a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

In an upcoming issue, the journal of the Psychohistory Forum, Clio’s Psyche, is conducting a symposium focused on two interesting papers, one by the journal’s editor, Paul Elovitz, and one by Frank Summers, a member of Psychoanalysts for Social Responsibility. Both of the papers offer psychoanalytic interpretations of American exceptionalism, which Elovitz defines as “the idea that this is a special country whose people are a model for humanity with a special mission to enlighten others.” He continues: “This vision has inspired both the drive to improve the lives and human rights of other people and justified a sense of national superiority, entitlement, and exemption from international standards.”  Summers, who is particularly concerned with exceptionalism as it plays in foreign policy, argues that: “The narrative of moral superiority, omnipotence, and a destiny of prosperity has been used historically to justify American international intervention.”  He, too, sees a “split national self-representation”: the nation that espouses self-determination most strenuously interferes with the self-determination of other nations most consistently.  In the period from the end of WWII until 2000, Summers claims, America  “attempted to depose 40 foreign governments unilaterally and on 30 other occasions  tried to suppress nationalist movements organized against dictatorial regimes.”

Both Elovitz and Summers think that what is known from psychoanalytic theory and practice about the narcissism of individuals can illuminate –by analogy—the behavior of the American society ever since it was, so to speak, summoned into being by John Winthrop’s famous 1630 sermon: “We are as a shining city on a hill. The whole world is watching.”  They both view the idea that America is a nation assigned a task by Providence as essential to its history, connecting themselves in this way with  the coiner of the phrase “American exceptionalism,” Alex de Tocqueville, who first used it in 1835.  For both, America’s exceptionalism is America’s narcissistic character.

Summers and Elovitz use the individual/society analogy, but they operate with two somewhat different notions of narcissism.  Summers makes a case for a persistent pattern in American exceptionalist narcissism with its split self-image. The pattern is that no lessons can be learned from the interventions justified by the “shining city on the hill” grandiosity.  Critics do arise when interventions work out badly and “the cost has become great in lives and resources” (that is, American lives and resources). A pause for reflection may come  (we are actually in such a pause right now, considering whaat to do in the Middle Eat). But any “lesson” about over-reaching is quickly disavowed, and its on to the next staging area, the next intervention. A moment to think back on Vietnam and then on to invade Iraq in 2003.  Historical and political analysts have often noted the exceptionalism used to justify American foreign policy, but they do not, Summers argues, have the means to explain “why the U.S. refuses to accept constraints on its ability to control world events.”

To provide an explanation, he offers this description of a typical narcissistic patient organized around emotional investment in a self-image: “The grandiose self is erected to protect against a sense of weakness and inadequacy that cannot be consciously admitted, and a panoply of defenses protect the inflated self-image, such as the disavowal of all failures and limitations, projection of defects onto others, and devaluation of the other. …If the grandiosity cannot be protected against [slights or] assaults, the very sense of self is threatened, resulting in what [the analyst] Kohut called “disintegration anxiety.”” Although such behavior “ultimately alienates others instead of invoking the admiration the patient seeks, the narcissisitically organized individual opts for immediate narcissistic gratification over long-term self-interest.”

Summers knows –as any clinician does—that you cannot strip away or try to puncture a narcissist’s grandiose self-image; your “assault,” your slight, will be the narcissist’s exit cue, or the trigger for a major angry counter-attacking rage.  But an analyst who can empathize with a narcissist’s “longings and vulnerability” can, slowly, draw the patient toward realistic ambitions and ideals. “The analogy to work with narcissistic patients suggests that the road to the transformation of American grandiosity is leadership that directs the nation to invest in a redefinition of American identity.” The country needs a great educator/therapist.

Elovitz, too, hopes that realistic ambitions can replace the American grandiose exceptionalist fantasy, but his description of what is needed is different: “Just as a narcissistic personality is unable to realistically view the needs of others and the situation because of the lack of boundaries, the narcissistic society verges on catastrophe. Their diagnoses and treatment are similar: boundaries must be established to regulate the unregulated desires and grandiosity. For example, in the financial arena, the Glass-Steagall Act (Banking Act of 1933) had done a fairly good job of controlling excesses in the banking industry.”  I think what Elovitz means by “lack of boundaries” is that his narcissist cannot see another as other, as not himself, and recognize the other’s  feelings and experiences and culture; his grandiosity is, so to speak, cannibalizing –everything and everyone is “Mine! Mine!”  because the narcissist is the entitled exceptionalist gobbler. Summers’ narcissist is a hurt, deflated being inflating himself;

Elovitz’s is an inflated being taking up every inch of the room, excluding all others, unrelated, paranoid about being reduced or defeated. The first needs a great educator, the second a great regulator. The two essayists actually identify the two sides of a pathologic narcissistic character, which are known in the psychoanalytic literature as the inflated and the deflated (or depleted). Most narcissists are both, alternating between being grandiosely perfect and grandiosely defeated. In the grandiosely perfect mode, reality disappears and the narcissist tries to substitute his reality for it, to make reality in his image –like a God. (For people operating in this mode, we have a half-joking title now, suitable for a globalizing world: not just His Highness, but Master of the Universe.)  In the grandiosely defeated mode, the narcissist shouts loudly about his victimization –he is the most perfectly victimized person ever–while trying to find a way to reinflate himself, turn the tables, take revenge. The idea that you and your people have been singled out by Providence, that you are the chosen people of a God who has made the world in His image, is the most inflating idea humans have ever come up with –and each and every people that has discovered this cocaine-rush of an idea has become murderous living it out, rearranging the world.

Summers seems to think that if a grandiose image is available, people will go for it and become determined by it. “Born of emotional investment in an inflated national image that admits of no blemishes, the defenses of denial, projection, and devaluation of others are employed to protect the heightened but fragile national self-image.”   The theory is that an investment gives birth to a series of defenses that protect the investment –but what brought about the investment?  Why would people go for a grandiose image?  (not all people do!).  Images do not a narcissist make; narcissists make or find images to inflate themselves and deflate others.

Interestingly, neither Summers nor Elovitz look to the psychological and political situation that is crucial to why so many Americans currently subscribe to the  “beacon unto the nations” exceptionalism image –and not just as an image but as an ideology.  Investments in the exceptionalist image have waxed and waned over the nation’s history, but in the decades since the 1960s, political use of it has fused with a demographic shift toward embrace of apocalyptic and evangelical Christianity, a missionary religion. This kind of Christianity now guides our political life; the “wall of separation” that the Founding Fathers were wise enough to erect has eroded. There is no boundary. The whole national culture is newly responsive to the Republican Party, which has become a dictatorial party on Christian grounds. The Republicans (and Tea Party outliers) are currently writing exceptionalist tracts are proselytizers. As anyone can see by reading the chapter on America as a “model for the world” in her America By Heart: Reflections On Faith, Family and Flag, Sarah Palin is a self-aggrandizing evangelical proselytizer.

It takes a cohort like the Republicans to lead a citizens into constituting culture a culture of narcissism, which is a precondition for narcissism to become widely woven into the citizenry over the course of a generation or two. Every narcissist takes an individual road from childhood to adulthood, but the road has typical features because it is a road through narcissistic territory. By contrast, in a culture hostile to narcissism, and rewarding different ways of life and characterological types, narcissists rise up and flame out quickly –they are not tax subsidized while they run for the presidency.  There is the Citizen Kane ‘I am an exception’ model, and then there is the ‘we are all exceptions here! come be one with us!’ Republican Party group narcissism model.

The problem with the way Summers and Elovitz use the analogy between individual narcissists and narcissistic societies or cultures is that their sense for the macrocosm is not complicated enough. There are no one-to-one correspondences between a type of patient and a type of society. Unlike individuals, societies are big mixtures –pluralities–of people of all kinds, convictions, cultures, and characters. It is not enough to say that a culture or a society has become narcissistic and needs this or that kind of therapy –education, regulation. A societal diagnostics needs to acknowledge that a society may have a prevailing or predominating character but it will also have people, groups,  inside it that are different –perhaps dominated, but also perhaps rebellious, critical, not allured by a given image, able to think independently. Only in a fully totalitrain society is this not the case.

However, it should be acknowledged that a society that has become predominantly narcissistic does have great power to suppress, and even to suppress other types of pathological groups, ones that have become pathologically fixated on other images. Images, for example, of order and discipline, of America as a fortress keeping out all alien elements. It was an image of this sort that Hitler and the Nazis proselytized for among the Weimar Germans –an Aryan nation!  Create a Thousand Year Reich –a bigger and bigger fortress–to eliminate all the perfidious tribe that tried to infiltrate us, whose allies had knifed us in the back in the First World War. Anti-immigrant legislation appeals to this sort; and this sort of conspiracy-minded folk hold hearings designed to convince the American people that there is a perfidious tribe in their midst, Muslims, radicalizing their young, who will bring down the nation from within as “domestic terrorists.”

There are many sorts of American exceptionalism. The exceptionalism of chosenness and moral or religious superiority suits the onward Christian soldiers in our country; the exceptionalism of purity and racial superiority supports heirarchialists awaiting a Fuhrer; and some go for the exceptionalism of aesthetic greatness, charm, performance, seductiveness.  That the first one should be so often invoked now has required the support of politicized religion perversely parading as faith. This pseudo-Christianity has even trampled the original Christianity.  Jesus of Nazareth, after all, was not  a televangelical who tried to mesmerize  his followers with “The whole world is watching us!”