A (shitty) Freudian analysis of Donald Trump

Freud posited the existence of three aspects of every person’s personality that act in the subconscious. The id, the ego, and the superego. These three structures of the personality act in concert in reacting to events in our environments, deciding on goals and motivations in our lives, more examples go here. In this essay I will show how Trump’s personality has perverted goals and motivations.

The Id

The Id is our personalities’ driver for meeting wants and needs. The id doesn’t even particularly distinguish between wants and needs, that’s the job of the Ego. The id is all about getting what’s coming to you. Food, power, sex, computer games, taking a great shit, the id is like, “I wanna do that! I wanna have that!”

So, Donald Trump has quite an id; one that is unchecked perhaps in his entire 70-year existence. This goes some of the way to explain his bizarre moral obsession with Rosie O’Donnell and his surrounding himself with fashion models. Any woman who does not satisfy Trump’s desires is a threat to his id, which reins unchecked by a strong ego. A successful, popular woman who does not care about or satisfy Trump’s desire, poses an existential threat. His Id cannot make sense of such a person, and so it lashes out.

The Ego

Trump’s ego is presumably defeated. What the id wants, it gets, under the demanding gaze of the superego. The job of Trump’s ego is to fire yet another campaign manager, to … well, I don’t know what other jobs his ego might have. I don’t really want to.

Per Freud, the ego “attempts to mediate between id and reality, it is often obliged to cloak the commands of the id with its own rationalizations, to conceal the id’s conflicts with reality, to profess … to be taking notice of reality even when the id has remained rigid and unyielding.”

Trump’s outbursts make it clear there is no mediating force between what Trump wants, and what reality offers. The same can be seen in his campaign’s lack of an executive team. Trump does not take advice, Trump does not delegate power. Those are functions of the ego, and are simply absent in the face of his petulant and unyielding id. But why would it be so?

Superego

Trump the younger was raised in an environment where getting your own was the rule. That others were out to take advantage of you was perhaps the default assumption, certainly that you should take everything you can from others and avoid social and financial regulation. Fred Trump was likely concerned with very little beyond getting his own way and accumulating material possessions.

When Freud write that the superego “performs the task of seeing that narcissistic satisfaction from the ego ideal is ensured,” one wonders if he could have anticipated such narcissism as Trump’s. It’s actually kind of fascinating how perverted Trump’s whole family is (from a Freudian analytical point-of-view). It seems likely that Donald Trump has never been told “no” in his life, has never had to view consequences of his or his family’s actions. Freud asserts that the job of the superego is to reign in the id, but in Trump’s case, it actively feeds and supports the id. When the ego mediates between reality and the id’s desires, the superego provides the moral and ethical framework to do so. Trump’s superego is saying, “DO WHAT ID SAYZ!” And his ego is all, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ And with such unrestrained narcissism, Trump is reduced to an infantile repetition of denial in the face of real opposition.

Trump’s father had a song written about him by none other than American folk hero/singer Woodie Guthrie. It is not a complimentary song.

But why? What’s the point of this?

Isn’t Freudian analysis antiquated and discredited? Freud was part of a wealth and privileged segment of society, and did his work with (and on) similar people. In today’s complex culture, Freudian analysis is appealingly simplistic and as such is dangerous to those desiring and designing real progress. Do you see the analogy I am making here?