“Rational argument can be conducted with some prospect of success only so long as the emotionality of a given situation does not exceed a certain critical degree. If the affective temperature rises above this level, the possibility of reason’s having any effect ceases and its place is taken by slogans and chimerical wish-fantasies, That is to say, a sort of collective possession results which rapidly develops into a psychic epidemic.”
– Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self
With the anniversary of the January 6th attack on the US Capitol, news headlines around the country seemed to be sounding an alarm not heard since the advent of the Civil War. Former President, Barack Obama, released a statement saying that: “…our democracy is at a greater risk today than it was back then,” In an op-ed for the NYT, former President Jimmy Carter wrote: “I now fear that what we have fought so hard to achieve globally — the right to free, fair elections, unhindered by strongman politicians who seek nothing more than to grow their own power — has become dangerously fragile at home.”
According to a recent article in the New York Times, Perry Bacon Jr., a Washington Post columnist, wrote that American democracy is facing “an existential crisis.” Election law expert at the University of California, Irvine, Rick Hasen, commented: “This is a house-on-fire moment, and the priority should be trying to find bipartisan paths toward compromise.”
Is the US witnessing the dying gasps of the great American experiment? Are we on the verge of a second Civil War? Or are we struggling through the political manifestations of a much deeper changing of the gods? If we look at current US politics through a psychoanalytic lens, can we understand the rising groundswell of authoritarianism that is being played out in regional governments and small town politics as well as on a global scale, as a regressive pull to maintain or re-instate the status quo of a by-gone era and if so, is there an antidote to this psychic epidemic?