By putting them down, he raises them up: How Trump woos new recruits into his movement

Steven Hassan, in Combatting Cult Mind Control (1988, p. 150), states,

Remember, every person is different, and every cult member is at war between his cult identity and his real identity. At any time, you can actually see the person visibly switching back and forth.¹

→ This sounds like a vertical split, exactly what Heinz Kohut spoke of in The Analysis of the Self (1971). Kohut spoke of how the authentic self, under the stress of trauma and/or other types of self-alienation, becomes walled off rather to the side. Unlike horizontal splits (as in ‘split personality’), the authentic self can still be “seen” by the person who has shunted that personality off, shirked it.² The real self becomes trapped, much like the phantom self of the antihero in 1999’s Being John Malkovich.

In that film, the main character, a puppeteer, discovers a small fairy door that, when he enters it and slides down its chute, leads him into the mind of the actor John Malkovich; he then has access to the motor control of Malkovich’s body. To spoil the finale, the lead—the antihero—ends up taking the trip one time too many. He ends up “living” in the body of a person into whom he’s channeled himself into but no longer possesses the means to manipulate the intentions or bodily movements. He finds himself imprisoned.

Similarly, the real self becomes an impotent phantom in a vertical split. The instituted self, however, can espy that original self, if a glance is ever thrown in that direction.

S. Giac Giacomantonio, in “Disavowal in cognitive therapy: the view from self psychology” (2009), lends more light to the subject:

If repression can be seen as a horizontal split (i.e., content below the threshold of conscious awareness), then disavowal can be seen to lead to a vertical split (i.e., material defended against by being ‘held to the side’, and still available to consciousness). This vertical split shows itself phenomenologically as two parallel experiences of perceptions (Freud, 1938)—both a knowing and a not-knowing of the disavowed content. … A perception is not fully integrated, and so leads to two contradictory modes of functioning.³

So the cult self is an instituted self.

Still, if the two selves can be interpellated between each, that would indicate that there is something even prior to that, that is making the selection. And that is the “person,” the entity, the constitution that must be appealed to in order to rescue the person lost in a cult self.

→ Some theorists have noted dissociation as a key psychological mechanism that may be operative in this process.

But also, with regards to Donald Trump’s style of crowd seduction, he relies on negging, on removing the inner stature of his erstwhile follower, so that the person transfers his or her inner sense of worth and power to Trump in a grander process of projection and identification.

To remedy either of these, perhaps both in one blow, we need to restore these peoples’ confidence in themselves.

Without confidence, these people are more likely to be suggestible or even docile, taking direction and command in a way and to a degree rather unknown in their prior lives.

An unconfident person is more likely to put distance between their suddenly perceived undesirable self and thus that much more likely to adopt the identity held out to her or him by the leader or guru of the intense group.

A person convinced of his or her unworthiness at such a core level cannot help but be hounded by distortion in his or her perceptions. This distortion could affect all domains of that person’s cognitive processes or determinations.

And it’s important to keep in mind that this unconfidence is a trade, a negotiation made by the follower during the courting (seduction) process where the leader is offering these overtures. The follower exchanges her or his self-stature with that of the leader and, in doing so, accepts a permanent lowering of stature in his or her own eyes. This demotion can only be rectified or even possibly improved by taking on the apparent (via distortion) greatness of the leader, in a sort of substitution.

It’s an agreement—it’s a surrender.^4,5 It may not be explicit where the follower verbally pledges an affiliation or fealty to this seemingly great person, but at some psychological level the follower reduces him- or herself so that the leader can become even more preeminent. When the leader attains that status for the recruit, that recruit can make that exchange where they can live in the leader’s greatness and glory in almost a simulacrum of power-sharing.

That’s an illusion, of course, bordering on delusion; and it all stems from that first act of lowering oneself, which opens the door for an inherent power imbalance or differential. It all derives from that initial distortion.

Notes

¹ _{Steven Hassan, Combatting Cult Mind Control(1988), p. 150.}

² _{Heinz Kohut, The Analysis of the Self (1971), pp. 176-190. Diagram 3 found on p. 185.}

³_{S. Giac Giacomantonio, “Disavowal in cognitive therapy: the view from self psychology,”Psychotherapy in Australia (2009), Vol. 15, No. 2, p. 26.}

⁴_{“William James, in his classical study of conversion in The Varieties of Religious Experience, describes the process of conversion as a struggle away from sin, rather than as a striving toward righteousness. He sees it as an attempt to handle the problems of despair, anger, worry, and fear; after getting exhausted with the struggle and giving up, the person deals with these feelings by adopting opposite feelings. It is during the period of exhaustion that conversion occurs; it becomes thus a passive process, not an active process. He calls it a self-surrender to achieve unification, in which personal will must be given up.” Leon Salzman, “The Psychology of Religious and Ideological Conversion,”Psychiatry, Vol. 16, No. 2, p. 179.}

⁵_{“Surrender involves a leap, a push, a giving-up, an abandonment of hope, a cleansing through painful purgation for which no exclusively rational process can substitute. Hence, surrender comes over one in a wave, when reason, will, and knowledge are no longer adequate to sustain self-directed life. A severe crisis thus may actas a major catalyst in the surrender process, for in crisis or catastrophe the personal world, and perhaps the larger world as well, loses its carefully ordered reason or meaning.” Andrew Hidas, “Psychotherapy and Surrender: A Psychospiritual Perspective,”The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology (1981), Vol. 13, No. 1, p. 30.}