Finding hope in the reign of a super-ego | Letters
by Letters from on (#40W4R)
Guardian readers respond to Gary Greenberg's essay on Trumpian psychoanalysis
Gary Greenberg's beautifully written but flawed account of the first two years of the Trump presidency highlights the limitations of using psychoanalytic concepts to explain wider political and social developments (Analyse this, The long read, 12 October).
Far from Trumpism representing the return of "our archaic heritage", our deep instinctual need to "consume, to pillage, to destroy, to wall out our neighbours and to hate people living in shitholes", it is rather, like Brexit, a response to 30 years of neoliberal inequality and increased exploitation, an era during which millions of people both here and in the US have seen their lives get worse and their dreams evaporate.
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