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World events can sometimes make niche academic areas wildly popular and bring back from the dead scholarly traditions that have come to be seen as discredited. Just as it is a good time, in career terms, to be a conspiracy theory researcher and a specialist in infectious diseases it is clear that the once stigmatized area of psychohistory is going to be making a comeback. Donald Trump almost wrecked America and the pandemic continues to make this a difficult and even tragic period to be alive. Learning what we can from these challenging times must surely be one key goal for intellectuals. The insights coming from psychohistory and psychosocial analysis must be near the top of the list of issues to address anew in the wake of Trump.
The recently published collection of essays by psychologists, historians and sociologists “Psychoanalytic and Historical Perspective on the Leadership of Donald Trump: Narcissism and Marketing in an Age of Anxiety and Distrust” edited by Michael Maccoby and Ken Fuchsman offers timely and important insights into the psychology of Trump and Trumpism. It is packaged in ways that are likely to stimulate useful debate and new social science and historical research. Freud is no more dead than Trumpism is and with the Donald off our twitter feed and Biden safely in the White House, now is a good time to think big thoughts about the challenges ahead.
The major themes and most important ideas in this book are prefigured and developed in the first three chapters: influential social scientist Michael Maccoby's essay on “marketing narcissistic leadership,” Ken Fuchsman and Molly Castelloe's interview with the great psychoanalytic theorist of narcissism Otto Kernberg and Harvard historian of science Elizabeth Lumbeck's careful analysis of the “allure of Trump narcissism” for his followers and base. Before November 2016 scholars who were doing psychohistories and using Freudian insights in social science research were on the defensive, forced to make the