Discussion of “A Battle Cry for Our Moment: Revisiting the Two Analyses of Mr.Z”by Jenny and Peter Kaufmann

When I was initially asked by the editor whether I would be willing to write a discussion of this paper, I requested that I first have the opportunity to read it and decide if it was a paper I wanted to spend time and effort thinking and writing about. More important was the question of what I could add that came from my own experience as a psychoanalyst. After reading it I not only said yes but felt that my experience was particularly relevant because the paper linked the Two Analyses of Mr. Z, the Kohut paper that most reached and influenced me, to the current political When I was initially asked by the editor whether I would be willing to write a discussion of this paper, I requested that I first have the opportunity to read it and decide if it was a paper I wanted to spend time and effort thinking and writing about. turmoil created by the presidency of Donald Trump, an individual who I have spent much time and effort describing and classifying as having what I called a dangerous grandiose paranoid character. Not only had I moved away from the influence of my classical training through the pathway that Self Psychology provided, I had in addition written a chapter in the book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, published in April 2017. This combination made it not only appropriate but useful for me to add my comments to this very timely, energetic, and accessible paper. My aim is to broaden the authors’ contribution with the response of an individual psychoanalyst who had lived through not only classical psychoanalytic training but an analysis by an authoritarian classical training analyst, followed by a liberating exposure to Kohut and Self Psychology but not without adding my reservations about some of its assertions. Furthermore, although I shared the Kaufmanns’ sense that the presidency of Donald J. Trump, from the entirety of his first election campaign, his four years of destructiveness to this country, and the persistence of his dictatorial authoritarian p