Vlado Solc | Healing the Nation in a Time of Narcissistic Split 

This interview by Zuzana Vitková with Vlado Šolc originally appeared in dennikn.sk.

Do American psychologists or psychiatrists currently comment on Trump’s behavior in the public sphere?

Yes, quite often. Beyond Steven Buser’s book Real and Present Danger, American psychologists and psychiatrists have addressed Trump’s behavior in several other works. For example, psychologist Dan P. McAdams offers a detailed psychological portrait in The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump: A Psychological Reckoning. Another example is Dangerous Charisma: The Political Psychology of Donald Trump, which combines psychoanalytic perspectives with political psychology to explore what drives Trump’s behavior and his appeal. These books are part of a broader body of psychological commentary that regularly appears in both academic and public discourse.

In recent weeks, Donald Trump has repeatedly expressed his desire for annexing Greenland, established a “Peace Council” to which he invited Vladimir Putin and several other totalitarian countries, and accepted a framed Nobel Peace Prize from its current laureate. As a Jungian Analyst, what is your reaction when you observe the statements and actions of the American president?

Psychologists and Jungians who study Trump have long pointed out that he exhibits pronounced narcissistic traits. In such a personality structure, the central life aim is the gratification of one’s own needs, and experience, relationships, and reality itself are organized around propping the ego.  Because he has reached this kind of “inflated position” as president of the United States, he is constantly confirming to himself what he can get away with and what his power allows him to do. And the more he tests it, the more distorted his sense of self becomes. The attempt to annex Greenland is, in my view, just another example of the enactment of the grandiose fantasy.

I perceive his main goal as consolidating the power of the United States globally, rewriting the map of power, and dominating the Western Hemisphere in order to attain a self-affirming ego position that confirms his sense of strength and grandiosity. It appears as if he and Putin have mentally divided the world into Western and Eastern empires, and this can be understood as one of Trump’s attempts to move closer to that vision. As a narcissist, he has no inner restraints, and once he realized that he can get away with almost anything, he will keep pushing the limits. He has essentially legitimized vulgarity and lies, and elevated his own feelings of disdain above the moral principles that people usually carry within themselves. This is no longer just narcissism, but something bordering on psychopathy, as we see an absence of fear, pronounced impulsiveness, objectification of others as tools, a lack of remorse and shame, and an inability to form any moral relationship to his decisions.

Clinical psychologists and psychiatrists are usually reluctant to label public figures, since they have not had the opportunity to diagnose them directly and therefore speak rather about personality traits they observe. How reliably can Trump’s traits be assessed based on his public behavior?

Of course, it is not ethical to definitively diagnose someone without having met them personally in a clinical setting and without administering tests. In Trump’s case, however, we already have an enormous amount of material for analysis. We have books in which authors describe their individual encounters with him, we have his speeches, testimonies, correspondence, videos, and so on. I believe there is so much material that one can conclude with a high degree of certainty that Taken together, these features suggest that he could indeed fit what is often described as a malignant narcissistic personality structure. We observe pronounced traits such as rigidity, entitlement, tendency to control and manipulate, a persistent refusal to take responsibility, a striking incapacity for genuine empathy, an inability to apologize or acknowledge wrongdoing, and a pattern of rigid denial that remains unchanged regardless of presented evidence.

You described Donald Trump in an interview for the portal psychologie.cz as an anointed “über-narcissist” who has unleashed “dark” attitudes and emotions in people. What did you mean by that?

We all are, in essence, collective beings, which means that we are guided by collective psychology. Each of us harbors certain moral and individual persuasions in life, but to a large extent we are unconsciously collective creatures, shaped by unconscious forces, norms, and images related to society and the culture in which we live. Trump is a leader to whom many people attune themselves, and some even identify with him. If such a leader legitimizes a person’s shadow, that person is more likely to allow all the lower impulses and drives within themselves to surface, impulses they previously kept under control because they were not socially acceptable. But once they receive this kind of permission, they become more vulgar. You can see this, for example, on social media, where many people are no longer willing to communicate sensitively  with others but go straight into attack mode. In this way, Trump indirectly signals to people that being vulgar, aggressive, xenophobic, or racist, and projecting one’s anger onto someone else, is acceptable. He even encourages them not to be afraid of it and to go ahead with it. They are pitifully, to use Jung’s words, unaware, they are projecting parts of their own psychology onto their neighbors. 

Is this narcissistic archetype of a leader perceived differently in American society and culture compared to European one?

This archetype essentially functions as a projective screen onto which society projects its shadow. A narcissist operates with a certain self-image that he considers perfect, and everything that does not fit this image is rejected, attacked. He simply tells himself that this is not who he is, because he sees himself as someone entirely different, and he believes this unconditionally. He can’t bear the idea that he might not always be “a good boy.” At the same time, his goal is to evoke resonance in others so that they confirm this self-image back to him. Everything that does not belong there is split off and projected onto someone else. Hitler found his scapegoat in the Jewish, Roma or Slavic populations. Trump today projects a similar content primarily onto Hispanics, but also onto African Americans and other groups. Every culture has its own specific complex, and such a leader is able to legitimize it and direct it outward. We should ask ourselves, what is it about those minorities that allies with his unconscious image? Russians, for example, have the complex of “Great Russia,” a great-power complex that compensates for the deep Russian wound after losing an empire. Russia “suddenly” shrank, and today this loss is being projected outward. Putin places himself in the position of savior of Russian land and strength and creates an image according to which white Orthodox muscovites  appear to be chosen and to have a moral right to occupy Ukraine or neighboring Euro-Asian states.

From the outside, it can seem as if Trump and Putin are now competing over who dares more. Do you see any similarities in their behaviors and traits?

There is a certain similarity, for example, in the inflation of the ego by the mythological images. This is a form of grandiosity, where a person tries to play god and tests what they can get away with. Putin, for instance, said that he “discovered that there are no limits for him.” Of course, he does possess enormous power in reality, but it is not unlimited, and we can see that even his army does not have the strength for there to be “no limits.” With Trump, it is something similar. He constantly tries to push his power further, and he is aided in this by institutions such as the Supreme Court, as well as the House of Representatives and the Senate, which he more or less controls. Republicans stand behind him even as he tries to prove to himself what all he can do. A good example right now is Greenland. Trump behaves there like a petulant child who wants to use every available lever to achieve what he wants, even at the cost of centuries-old international relations. But I think he is at least subconsciously aware that this is not realistic. Similar to the idea of annexing Canada.

Doesn’t the behavior of Trump and Putin remind you of little boys on a playground, despite the fact that they are among the most closely watched leaders in the world?

…Yes, but I rather have the sense that behind the scenes they have agreed to divide that playground between themselves. It is said that French intelligence once fed Trump false information to see whether he would pass it on to Putin, and they found that he did. So they form a strange kind of coalition. I think Putin greatly impresses Trump. There is a peculiar projective relationship there: Trump sees Putin as a strong alpha male and, on an intuitive level, feels respect for him, even fear. Not military fear, but psychological fear. Putin is a narcissist, but also a psychopath, someone who could slit another person’s throat without batting an eye. You can see this in the ruthless way he eliminates his opponents: they fall out of windows, are poisoned with novichok in tea, their cars explode, and so on. He has absolutely no restraints. I would dare to say that human life has no value for him and is merely a chess piece in his grandiose plan. I think this has convinced Trump on some unconscious level. Trump is not very intellectually gifted and mostly acts instinctively, similar to Hitler or Stalin. He senses weakness, senses where to invest money, or who can be manipulated. A narcissist always attacks weak spots, where we feel self-doubt. But that does not work on Putin! You can see it when Trump leaves a joint meeting looking deflated, confused. Putin has no psychological access to his own shame. I would rather say that Putin is playing with him.

Do you consider Trump to be a psychopathic personality similar to Putin?

I cannot say that definitively from a distance, nor can psychologists fully rule it out, but I do think he has certain psychopathic traits. I would not describe him as a classic psychopath. Rather, he is a malignant narcissist who cannot cope with a deep inner sense of shame. The only way he regulates this feeling is by splitting it off and projecting it outward. Once he splits it off, he begins to systematically humiliate others. We saw this when he met with President Zelenskyy in the whitehouse. Conscious people saw clearly, though, that Trump only humiliated himself… He often speaks about himself as perfect, claims that everything works flawlessly, that he is a stable genius, and so on. Psychopathy, however, can gradually develop in him. In people who erotically play with their shadow while simultaneously gaining more and more power, moral restraints and what we call “humanity” slowly shift until they eventually disappear.

It seems that other politicians are so far treating Trump like a privileged child. Does the mechanism just give him what he wants and there will be peace work with such people? Or does their appetite for grandiose acts keep growing and remain impossible to satisfy?

I do not know. Most of the time they give him toys and try to outsmart him with them. They hand him some golden watches, tell him he is a genius and how everything is working perfectly for him, and for a relatively small price they try to gain a major advantage. For example, he often withdraws sanctions he had previously threatened. Unfortunately, America has enormous power and influence in the world, not only militarily but also economically, and Europe needs the United States. But this also works the other way around, except that Trump’s grandiose complex prevents him from seeing that it is not all about him and that he, too, needs the rest of the world. He can claim that America is perfect, beautiful, and needs no one, but the world is far more tightly and complexly interconnected. The ego, always loses when it rejects the whole from which it emerged.

We often see narcissistic personalities as masters of manipulation. But don’t their character traits also make them vulnerable to manipulation from the outside?

Absolutely. One of the basic traits of a narcissist is that he does not live in reality. What Jung said describes it well, he said that “an inflated consciousness is always egocentric and conscious of nothing but its own existence. It is incapable of learning from the past, incapable of understanding contemporary events, and incapable of drawing right conclusions about the future. It is hypnotized by itself and therefore cannot be argued with.” He lives in a kind of grandiose fantasy of his own, and the people around him are expected to nurture that illusion, because if they don’t, he attacks them. We see this with Putin as well, who in fact does not even know the real state of his army, because his generals are afraid of being punished if reality does not match his imagination. With Trump, too, we see how the people around him try to feed his ego. But then, there is a process we called thonemesis, the unconscious forces flips the ego and reality sets in. Historically, this is nothing new—just look at how Julius Caesar, Caligula, or Nero ended up.

Carl Jung did not use the term narcissism very much, but he spoke about what he called mana personality. Mana, for him, was a rare kind of energy that grants almost superhuman power, like the ring in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. This inflation of the ego gives a person an immense sense of power. The problem is that it is not aligned with reality, and sooner or later reality comes knocking at the door. A person can create illusions about himself, but in the end reality usually confronts him when he has to actually prove something in life—earn money, take care of a family, and so on. One can try to avoid this reality through psychological maneuvers, but most of the time reality holds up a mirror and kicks you out.

What can happen when the most powerful man of the democratic world gets kicked out? Aren’t we all then put at risk?

That is precisely the problem: it can pull all of us down with him. In a way, this is also the karma of the nation that elected its mirror. Trump enabled people to bring unconscious contents to the surface, things they projected onto him, and now they will have to confront them. We already see this, for example, in Wisconsin. Of the forty percent of Hispanics who voted for him, many are now suddenly surprised that he is deporting their brothers and sisters. Dairy farmers in northern Wisconsin who employed undocumented workers now see that when those workers are deported, there is no one left to clean manure. So racism or xenophobia returns to people in this concrete form. They realize that it directly affects them, but a narcissistic leader does not see the connection between his I and the practical life of someone else.

Trump and Putin are both over seventy. Does age strengthen or weaken narcissistic traits?

A wise person develops with age and tries to live in the middle of life’s opposites—both inner and outer ones. A foolish person, by contrast, becomes fixed in a single position, and age often contributes to greater rigidity and stubbornness. Such a person often acquires the feeling that he has already figured everything out and must leave a strong legacy behind, because he is so great and perfect that he considers it his duty. I have the impression that we see this process in many narcissistic leaders, whether it is Trump, Putin, or other unchecked leaders. People who acquire too much power while receiving very little feedback or real consequences for their actions lack effective inner means to moderate the inflation of their own ego.

On social media there is now a trend of nostalgia for the year 2016, which Harper’s Bazaar called the “last good year.” What has changed in society over the past ten years that statements by world leaders which would then have been considered absolutely scandalous are today just another Monday or Wednesday?

I have the sense that Democrats failed to register the moods and anxieties that were dormant in the national unconscious and literally awakened during Trump’s first term. Parts of society were bothered, for example, by immigration or deaths related to fentanyl. Of course, these issues were to a large extent inflated by nonsense. But people may have had real experiences with gang crime and a feeling that nothing was being done about it. Others were afraid of the opening of various queer topics. Most Americans are alarmed by the fact that billionaires are accumulating unprecedented wealth. And Trump knew how to skillfully play on precisely these human fears. He acknowledged them and at the same time told people that the only solution was repressive policy. He promised people whom no one had listened to that those they disliked would go to jail or have their rights restricted, and so on.

Democrats claimed that everything would be fine and that there was no need to fear the things mentioned above. To a large extent, they were right—for example, transgender policy is a marginal issue that does not really threaten anyone. America experienced something similar already in the 1960s, when interracial marriages were debated and part of the population predicted God’s wrath, which never came. But in the unconscious and fantasy of many people, deep fears, racism, and a sense that society was falling apart were alive. Democrats, however, failed to find a language or an approach that could calm people and symbolically contain their swollen anger. They grossly underestimated Trump’s ability to con the nation – again!

Over the past decade we have experienced a pandemic, several international conflicts, escalating manifestations of the climate crisis, and the arrival of artificial intelligence. Can any of this be blamed for the fact that a large part of society is leaning toward authoritarian and narcissistic leaders?

It has certainly activated unconscious fears in people. And because many people are unable to connect with such fear symbolically and emotionally, they create compensatory fantasies that often grow into conspiracy theories. Whether these are fantasies that try to solve problems through some heroic, magical act of an individual, or that explain a complicated world through a magical story about elites (the Illuminati), who extract from the blood of small children an elixir of youth (adrenochrome), control the world, and so on. Such mythological fantasies generated by the unconscious are often the result of people failing to respond pragmatically to challenges such as the climate crisis or financial inequality, and instead choosing something simpler—a quasi-theory on the level of magical thinking.

American psychologist Speakery Lee, who wrote the book The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, claims that experiencing Trump’s presidency from the perspective of a citizen is like being in an abusive relationship. She argues that he communicates with the public through gaslighting and other manipulative techniques. What emotions and character traits does such a leader awaken in the public?

I have not read the book, but it is very well put, and I agree that we are experiencing a form of narcissistic abuse. I have called it a narcissistic split. My clients often experience this in relationships, when one partner manipulates the other, controls them, and tries to take power over them in order to feel better and consolidate their own sense of dominion. At the same time, such a partner attacks the other’s self-confidence and weakens their ability to defend themselves. And that is exactly what Trump is doing to us. When we do not behave the way he expects, he threatens us with thousands of ICE agents or with the military. At any cost, he tries to impose control, and this naturally evokes fear, anger, and other emotions in people, which we have to “swallow,” causing the nation to live in a state of constant stress.

I see the consequences also in my clients. People are losing trust in reality, they cannot sleep, they experience emotionality, anxiety and depression. The situation has divided many families, and people are permanently under enormous stress. But it is up to us to learn how to reduce the influence of the narcissistic principle on our lives. How to return to ourselves again and awaken within us the capacity to communicate even with the “opposite camp.” Because this spares no one—whether it is a father, an uncle, or a boss at work with a different opinion, we are all exposed to these strong emotions.

Do you personally have fears about the future of the world when you look ahead?

I am an optimist. Of course, when one tries to look at the current situation objectively, there are not many optimistic signals to be seen. But I believe that our essential, “true Self” carries enormous capacity within it, and that something can awaken in us that will push this escalation of evil back. However, we probably first have to go through this mirror—through a moment when people simply “fall flat on their face” and learn something from the Trump era. Most of us learn from our own mistakes; the development of consciousness usually takes place through pain. His speculative behavior also points to many gaps in the system and in legislation that will need to be addressed so that a similar situation does not happen again.

Do you have any practical advice for us on how to preserve hope and optimism during those times?

I would say that a person must not forget their deep Self and the fact that life itself is a miracle. If we chase these projections too much and surrender to fear too easily, we may forget all the beautiful things that exist in life. For example, Newton wrote Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687) at a time when he was likely stepping over the bodies of people who had succumbed to the Great plague of London. But because he lived in those times, he simply transcended his pain: imagined, worked, and was creative then. That is what we must do as well. Let us focus on one another, on love for people, for nature, and nurture the good that still exists within us. Because we cannot radically change the world at a collective level. We can only vote and work on ourselves, and in that way change the world.

Narcissistic personalities are almost always spoken about in very negative terms. What chances do people have when working with this personality trait, which develops in childhood?

It is not easy, and it requires years of work. This is because the person developed over many years in a complicated situation. For example, they may have had a narcissistic, sadistic, or emotionally absent parent. These are years in which a child has to cope daily with demanding—manipulative—situations, and later applies them automatically in adult life. Recently, an interesting book was also published in Czech translation, Disarm the Narcissist, which discusses how one can work with such a person. However, that person must reach a point at which they are willing and open to this kind of inner work, for example in therapy or with a life partner. But it is very demanding, because the partner must be able not to enter into the narcissist’s game, and must maintain their own boundaries, and to communicate their wounds uncompromisingly but at the same time compassionately. It is a long-term process of linking ἔρως with λόγος and restoring a true self-image. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it does not. Many Greek myths have already dealt with this phenomenon, and the one about Narcissus also shows that for many people it never becomes possible to change, and they remain frozen in their position.

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Literature:

Behary, W. (2013). Disarming the narcissist: Surviving and thriving with the self-absorbed. New Harbinger Publications.

Buser, S. (Ed.). (2016/2017). A clear and present danger: Narcissism in the era of President Trump. Chiron Publications.

Harari, Y. N. (2024). Nexus. Spiegel & Grau.

Lee, B. X. (Ed.). (2017). The dangerous case of Donald Trump: 27 psychiatrists and mental health experts assess a president. Thomas Dunne Books.

McAdams, D. P. (2020). The strange case of Donald J. Trump: A psychological reckoning. Oxford University Press.

Renshon, S. A. (2019). Dangerous charisma: The political psychology of Donald Trump. Routledge.

Newton, I. (1687/1999). The principia: Mathematical principles of natural philosophy (I. B. Cohen & A. Whitman, Trans.). University of California Press.

Šolc, V., & Didier, G. J. (2023). Temné náboženství: Psychologie popření a otevření reality. Triton.

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Vlado Šolc is a Diplomate Jungian Analyst practicing in Wisconsin and Illinois. He serves as an analyst, consultant, educator, and co-director of the Jungian Psychotherapy and Jungian Studies Program at the C. G. Jung Institute of Chicago. He is a member of the Slovak Society for Analytical Psychology (SSAP). Vlado lives in constant awe of the miracle of existence. His clinical focus includes psycho-spiritual crises such as loss of meaning and direction in life, the mind-body connection and psychosomatic concerns, as well as issues related to immigration and cultural adaptation. His research interests encompass narcissism, collective psychology, religious fundamentalism, illusion, and transformation. He has presented at conferences across North America, Asia, and Europe and is the author of numerous peer-reviewed articles and seven books in the field of depth psychology. Learn more at therapyvlado.com.