The Seduction of Simplification

Psychoanalysis, Trump, Gaza, and the Allure of the Absolute (Vol. 4; Issue 23)

Surprises emerging in the course of patients’ journeys provide endless fascination for practitioners of depth psychotherapy. And they offer the same for patients—except for, perhaps, the most painful ones. When striving to understand themselves, and how they relate to others, individuals will make unexpected turns. Consider revelations springing from work with these (fictionalized) patients:

A woman believes her marriage causes her distress, only to learn that early attachment failures and unfulfilling work are the primary issues. A man’s conflicts with his male roommate trigger anxiety attacks, and he realizes his roommate reminds him of his father who died suddenly a year earlier. It’s what causes his anger. A married couple, convinced their arguments surround finances, identify an underlying sadomasochistic theme responsible for their difficulties.

Human subjectivity is unimaginably complex. Our conscious experience represents but a thin layer of our knowledge. Falsely attributed to Freud (Green, 2019), an iceberg metaphor of the mind is sprinkled throughout the writings of many psychoanalysts. It represents the mind’s three levels as:

The conscious (peaking out the barely visible tip).

The preconscious or what’s been called “pre-reflective structures of experience” (Stolorow, 1988, p. 336) lies just below the surface, and;

The unconscious residing in the vast submerged portion.

The incredible intricacy of subjectivity creates overwhelm. As a result, we simplify. As just noted, patients’ presentations of “my husband bugs me,” “my roommate drives me crazy,” and “we fight about money” represent understandable, yet inaccurate, perceptions. In recent years, we witness the same oversimplification emerging on the geopolitical scene.

Many recently celebrated the New York Times headline reading:

Trump Guilty On All Counts.

Unequivocally true. A jury of his peers found Trump guilty of all 34 counts of falsifying business records in an attempt to cover up a sex scandal, which, if publicized at the time, might have cost him the 2016 election.

But, if you peer beneath the surface, fissures appear. District Attorney Alvin Bragg combined numerous misdemeanor counts into felonies in a manner possibly giving Trump an avenue for successful appeal. Judge Merchan should’ve sequestered the jury, some say, another possible fault with the conviction.

You’ve read the simplified, dichotomous views on each side. Progressives consider the verdict a long-awaited dent in Trump’s shiny Teflon coating; right-wingers join with Trump in proclaiming:

This is a scam. There's a rigged trial. The Democrats weaponized the American system of justice.

Elon Musk, his right-leaning behavior nearly triggering vertigo, reacted to the Trump verdict by describing the trial as “motivated by politics rather than justice.” He warns that convicting someone over “such a trivial matter” damages people’s faith in the American legal system.

Ironically (and, perhaps, tragically), these statements directly contradict that same legal system’s current prosecution of President Biden’s son Hunter and of Senator Bob Menendez (accused of bribes in the form of gold bars and envelopes of cash). The American justice system prepares corruption charges against Rep. Henry Cuellar for allegedly accepting $600,000 in bribes from foreign oil and gas companies. These politicians are Democrats.

On the more progressive side, many celebrate the conviction for Trump’s mobster-like behavior finally having consequences. Regardless of the outcome of the conviction, Trump still faces charges of election interference on state (Georgia) and federal levels, as well as for illegally retaining classified documents. Robert Reich, former secretary of labor, decries the billionaires supporting the Trump campaign. In an opinion piece for the Guardian, Reich reports that Trump told a group of oil executives that, if elected, “he would immediately reverse dozens of environmental rules and green energy policies.” Reich notes, additionally, that “most of the benefits of Trump’s tax cut went to big corporations like JPMorganChase and wealthy individuals.”

Entering an arena wherein metaphors like shark-infested waters sound like Beverly Hills swimming pools, the 8-month war in Israel gives rise to another set of simplicities. On the day after Hamas’ October 7, 2023 invasion, an acquaintance texted me:

This isn’t complicated,

implying the failure of Israel and other nations to create a two-state solution led to the horrific attack.

Not complicated?

The layers of causation contributing to the tragic Gaza situation possibly exceed our cognitive capacities for comprehension. They include archeological debates, the 1922 collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the subsequent British occupation, the ensuing failure of repeated, international efforts to create sovereign Israeli and Palestinian states, and the embroilment of both Israelis and Palestinians in complex victim-perpetrator dynamics. The latter phenomena create endless cycles of violence, with the current one being particularly brutal.

And why do only pro-Palestine protests embroil college campuses? The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) kill civilians in Gaza, for sure, but the Russian military murders even more. Russia, unlike Hamas, does not block escape routes for civilians fleeing the conflict. A February 2024 Associated Press (AP) article estimated that “tens of thousands” of civilians have been killed in the Russia-Ukaine war.

Further, where were these protesters during two recent, well-documented genocides of the Muslim Rohingya people in Myanmar? The first began with the military crackdown in October 2016, and the second has been raging since August 2017. Somewhere between 13,000 and 43,000 Rohingya people have been systematically hunted down and murdered.

Arguably more than an era of simplification, we live in what philosopher Guy Debord (1967/2000) calls The Society of the Spectacle. In his book of the same title, Debord defines the spectacle as:

Affirmation of all human life, namely social life, as mere appearance.

And he warns that:

When the real world is transformed into mere images, mere images become real beings— dynamic figments that provide the direct motivations for hypnotic behavior.

The examples just noted, from Trumpism to the Israeli war, demonstrate how “mere images” become transformed into “real beings.” They reveal a mass hypnotic state. We don’t much hear about the Rohingya people because the military junta bans journalists. But Hamas’ terrorist attack, followed by Israel’s invasion of Gaza, floods all forms of mass media. The spectacular images, albeit distorted by censors on both sides, make the “living room war,” as the Vietnam War was known, a minor event. Fifty-thousand American soldiers died in that useless conflict.

The solution to our Era of Simplification, our Age of the Spectacle, lies in actively engaging in:

Critical thinking.

Is it no longer taught? Or has the spectacular simply overshadowed it?

Much like patients unravelling their difficulties in psychoanalysts’ consulting rooms, global citizens must delve more deeply into the intricacy of issues creating national and international turmoil.

No, your marital problems are not about your husband.

No, the conflicts in your apartment have little to do with your roommate.

And, no, Trumpism and Gaza are anything but simple. Much like personal difficulties, these crises require careful, reflective explorations, not spectacular, simplistic proclamations.

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References

Debord, G. (2000). The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. F. Perlman. New York: Black and Red. (Original work published in 1967).

Green, C. D. (2019). Where did Freud’s iceberg metaphor of mind come from? History of Psychology, 22(4), 369–372. https://doi.org/10.1037/hop0000135_b

Stolorow, R. D. (1988). Intersubjectivity, psychoanalytic knowing, and reality. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 24:331-337.