Can you believe the election is only two months away? It seems like only yesterday that Trump supporters were breaking their way into the Capitol Building (making for some big laughs at the RNC) after Trump lost the election decisively to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in 2020, baselessly claiming fraud while committing same from November, 2020 until yesterday. Now that the Democrats have smartly re-engineered the political landscape surrounding the 2024 election, Trump is toast, again — and he knows it. Donny has been letting his frustration get the best of him lately because he’s been ‘round this carousel of losing before, but that’s not the point. I really can’t comprehend how anyone in their right mind could ever consider voting for Donald Trump for Mayor of West Palm Beach, Florida let alone President of the United States of America, but here we are. Again.

All of us apprehend the world under the model of the ‘Id,’ ‘Ego,’ and my favorite: the ‘Superego.’ These terms were famously coined by the founder of psychoanalysis (along with Dr. Josef Breuer) the Austrian (now Czech) Dr. Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud in 1856 in Freiburg, Austria, (now Příbor, Czechoslovakia). This was also where his brother Julius was born in 1857, dying tragically the following year, and it was also in Freiberg that Freud’s father’s wool business collapsed, leaving the family destitute and forcing them to leave for Vienna. The House is part of the Department of Culture and Tourism of the City of Příbor, Freud was born in the house and his family lived there for his first three years. When visiting, the Family House of Sigmund Freud is open Tuesday-Sunday from 9am-5pm (April – September) and 9am-4pm (October – March). Enjoy! Also on your trip itinerary should be the famous Austrian address at Bergasse 19 (when in Vienna visit the underwhelming Freud Museum, which for 47 years was the Freud family home and the site of his legendary practice until they were forced to up and flee the invading Nazis.)

We all have a dark side to our psyche that ‘ol Sig had some thoughts about that he ascribed to the German loan word, ‘Todestrieb’ that as usual for a long German word would take a thesis to explain, but we all innately know what it really means. We know when we do something wrong, something unhealthy or when we get angry and dangerous, we all know that there will be negative consequences to our bad behavior— but we do these bad things over and over again, anyway. Compulsively. Doing good things over and over is a good thing, but why does this tend to balance out almost 50/50 in all good (and not so good) people? Freud developed therapeutic techniques like ‘free association’ and ‘transference’ with a central role in the analytic process, elaborating his theory of the ‘unconscious’ and the existence of a ‘libido’ of sexual energy flowing throughout our bodies (oooohhhh!!!!) and finally, of what he called Todestrieb, or the ‘death drive,’ the source of hate, aggression, negative repetition and neurotic guilt. Freud also formed the ‘Oedipus complex’ (I’ll Always Love My Mama) as a central part of his overall psychoanalytic theory, but perhaps he’s most famous for his analysis of dreams as wish-fulfilments, giving him models for real-world clinical analysis of unconscious repression, a boon for the analyst couch business.

Today in Freud’s house in London, in his study at the Freud Museum Britain, his iconic couch is undoubtedly one of the most famous pieces of domestic furniture in the world and when Freud fled the Nazis and went to London from Vienna in 1938, the couch went with him too, of course, and from years of treating patients on this comfy chaise longue, so radically different from the sterile hospital stretchers used at the time during therapy, Freud studied and categorized human behavior in such a way that had never been so fully and boldly articulated before, his work was as groundbreaking as it was contentious and public discourse has grappled with Freudian concepts for over 100 years since, much of his scholarship ends in speculation, however, but there’s a reason Freud is considered by most people to be the first and greatest psychoanalyst, because much of what he postulated has a kernel of truth to it.

For our purposes, let’s apply the concept of Todestrieb to this year’s US Presidential Election, only (gulp) two short months away: We are all fascinated with death, and in some strange ways we tend to want to see it in all it’s ghastly incarnations and want to constantly learn more about it as we unconsciously say “bring it on,” an actual public utterance by our 43rd President, George W. Bush while he was supposed to be protecting us from terrorists and accordingly, the next couple of months will be an instructive experiment in cognitive dissonance and collective narcissism as American democracy, this most perfect union will undergo the greatest stress test since, well, January 2021 and as always, the world will be watching.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, regardless of how crazy and effed-up the US political process might appear at times, I remind you that Donald Trump is toast, now that the Democrats have wrapped up their wildly successful convention stressing how great America is, and how Donald Trump’s America is not. When Roger Stone green-lights the Republican/Russian October Surprise, it won’t land with the same sting as Hillary’s email leak in 2016, and by the time the early November news cycle rolls around, I’m pretty sure the political winds will be blowing all Kamala Harris and the Democrats’ way. So vote blue, win big, keep calm and carry on.

Support for Donald Trump, who famously allowed our Capitol building to be desecrated months after he lost the last presidential election and was forced to leave the White House in disgrace and dishonor, is a prime example of how the death drive is manifest in some of us Americans who are old enough to vote. Trump is wafer-thin close to being a senile old man and he can’t govern for shit, but he definitely delivers on the spectacle of lunacy, disaster and chaos in a very TV-friendly way, and we just can’t seem to change the channel as he rides down the escalator of our lives as we click, click, click incessantly away, examining and re-examining his weird and unprecedented behavior on the web and TV. He’s explained quite succinctly to the media establishment a fact that they cannot deny: he’s good for ratings. But he’s bad for everything else, unfortunately, and his voters have an undermined sense of self-worth and Trump taps into that base mental glitch and shapes and molds it to his selfish and greedy ends while cashing those donor checks like he was the QVC.

If anyone doubts that we hate boring normalcy and pine for our own glorious destruction on an almost daily basis, we should look no further than the vaunted BBC News Service for that Continental perspective, where the lead US story last Saturday was “Will the Chicago DNC have protests like 1968?” This laughable article, written by US political ‘expert’ Bernd Debusmann Jr. for the BBC (credit to the news division, they followed up the ridiculous headline shortly with the more normal, “The Chicago DNC won’t have protests like 1968”), and I gotta ask myself, is this the best the BBC’s got to offer? Brexit makes a lot more sense to me now. I know the media world is hurtin’ for profit, but these last two presidential political cycles have proven more than ever that we Americans, even the finest of us, are kind of stupid. Read today’s New York Times and the wall-to-wall Trump coverage, the phony ‘balanced’ approach to covering the race that pathetically falls away into the overwhelming pressure to deliver the garbage that so many of us humans secretly and innately want. Show us the disorder. The destruction. Especially the death. Yes, we also want the calm, the order and the abundant life part as well, but it’s evenly balanced in a Yin/Yang duality death-match with evil and disorder that I frankly just don’t understand, even though I’ve read my share of Freud.

Carl Holt
August 24, 2024

N.B. “Errare humanum est, (sed) perseverare diabolicum” is attributed to Seneca but not attested in his works and “Cuiusvis errare: nullius nisi insipientis in errore perseverare” (It is anyone’s to err, but nobody’s but a fool to persevere in error) was written in 44 BC by Cicero in the Philippicae .

“To err is human, to forgive divine” is an aphorism drawn from Alexander Pope’s 1711 poem, “An Essay on Criticism.”