Finding empathy without sympathy for Donald Trump

Historians have sometimes been ridiculed as mere list-makers and stackers of facts, compulsive and myopic antiquarians. But while ambitious researchers venture to study vast landscapes, they eagerly recruit related disciplines: neuroscience for the deep history of humanity, genetics and linguistics for population movements, geography for struggles for resources and terrain, biology for resistance to disease and epidemics, economics for the means of production and trade and commerce, technology for war, transportation and discovery. And so on.

Whatever their quest, and however stratospheric the big picture, historians also never escape the chronology and details that bring them back to earth. They don't shy away from biography either. Knowing how a life unfolds often explains why individuals' lives have taken particular courses.

Historians and biographers have profitably exploited theories of personal psychology that have illuminated how their subjects thought and felt and how they perceived themselves at crucial and consequential turning points.

Psychology as an element of biography

Thus, the psychological biographies of world historical figures such as Augustine of Hippo and Martin Luther, Vincent Van Gogh and Mohandas Gandhi, Henry Ford and Adolf Hitler show how the seriously beleaguered individual, for the better in terms of inspiration or catastrophically at worst, it has changed the lives of the rest of us.

Sources and subjects

In the case of the presidents of the United States, those colorful, powerful, often inspiring and sometimes tormented souls, biographers find that psychological theory helps them mine rich veins of explanation.

In this regard, the writings, contemporary reports, and recollections of important and complex figures of former presidents such as Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Richard Nixon have attracted inspired writers whose in-depth biographies inspire current psychological and clinical theories. .

While their subjects faced personal challenges and torment, these biographers note, their subjects changed the course of history.

The devil is in the details

Presidents sometimes write and speak in revealing ways, and when they do, historians and psychiatrists pay close attention. This is where they find their best material.

However, with an eye on the present and the future, presidents usually weigh their words carefully. Our latest outgoing president, however, stands out among his predecessors in that he cannot help but speak revealingly. Naturally, historians, biographers and psychiatrists have looked coldly at this torrent of self-revelation. As Psychology Today summarizes, President Trump has defiantly flipped the presidential script, making chaos and deliberate combativeness the new normal that manifests itself in hostile briefings, high rates of staff turnover, and cultural exchanges that seem intended to divide the nation.

The ghosts of bad tuning

Condemnation or approval belongs to politics and political campaigns. In this particular case, let's keep that in mind.

But the diagnosis belongs to psychiatrists and clinicians once they become biographers who trace the life history of their subjects. Mary Trump, the ex-president's niece, herself a clinical psychologist and close personal observer, wrote a psychobiography of her uncle, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the Most Dangerous Man in the World (2020 ). Personal anecdotes reveal his uncle's strange character and strange behavior; therapeutic discipline and careful clinical observations help him and others understand it.

Alongside his best-selling book is a brief article by veteran psychotherapist Jeffrey B. Rubin, in a recent issue of the psychohistorical journal Clios Psyche, titled How Donald Trump's Childhood Distorted His Personality and Threatens American Democracy.

Empathy without sympathy: explaining hostile behavior

To explain Trump's hostile and often bizarre behavior, Rubin relies on an essential element of good psychotherapy, namely empathy, which he describes as the unwavering effort to understand even this most unsympathetic character.

Fred Trump, Sr. regularly referred to his fragile young son as a “killer” and a “king.”

Source: Fred Trump, Sr., 1986, public domain image courtesy of Bernard Gotfryd, via Wikimedia.

Rubin observes how, throughout his life, Trump was haunted by the emotional ghosts of his past, those of an austere, harsh, perfectionist father and a withdrawn, unnurturing mother. Both parents were cold, distant and ill-suited to raising children.

For the father, Fred Trump Sr., Rubin reserves other adjectives: deceitful, cruel, racist and domineering; in short, a high-functioning sociopath who deprived his son Donald of basic, life-affirming emotional nourishment. It is no coincidence that Fred Trump delivered a strangely mixed message to his abused young son: You are a killer, the father regularly said, you are a king.

From troubled teen to fucked-up adult

Thus, Donald became an ungovernable and bullying child. Not surprisingly, his parents sent him to a military academy. The long-suffering mother said she was relieved. But far from home, young Donald felt even more abandoned, humiliated and punished, feelings he never stopped striving to overcome.

For all but the luckiest children of neglectful and hurtful parents, a lifetime of unhappy relationships and a lack of moral responsibility often follows. Donald Trump himself attributed the source of his disturbance in his book, Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and Life (2007): That's why I'm so screwed up, he testified, I had a father who pushed me quite hard. .

Cutting this lengthy biography short, we now know that this troubled, fragile, and needy child grew up to become a convicted felon, an accused insurrectionist, and a tried rapist.

A diagnosis of nieces

Mary Trump's biography is also a case history. She notes that her uncle meets the nine criteria identifying a narcissistic personality disorder, as listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

These include grandiosity, envy, arrogance, an excessive sense of entitlement, a need for admiration, and fantasies of unlimited power. (Hoping to fulfill the father's prediction, he proclaimed himself king several times.) Those who pay attention to the tirades on social media will see the negative traits on display almost every night. Personality disorders are generally considered incurable.

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