Nikolas Rose's Informative Essay: The Trump Administration Campaign

The Trump Administration Campaign
The 2016 Presidential Campaign of Donald Trump was remarkably a masterful use of grouped psychology principles that allowed him to win. America has had a Democratic president for the past eight years, Barack Obama, who has had great accomplishments during his presidency; however, he has failed the American citizens who were left unemployed and foreclosed on homes after the recession in the late 2000s. This set the stage for Trump’s success. These communities were left voiceless, Trump’s campaign is built on “Americanness”, he offered these communities a solution to increases on tariff taxes that would deter American companies from outsourcing their factories and jobs and have “American workers”.
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For this paper I will be using the works of Nikolas Rose’s “Inventing Ourselves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood”, Arthur Kleinman’s “Violence, Culture, and the Politics of Trauma”, and Phillip Rieff’s “Freud: The Mind of the Moralist”. The success of the Trump campaign was not just mere luck, it was a skillfully created for individuals who did not a voice post-recession era. I will be analyzing the success of the Trump administration through using therapeutic discourse using the lenses of the “psychological man”, the shift from “self-expression” to “self-mastery”, and lastly the political critique. The goal of Freud's psychoanalysis methodology was to make the unconscious man conscious. The psychological man is based off Sigmund Freud’s importance of the unconscious mind, and made a primary assumption of Freudian theory is the unconscious mind governs behavior to a greater degree than people suspect. “What is needed to free men from their sick communities. To emancipate the man’s ‘I’ from ‘we’ is spiritual guidance” [Reiffe 1960: 330]. This shift begins from within the individual. To separate the individual to look inside themselves, it requires a psychoanalysis that defends the private individual against demands made by culture and instinct. It entails a self concern that takes priority over social concerns

The political critique of therapeutic discourse is captured by the power imbalances; self liberation through use of therapies is a dominant form of institutional power. There are individuals with power and those who do not, one will be subject to the other. “...freedom as it has been articulated into the norms and principles for organizing our experiences of our world and of ourselves; freedom as it is realized in certain ways of exercising power over others…” [Rose 1993:16]. Therapeutic discourse is represented by atomized individualism. Individualism in sociological terms places the individual's own personal needs over the commitment to others needs; to promote the individual's goals and to advocate for interests at the expense and or interferences of the social groups or state. Individualism is contrasted by altruism, a theory that places the needs of the social group or state prior to the individual’s needs. “The therapeutic is a site within which we invent ourselves as individuals, with wants, needs, and desires to be known, categorized, and controlled for the sake of freedom” [Foucault, 1990:141]. Trump has no political background and his main argument why America has been weakened by