Political Leaders and Psychohistorical Approaches in a Time of Borderline Polarization

Since the breakup of the Soviet Empire in 1989, followed by Yugoslavia, many otherwise secure countries have been collapsing and splitting apart. The maps in the Middle East are continually being redrawn, more often than not, in blood. Scotland is poised to break away from the UK, Catalonia from Spain, and here at home several states toy around with secession. Much of this turmoil on the macro level seems to dovetail with my present focus on the micro. Whether the two are related in some fashion is tantalizingly beyond the present scope. In this paper my micro-purpose is to delve into the deeper recesses of our public life and explore the intra-psychic fissures. The key concept for this quest is a relative newcomer to psychoanalytic nomenclature: the borderline. Coming to the fore in the 1970s, the term addresses the widespread splitting both within the self and in relationships, manifest in either-or, all-or-nothing ideation, along with an impulsivity that further distances actions from consequences. These and related features-are conducive to an anything-goes politics of us-against-them. Richard Hofstadter's 1965 "paranoid style," of political leaders is recalled and modified to a borderline-mode factored into a psychohistorical dynamic which construes politicians as delegates for group-fantasy. Recent presidential elections offer a rich field for testing the aptness of this approach. Then, after brief detours into how Freud and Darwin disrupted polarizing forces in their own cultures, we revisit political turmoil during the Woodrow Wilson years for historical similarities and differences in which repeated recourse to purity serves as a bridge word. The inquiry closes with reflections on how psychohistory may avoid pitfalls in further probing this vexing state of affairs and primes the reader to ponder whether the disaffected young males drawn to ISIS are functioning on borderline levels. If so, we have a plausible bridge between macro and micro realms.