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ABSTRACT: Supreme political ambition has frequently been motivated by a single-minded quest to attain "power-over," which in itself may compensate for deep-rooted feelings of insecurity and humiliation. Authoritarian domination serves the grandiose, retaliatory narcissism of such powerful "leaders," who subjectively experience sadistic satisfaction in destroying, and/or forcing into submission, "enemies" with little power to resist. In this paper, such latent motivations in the "foreign policy" of three recent leaders are examined.
Freudian depth-psychology remains an under-utilized tool in interpreting motivation and personality of recent American "leaders" who have chosen to deploy massively destructive military force on large civilian populations in places like Serbia, Iraq and Afghanistan. A president may deny (or repress) his own destructive hostility, projecting it onto "the other." Splitting-and-projection readily enables a clear definition of an "enemy" nation, whose population as a whole may have to endure "collateral damage." As psychoanalyst Vamik Volkan has elucidated, in extreme situations (such as the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks), both "leaders" and "followers" may regress to such splitting mechanisms: "we" are all-good, blameless- and they, as one war president claimed, maliciously "hate our freedom." Such group-regression, Volkan noted, occurs when the citizenry of a nation abandon mature, inductive rationality and succumb to such dangerously over-simplified, defensive emotional states.1
Here I am focusing on the urge for, and exercise of, "power-over" as a manifestation of compensatory narcissism (a term I prefer to Volkan's "reparative narcissism"). As to the latent motivations of high-ranking policy-makers in presidential administrations, political scientist Harold Lasswell concluded long ago that unresolved, intrapsychic conflicts may be re-enacted, in rationalized form, in controversial (and sometimes disastrous) presidential policies.2
As psychoanalyst Erich Fromm (1941) recognized in the rise of European fascism, sadism is symptomatic of the "dominance-submission" psychology of the authoritarian personality: "the world is composed of people with power and those without it. The very sight of a powerless person makes him want to attack, dominate, and humiliate him."3 In The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973), Fromm elaborated further: "For the sadistic character there is only one admirable quality, and that is power.... The [non-sexual] sado-masochist has been called the 'authoritarian character,' translating the psychological aspect of his character structure into a political attitude."4
Those individuals who single-mindedly attain such "power-over" may then...