Hypnotic Influence of a Leader

The rise of authoritarianism in political leadership worldwide has been a troubling development especially in democratically constituted nations like the United States, where their constitutional democracy was nearly overthrown by an incumbent president. Parallels to the rise of fascism in Europe in the early part of the 20th century were often voiced in the media. Psychoanalysts were sought out by journalists seeking to diagnose a leader that they called a pathological liar, a narcissist, and a moron. In the ISFN Webinar series titled “Listening with Ferenczi” (2021), psychoanalysts endeavored to analyze the underlying dynamics of the nature of the apparent hypnotic influence the leader had over the populace.

Psychoanalytic principles, usually applied to the understanding of individual dynamics, can also be fruitfully applied to understanding large group dynamics that may lead to the election of populist charismatic leaders with a far-right platform. The four contributors in this issue provide interesting analyses from different perspectives. Together they comprise a clear, cogent, and comprehensive interpretation of the Trump Phenomenon. The discussants' discourses complement each other, and strands of ideas are woven together to form an appealing narrative explicating the meteoric rise of a political outsider who galvanized the American public like no other political hopeful in American history, rightfully deserving the moniker of Phenomenon, bursting onto the political stage out of nowhere. The incredulity that many politicians and media figures expressed begged the question “How did this happen?” The papers in this issue propose psychoanalytic hypotheses of the undercurrents in the individuals' and the polis' psyches that Donald Trump identified and successfully exploited