For this reason, I prefer to start with something Dr. Frank says in his 2007 book about former President George W. Bush. In it, Dr. Frank says, "Simple mania involves love and the need to deny [either] dependency or loss of a loved person; [but] megalomania involves hate and a need to triumph over paranoid fears" (p. 202).
Basically, the paranoid-schizoid position activated in infants' experience of their mothers, or mother-figures, "involves hate and a need to triumph over paranoid fears" of abandonment by the mother, or mother-figure.
No doubt Trump voters in the 2016 presidential election tended to be motivated by "hate and a need to triumph over paranoid fears" of abandonment by the mother, or mother-figure. No doubt abandonment feelings are powerful.
Now, in his 2011 book on Obama, Dr. Frank operationally defines containment as the antidote of abandonment (p. 235). So Trump voters should explore ways in which they can cultivate containment of their abandonment feelings. No doubt this is easier said than done.
In the 2008 presidential campaign before the news of the economic crisis broke, then-Senator Obama excelled in delivering speeches expressing the manic tendency involving love.
Now, when we turn our attention to former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's most fervent supporters in the 2016 presidential election, we should not be surprised that they tended to be characterized as gravitating toward simple mania involving love, as distinct from hate, as Dr. Frank describes this. (Disclosure: I voted for Hillary. But I could not be described as one of her most fervent supporters.)
At first blush, because the manic tendency involves love, not hate, we might tend to see it as preferable to hate.
But in his 2007 book on Bush, Dr. Frank says, "Both megalomania and [simple] mania exhibit three overtly defensive characteristics: [1] control, [2] contempt, and [3] triumph" (p. 202).
Therefore, in the final analysis, manic tendencies involving love also call for containment. In his 2011 book on Obama, Dr. Frank discusses containment extensively (pp. 94-96, 98, and 235-36).
Concerning working through acute abandonment feelings, see Susan Anderson's self-help book The Journey from Abandonment to Healing, 2nd ed. (New York: Berkley Books, 2014).
Susan Anderson delineates a fourfold sense of personal identity that strikes me as virtually a formula for self-containment: (1) Face, accept, and celebrate your separateness as a person (i.e., as a person separate from the person lost through abandonment, including your experience of abandonment as an infant). (2) Celebrate the importance of your own existence. (3) Face and accept your reality (i.e., the reality of the loss due to abandonment). (4) Enhance your capacity to love.
In summary, oral culture 2.0 appears to be here to stay, stirring the feminine dimension in the depths of the human psyche. On the surface level, the news media are likely to continue animating the noosphere with reports of events and developments that may prompt us to feel threatened. Under the circumstances, the paranoid style in American politics that Trump exploited in his 2016 presidential campaign will probably continue to be exploited in American politics, because it resonates with the paranoid-schizoid experience of abandonment in the depths of the human psyche.
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