“Leftists losing it” as “acting out”: A psychoanalytical perspective
Résumé
The present article is an attempt to come to grips, conceptually, with the strange phenomenon of “leftists losing it” in the immediate aftermath of the presidential election victory of Donald Trump in the United States at the end of 2024. This has manifested itself in the guise of numerous videos posted online, showing individuals behaving impetuously in various ways, such as crying and shouting uncontrollably and repeatedly in the face of Trump’s election win. It is proposed that these instantiate what is known in psychoanalysis as “acting out”, that is, resorting to (pseudo-) actions as a substitute for coherently speaking about the event in question. Before an interpretation of the relevant videos is provided, “acting out” is unpacked in psychoanalytical terms such as repression, the unconscious, trauma, remembering and transference, with reference to the work of Freud and Lacan. Insofar as “acting out” entails repetition, a theoretical detour is undertaken through Freud’s conception of the “death instinct” to understand its significance for the recent phenomenon of “losing it” or “melting down”. Against this backdrop, an interpretive account of the behaviour witnessed in the videos referred to is offered, and its political implications are articulated with the help of Arendt’s claim that political power consists in its continued renewal through speech and action, through which the space of appearance is constituted. Where this reciprocal relation between power and the (political) space of appearance is absent, one cannot coherently speak about the “political sphere” in the authentic sense; hence, the video-soliloquys of the individuals “acting out” may be shown as failing the test for being “political” in the Arendtian sense. In conclusion, the historical context within which this occurred is fleshed out, with the emphasis on the fact that, by all accounts, those voters who supported Trump were overwhelmingly Christian, while many of those who opposed him were “woke”, that is, dismissive of everything traditional, including Christianity, as well as what is considered “toxic (white) masculinity”.
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