. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991.
Fromm, E. (1949) Man for Himself. London: Ark, revised edn., 1986.
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Gerodimos, R. (2015) The ideology of far left populism in Greece: Blame, vic-
timhood, and revenge in the discourse of Greek anarchists. Political Studies
63, 608–625.
102 R e f e r e n c e s
Gray, J. (2003) Al Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern. London: Faber & Faber.
Greenfeld, L. (2016) Advanced Introduction to Nationalism. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
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bridge University Press, revised edn., 1992.
Hoggett, P. (2011) Climate change and the apocalyptic imagination. Psychoanalysis,
Culture and Society 16(3), 261–275.
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Macmillan.

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THE PSYCHOLOGY OF POLITICS

How do some political leaders capture popular support? What is the

Barry Richards is Professor of Political Psychology in the Faculty of

People are fascinated by psychology, and what makes humans tick.

Titles in the series:

The Psychology of Driving The Psychology of Happiness

The Psychology of Retirement The Psychology of Politics

For further information about this series please visit

1 The heart of politics 1

The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing.

OUR PSYCHOLOGICAL ERA

Yet despite the growing influence of psychology in education,

hyper-rationalist self needs to feel that it knows itself, and a psychol-

say or do (whether they are ordinary citizens or national leaders)

resources for meeting life’s demands. This approach is based primarily

THE SAFETY PRINCIPLE

the goodness of the mother to be able to continue to trust her when

to preserve an experience of the individual’s mind as a safe place.4

THE DIGNITY PRINCIPLE

the philosophers Axel Honneth on ‘recognition’ (1995) and Avishai

Under that influence, the humiliation of dependency can be

INSIDE AND OUTSIDE: THE IDENTITY

might include a precarious sense of safety, or low standing levels

In some cases, depending on the nature of the perceived threats, the

THE PSYCHO-CULTURAL CONTEXT AND

what kinds of outcome to a conflict we are able to imagine and to

with fatalities, a lot of emotional effort may be invested in helping

‘POPULISMS’: A KIND OF EMOTIONAL

properly call emotional intelligence, typically in its lack of empathy

THIS SHORT BOOK

RAGE AND RETRIBUTION

These are statements made during a successful campaign in 2016 by

AUTHORITY AND THE SUPEREGO

punitive enforcer causing much painful guilt. Undoubtedly, guilt is

THE EXTERNALISED SUPEREGO

up in efforts to internalise restraint, and to build our own internal

However, developments in psychoanalytic thinking since Freud

AMBIVALENCE TOWARDS AUTHORITY

legal proscription of hate speech. However there is reason to think

THE CHANGING STYLES OF LEADERSHIP:

in the more stable democracies to underplay the importance of lead-

However, while this is clearly a mixed development, we might wel-

THE LEADERS WE DESERVE?

Amidst all this tragedy, I am proud to live in a country that has

of statements could conceivably have been made by a national leader

to be expressed. It followed a claim that this was not naïve with a

though his particular character was perhaps also necessary to break

demands of economic life, diplomacy, and so on. While the default

LEADING INTO BATTLE

number of other adverse effects. A large group is vulnerable to this

THE ‘POPULIST’ PHENOMENON

For many, economic recession is the key explanation, bringing as

AND SO TO TRUMP AND KIM JONG-UN

of which to arrive could later be blamed on the other, or explained in

NATIONS AND NATIONALISMS

Firstly, some definitions. By nationalism, we will mean a state of

a A sense of belonging to a particular nation (national identity);

This definition begs all sorts of questions, particularly about how

that essentialist views capture more of the psychological reality of

1 The heart of politics 1

dignity/humiliation dynamic as played out in national and interna