What Psychoanalysis can Teach us about the US Election
Rafael Holmberg
4 January 2025
Since Trump’s election victory, it is tempting to think that we need to understand politics ‘by itself’ - that is, without the mediation of any speculative explorations or the insights of other disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, sociology etc, which we often apply to politics to help us understand it. The situation in politics today, it seems, is critical enough to require us to get down to brass tacks, to focus on the facts of the election itself and avoid any complex or deviating multidisciplinary interpretations. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. What we can take away from the election is that politics cannot be understood by itself. For this reason, I will attempt the opposite of what might be suggested: a psychoanalytic understanding of the politics of the 2024 election.
We might say we need an external interpretation of the election in order for it to be internally understood. Contrary to popular notions of the democratic process, when we vote, we never merely vote ‘for ourselves’. Our individual vote cannot be stated to correlate with any true personal political stance. The so-called ‘personal’ reasons for voting are inevitably external to the voter themselves – the intimacy of our personal discourse is located externally, in the exteriority of the social field.
We vote on the behalf of an idea. Yet the origin of this idea is performative, it is a shared notion in which we partake. Thus to vote is to appeal to an impersonal notion, an Other that we partake in and that speaks for us and through us. This Other is the kernel of psychoanalytic theory: deep inside ourselves, what we discover is never the intimate ground of our own self-hood, of our own sense of identity. What constitutes a social subject – the modern, psychoanalytic subject – is the exteriority, the unassimilable alienness, at the heart of the self. That which is most close to us is not our knowledge of ourselves, but the unpleasant intimacy of something foreign, an alterity which renders our actions permanently alienated from our own rational self-awareness.
To vote for oneself, to know what one really wants, is a contradiction where psychoanalysis is concerned, since this ‘really’ – the intimate, true kernel of our enjoyment – does not exist. The question of what one really wants, of the real ground of desire, is a retrospective fiction instituted by the original absence of any truly perfect object of enjoyment. We desire something as a veil to the fact that it is in fact nothing which can actually be desired.
In the general and the political sense, the relation to the self is a relation to the Other, to a third body which mediates our sense of autonomy. Trump’s victory was the exact embodiment of this: many claimed to vote for Trump because they found ‘their own voice’ in him, yet this is precisely the game of false autonomy played by right-wing populism.
The unexpressed inner sentiments of a dissatisfied body politic did not find some form of embodiment in Trump’s sporadic, proudly self-contradictory discourse. Instead, the Other of hysterical and paranoid Republicanism imposed its speculative form upon the interiority of the voter mindset. The logic of populism, as Laclau argued, is to have a series of unrelated demands be seemingly satisfied by one solution, a solution which simultaneously does not satisfy any specific, given demand by itself but displaces these demands and directs them against a common enemy. The logic of demand-difference is transformed into a short-circuited logic of demand-equivalence.
In other words, populism reveals the empty centre of our political intentions, the absence of any real political desire, and the external contingencies of our innermost personal demands. Psychoanalysis furnishes a frame for this paradox: desire, as Lacan wrote, is the desire for something else. The origin of desire is non-existent, a perpetual contradiction without a stable reference-point. Desire therefore functions only by its reference to the Other. Politically, we desire in the service of the Other, or more specifically, our intimate desire is felt as ‘ours’ only insofar as it is constructed from the experience of the Other.
What they partook in was a substitute idea, an external point of identification which - rather than reconcile them with their ‘true’ position - merely reproduced the inevitably self-alienated status of personality. Their personal interests were identified with the private corporate interests of a disingenuous populist figure. It was the impotent voice of the Other that spoke through the real intentions of the Trump voter body. The Democrats are not exception to this, and it is worth noting that Trump won not because he became a more efficient populist – he did not receive more votes in 2024 than he did in 2020 – but because the Democrats became less efficient ones, and lost a significant amount of voters between this election and the last one.
The point, nevertheless, is that when we say that “in democracy, I vote for the party that best represents me”, what is implied by this me? And what is implied by the desire that underlies our political projects? For Freud, this me is the inscription of Otherness in our own identity, it is a point of permanent discrepancy.
This fact presents us with a difficulty: the answer is not to suggest that everyone submits themselves to a 5-year-long psychoanalytic treatment, nor that we abandon ourselves to contingent whim since we do not know what we want. The first step is a reframing of the modern democratic process: to recognise the external colour (the social and economic ground) of our internal narratives and personal/psychological traits. ‘Division’ is not the feature of bad politics, it is the precondition for politics. The modern democratic subject is not caught in a battle between ‘what it really wants’ and ‘how to express this’ in the current electoral college system, but between the asymmetry of a politically manufactured sentiment of conviction and a profound lack of identity between the self and itself. The antithesis is as much external as it is internal, and we should begin with a recognition of the exploitation of the Other - and the Other’s exploitation of us - as a constitutive moment of our own ‘internal identity’.
More than any other discipline, psychoanalysis teaches us not only how we identify with ourselves through the false image of the Other - how our inner certainty is itself the contingent exteriority of the social - but also how to reject this populist tendency inscribed in personhood.
Rafael Holmberg is a university researcher specialising in psychoanalytic theory, German Idealism, post-war continental philosophy, and political theory. His writings and teaching explore the intersections between these fields, and the necessity of psychoanalysis and philosophy in order to understand contemporary politics. He has written articles, essays, and op-eds for a variety of journals, magazines and newspapers, including Z Magazine, Culture, Theory & Critique, Aeon, and Radical Philosophy and he has a weekly newsletter, Antagonisms of the Everyday, on Substack.
