Comment: Reciprocity and the Rise of Populism

Res Publica - It has recently been contended that the rise of populism in the US, culminating in the election of Donald Trump, vindicates liberal political theory, and the liberal political theory...     

Disavowing White Identity: How Social Disgust can Change Social Identities

Recent work finds that the sense of solidarity some whites feel with their racial group is strongly associated with their political attitudes, particularly since the election of Barack Obama. Prior work has also noted that levels of this identity have been stable across time and data sources. We, however, document a notable decline in levels of white identity in both panel and cross-sectional national survey data immediately after the 2016 presidential election. Using a two-wave panel design, we examine the factors associated with this decline. We examine whether particular emotional reactions, especially disgust toward Donald Trump, pushed some whites away from their racial identity. We also consider the possibility that some whites may have felt that Trump's election reduced perceptions of racial or political threat, therefore lowering levels of white identity. We find the strongest support for the former hypothesis; the decline in white identity was driven mostly by whites expressing disgust toward Trump. Our results highlight the effect that the political environment can have on group identities and point in particular to the significant role that disgust may play in attenuating the strength of group solidarity.     

It’s security,stupid! Voters’ perceptions of immigrants as a security risk predicted support for Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election

We analyzed two datasets to determine the predictive validity of four explanations of support for Donald Trump during the 2016 US presidential election: (a) security concerns regarding immigrants, (b) economic concerns regarding immigrants, (c) cultural concerns regarding immigrants, and (d) social dominance orientation. Results of a two‐phase study (N = 354) suggested that perceiving immigrants as a security concern was predictive of increased support for and greater odds of voting for Donald Trump three weeks later. Perceiving immigrants as an economic threat predicted odds of voting for Donald Trump, but only among liberals and there was no evidence of cultural concern or social dominance orientation (SDO) predicting support for Donald Trump or odds of voting for Trump. A follow‐up analysis of the cross‐sectional ANES survey corroborated that security concerns were an important correlate of voting for Trump, but also that SDO was correlated with having previously voted for Donald Trump. While our two‐phase study has the benefit of prediction, the cross‐sectional ANES data does not—“predictors” in these data were collected up to two months post‐election.     

A Group Analyst’s Perspective on the Trump–Clinton Election and Aftermath

Utilizing a group psychoanalytic perspective, the author examines group dynamics surrounding and generated from the Trump–Clinton election and the aftermath with particular attention to the emotional interactional relationship between the leader and the nation. Group dynamics are explored from a psychological, social, political, and historic context.     

Fifty years of American polarization and the changing roles of faith communities

The 2016 election of Donald Trump as president and the first year of his administration have been accompanied by intensified social and political divides in the United States. A comparison of today's polarization with that during the Vietnam War and civil rights movement of the 1960s suggests strategies for bridging the divides—and in particular for an expanding role by faith communities.     

The Introversion of War

This article brings personal experiences, dreams, synchronicity, archetypal amplifications, and Jungian theory to bear on issues surrounding the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States and explores some ways in which the unconscious psyche encourages reflection in the context of political projections. The introversion of war—a phrase borrowed from Jungian analyst Barbara Hannah—is placed in the context of Jung's theory of individuation as the means by which the death and rebirth of collective values, and hence the creative transformation of society, take place. Standing between my deceased father, whose values mirrored those of Donald Trump, and my 11- and 14-year-old sons, whose values are already quite different, I describe the phenomenology of how psyche seeks to create new values through experiences of death and rebirth.     

The Effect of Group Polarization on Opposition to Donald Trump

Using focus groups, we examined support and opposition for Donald Trump prior to the 2016 presidential election. When ingroup members participate in discussion, this conversation alone typically strengthens and intensifies members’ initial attitudes. We used a pre‐ to post‐focus‐group questionnaire to assess attitudes toward Trump, his campaign, and policies. We argue that group polarization influenced people’s opinions about Trump such that attitudes became more extreme after discussion with like‐minded individuals. We report changes for Trump nonsupporters for which group polarization occurred on attitudes toward illegal immigration, political correctness, the military, women, and veterans after the group discussion. For each, level of support for Trump’s views decreased. To further explore potential psychological mechanisms associated with group polarization, we employed network science methods to examine the structure of the language associated with these issues and identify potential drivers of attitude change. Results provide some support for a common mechanism for group polarization, which may be driven by language dynamics specific to individual attitudes.     

Did Donald Trump’s presidency reshape Americans’ prejudices?

Did the presidency of Donald Trump affect Americans’ intergroup attitudes? Converging evidence from recent experimental and longitudinal studies suggests that Trump’s political rise led his supporters to increase their reported prejudice toward traditionally minoritized racial and religious groups in the USA.     

To Preserve,Protect, and Defend: Masculine Honor Beliefs and Perceptions of the 2016 Presidential Candidates

We investigated the relationship between masculine honor beliefs and perceptions of the candidates vying for the presidency. Consistent with hypotheses, we found that higher levels of masculine honor beliefs were associated with more positive perceptions of Donald Trump and with more negative perceptions of Hillary Clinton. Furthermore, our results indicate that higher levels of masculine honor beliefs were associated with clear preferences for Donald Trump. Thus, our data, collected immediately prior to the election likely reflect the beliefs and perceptions that individuals took with them to the polls and help to explain the decisions that voters made on Election Day.     

Touching the base: heart-warming ads from the 2016 U.S. election moved viewers to partisan tears

Some political ads used in the 2016 U.S. election evoked feelings colloquially known as being moved to tears. We conceptualise this phenomenon as a positive social emotion that appraises and motivates communal relations, is accompanied by physical sensations (including lachrymation, piloerection, chest warmth), and often labelled metaphorically. We surveyed U.S. voters in the fortnight before the 2016 U.S. election. Selected ads evoked the emotion completely and reliably, but in a partisan fashion: Clinton voters were moved to tears by three selected Clinton ads, and Trump voters were moved to tears by two Trump ads. Viewers were much less moved by ads of the candidate they did not support. Being moved to tears predicted intention to vote for the candidate depicted. We conclude that some contemporary political advertising is able to move its audience to tears, and thereby motivates support.     

Doing things differently: an appreciation of Meltzer’s contribution

In this paper I wish to draw attention to aspects of Donald Meltzer’s ways of working which characterised his practice as a psychoanalyst and which I consider important in appreciating his originality. Several central themes are described and elaborated including: the central relevance of child analysis and the unity of child and adult analysis; the value of working in a clinical group with colleagues; the revision of psychoanalytic theory; joint research and writing projects; Meltzer’s recognition of the power of infant observation as a tool for learning; the commitment to a wider psychoanalytic culture; the particular contribution to the Tavistock child psychotherapy training. Examples from Meltzer’s written archive, both his books and papers, are used to demonstrate and illuminate these themes, alongside clinical material from child psychotherapy work brought to the author’s attention in supervision.     

A conceptual replication examining the risk of overtly listing eligibility criteria on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk

Recent scholarship indicates that explicitly listing eligibility requirements on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk can lead to eligibility falsification. Offering a conceptual replication of prior studies, we assessed the prevalence of eligibility falsification and its impact on data integrity. A screener survey collected the summer before the 2016 presidential election assessed political affiliation. Participants were then randomly assigned to be exposed to a second survey link for which they were eligible or ineligible. There was a significant interaction such that the differences between self‐reported Republicans and Democrats on outcome measures (e.g., attitudes toward Hillary Clinton), were smaller among participants that were falsifying eligibility (i.e., imposters) than those that were not (i.e., genuine participants). Moreover, for most outcomes, imposters put forth responses that were significantly different from the responses put forth by those in the political party with which imposters were pretending to be affiliated. Imposters’ responses were also significantly different from participants in the political party with which imposters initially claimed to genuinely belong. For example, those who self‐reported themselves as Democrats on the screener survey but responded to a survey for “only Republicans” (i.e., imposter Republicans), reported more favorable attitudes toward Donald Trump than genuine Democrats, but indicated less favorable attitudes toward Donald Trump than genuine Republicans. These results highlight the potential harms of explicitly listing eligibility requirements and emphasize the importance of minimizing imposter participation.     

Psychoanalytic developmental psychology and the supervision of psychotherapy supervisor trainees

While literature on psychotherapy supervision abounds, literature on supervisor supervision (i.e., the actual supervision of a supervisor trainee who is in the process of learning to supervise) is far more scarce. How might the supervision of supervision process be best understood? What is the developmental experience of supervisor trainees? How can supervisors effectively intervene when working with supervisor trainees? Those questions have been addressed in only the most meagre fashion, and guidance on how to engage in the supervision of supervision is sorely lacking. In this paper, a psychoanalytic developmental framework is used to provide a means of conceptualising the supervisor trainee experience and to suggest a programme by which supervisors can best respond to their supervisor trainees' needs. Supervisor trainee ‘unfolding’ and ‘becoming’ are captured within a developmental progression that punctuates separation and individuation processes. The place of the supervisor – in holding and containing, loosening and liberating, buffering and bolstering, and refuelling and reloading – is considered in the facilitation of supervisor trainee development.     

Analytic neutrality, anonymity, abstinence, and elective self-disclosure

Recent contributions to the psychoanalytic literature propose new ways of understanding analytic neutrality, anonymity, abstinence, and self-disclosure. They advocate elective self-disclosure by the analyst as an antidote to the allegedly game-playing quality of transference and resistance analysis. The analytic relationship, they assert, becomes unreal when attempts are made to observe the principles of neutrality and abstinence. Both are seen as ill-conceived because of the irreducible subjectivity and unwarranted authority of the analyst. These relational and interactional views are criticized because (1) they ignore the fact that transference and resistance analysis have from Freud onward been accepted as minimal criteria qualifying a clinical process as psychoanalytic; (2) elective self-disclosure carries metapsychological implications dismissing not only Freud's theory of motivation but motivation as a basic feature of human personality; (3) they do not recognize interpersonal relations as mental events and so do not consider the ego's ability to create intrapsychic representations of object relations; (4) elective self-disclosures within the empathic parameters of the analytic situation are themselves unreal compared to the reality of the patient's experience with other objects. Abstinence and neutrality as ideals facilitate maintenance of an internal holding environment or container for the analyst's countertransference.     

The Most Important Election of Our Lifetime: Focalism and Political Participation

This article argues that a psychological bias called “focalism” contributes to an overestimation of the differences between political candidates, which in turn increases participation and polarization. Focalism causes people to confuse the allocation of attention to things with the importance of those things. Because attention to politics typically centers on conflict, the result is an exaggeration of differences across the partisan divide. I test this intuition using an experimental design that provides all respondents with all the information they need to estimate how much Joe Biden and Donald Trump objectively disagreed on policy positions just before the 2020 election. I find that shifting attention—toward either those positions the candidates agreed or disagreed with each other on—influences beliefs about the differences between candidates. The effect exceeds that of identifying as a Democrat or as a Republican. Beyond those perceptions, focalism increases turnout intentions, perceptions of election importance, negative feelings towards the out-candidate, and affective polarization.     

PRIVATE THEORIES AND PSYCHOTHERAPEUTIC TECHNIQUE

That if real success is to attend the effort to bring a man to a definite position, one must first of all take pains to find him where he is and begin there. This is the secret of the art of helping others (Kierkegaard [] 1962, p.?27)

The aim of this study is to explore the importance, to the therapeutic process, of the relation between the patient's and the therapist's problem formulations and private theories of pathogenesis and cure. Four cases of young adults in psychoanalytic psychotherapy were compared, two with unequivocally positive and two with more ambiguous outcome at termination. The patients and therapists were interviewed about their private theories initially and at termination of therapy, and a qualitative comparison was made between the cases. In the two more successful cases the therapists had early in therapy perceived obstacles for the therapeutic work in the patients' ways of thinking, feeling, and relating, and made interpretative interventions focusing on these. This was not observed in the less successful cases. In the more successful cases the patient's and the therapist's private theories were more similar at termination than initially, whereas the opposite development was found in the less successful cases. One hypotheses generated is that the therapeutic process can be facilitated by a therapist listening to the patient's private theories, making interpretative interventions focusing on obstacles to the therapeutic work, including contradictions between their private theories, and monitoring the patient's reactions to these interventions.     

Speaking two “Languages” in America: A semantic space analysis of how presidential candidates and their supporters represent abstract political concepts differently

In this article we report a computational semantic analysis of the presidential candidates’ speeches in the two major political parties in the USA. In Study One, we modeled the political semantic spaces as a function of party, candidate, and time of election, and findings revealed patterns of differences in the semantic representation of key political concepts and the changing landscapes in which the presidential candidates align or misalign with their parties in terms of the representation and organization of politically central concepts. Our models further showed that the 2016 US presidential nominees had distinct conceptual representations from those of previous election years, and these patterns did not necessarily align with their respective political parties’ average representation of the key political concepts. In Study Two, structural equation modeling demonstrated that reported political engagement among voters differentially predicted reported likelihoods of voting for Clinton versus Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Study Three indicated that Republicans and Democrats showed distinct, systematic word association patterns for the same concepts/terms, which could be reliably distinguished using machine learning methods. These studies suggest that given an individual’s political beliefs, we can make reliable predictions about how they understand words, and given how an individual understands those same words, we can also predict an individual’s political beliefs. Our study provides a bridge between semantic space models and abstract representations of political concepts on the one hand, and the representations of political concepts and citizens’ voting behavior on the other.     

Counselling children and young people: A review of the evidence for its effectiveness

This paper summarises and presents the results of a BACP commissioned systematic scoping review on the research evidence on counselling children and young people. The methodology was based on a structured, hierarchical, systematic approach to searching and reviewing the research literature. Inclusion criteria defined the scope of the review in relation to a range of issues in counselling children and young people: behavioural problems and conduct disorders; emotional problems including anxiety, depression and post‐traumatic stress; medical illness; school‐related issues; self‐harming practices and sexual abuse. Four groups of counselling approaches were examined: cognitive‐behavioural; psychoanalytic; humanistic; and creative therapies. The findings indicate that the four therapeutic approaches are effective to a greater or lesser degree in relation to the range of issues. Although the findings show that there is little or no evidence for the effectiveness of some therapies for particular issues, this may not reflect the lived experience of children and young people engaged in counselling in a range of community and institutional settings. Instead, the absence of evidence is likely to reflect a lack of published studies that fit the inclusion criteria for this review.     

Relational ecologies of psychotherapy: The influence of administrative attachment on therapeutic alliance

There is now vast and multi-faceted empirical literature on the impact of relational dynamics in psychotherapy, and relationality is a central theme within contemporary psychoanalytic theories. Yet, there is virtually no literature addressing the relational dynamics around outpatient psychotherapy that influence the wider therapeutic alliance, that is the relational dynamics that unfold between clients and administrative office staff in making initial contacts and appointments, completing paperwork, negotiating payment, discussing insurance coverage, working through crisis calls, and the myriad of other forms of interaction which serve to form the relational ecology of psychotherapy. Milieu therapy or the use of supportive and structured therapeutic environments has been given significant attention in inpatient settings; however, administrative relational factors or administrative staff characteristics have seemingly been ignored in outpatient psychotherapy and psychoanalysis literatures. Many outpatient clinical practice settings involve multiple levels and dimensions of relationality between clients, administrative personnel, and therapists which shape the potential for secure continuous containment and various forms of attachment to psychotherapeutic space. In this paper, we describe several clinical illustrations of relational dynamics between clients and office staff which influence therapeutic alliance and outline the contours of our emerging idea of administrative hospitality based on relational psychoanalysis, attachment theory, symbolic anthropology, and stigma research. In doing so, we draw on our collective experience working in several outpatient clinics and insights from our current context in an urban outpatient training clinic which emphasises psychodynamic practice. Our goal is not a comprehensive analysis of the relational ecology of psychotherapy but to offer an initial exploratory account of some of the administrative relational dynamics in and around outpatient psychotherapy which go beyond the therapist-client dyad. The anthropological concept of liminality is connected to relational psychoanalytic theories to describe the important dynamics of transitional space in an overall process of relational transformation.     

Living Entities that Join and Separate Us: A Discussion of “Trump Cards and Klein Bottles: On the Collective of the Individual”

González’s paper (this issue) strives to deepen the field of psychoanalytic thinking and the growing body of theory bridging psyche and society, by reaching to group theory and fashioning an unconscious internal structure for the social links alive within us. His paper represents an incredibly ambitious, rich, and highly complex synthesis of aspects of classical theory, object relations, relational, neo-Kleinian, Winnicottian, intersectional, feminist, multiple group, link, and critical social psychoanalytic theories. In my discussion I will position González’s ideas within the matrix of the Bionian psychic apparatus and field theories; followed by a response to his personal and clinical examples of the collective in the individual in the aftermath of the Trump election, and the challenges before us.