The Psychology of the Communication of Political Projection and Donald J Trump

Before much psycho-babble:  a statement about what democracy is supposed to look like. I don’t expect that ours is in trouble at this time, but we must keep in mind what we all need and want it to remain. Here is my off the cuff interpretation:


*This best-known manner of practicing the old meaning of democracy, as the Greeks established: a method of discourse between those with difference in order to sustain a peaceful society, is now changed thanks to the predictable rise of megalomaniac Donald J. Trump, who with the psychosis of . . .*

~~~~~

*You must now read this* (below) and please be biased toward the so-called billionaire, who has exhibited ALL OF THE BELOW indicators of a worrisome, often delusional psychotic state of behavior and so his being.

Best modern example of The Donalds’ psychological projection behavior may be a statement from the Donalds’ subconscious, such as: *”I have a fear they’ll realize that what they want is what my opposition has been wanting for decades and so I’ll tell these people (recipients of my projection (of that fear)) that that behavior my opposition has wanted (that they are largely unaware of) is what I want and what my party wants for them. Yes; I’ll use them to hear my defense of my fear by saying they don’t do that and I and my party will!"* 

It is a counter-projection counter communication. An old political tool used by those with a subconscious fear that they may be on the wrong side of issues. It’s used frequently when polling reveals a desire in the constituency that that candidate may want a few points from in the coming election. That desire is often counter what their public communications have indicated for a long time.  Knowledge of the candidates' that his or her public, at large do not know  the reasoning behind his fears.  That is key to who and when and how that countering is performed.

Some definitions to know when listening and watching and listening to Donald J. Trump and many conservative politicians and some liberal ones too!:



(C) James Gray Mason, September, 2016

Below: Below:  A bunch of lifts from 4 different Wikipedia links to what the Donald has (VERY likely). Donate to Wikipedia because it’s a FREE service that needs to sustain. I paid my 3$ per month all last year. Going to renew that auto payment soon.  

https://donate.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:FundraiserLandingPage&country=US&uselang=en&utm_medium=sidebar&utm_source=donate&utm_campaign=C13_en.wikipedia.org

Narcissism:

Noun
ˈnärsəˌsizəm
narcissism
Noun: excessive or erotic interest in oneself and one's physical appearance..
Synonyms: vanity, self-love, self-admiration, self-absorption, self-obsession, conceit, self-centeredness, self-regard, egotism, egoism,

Antonyms: modesty

Watch the Donald for these specific traits!:
Wiki lift para:

“Four dimensions of narcissism as a personality variable have been delineated: leadership/authority, superiority/arrogance, self-absorption/self-admiration, and exploitativeness/entitlement.[6]

A 2012 book on power-hungry narcissists suggests that narcissists typically display most, and sometimes all, of the following traits:[7]

An obvious self-focus in interpersonal exchanges
Problems in sustaining satisfying relationships
A lack of psychological awareness (see insight in psychology and psychiatry, egosyntonic)
Difficulty with empathy
Problems distinguishing the self from others (see narcissism and boundaries)
Hypersensitivity to any insults or imagined insults (see criticism and narcissists, narcissistic rage and narcissistic injury)
Vulnerability to shame rather than guilt
Haughty body language
Flattery towards people who admire and affirm them (narcissistic supply)
Detesting those who do not admire them (narcissistic abuse)
Using other people without considering the cost of doing so
Pretending to be more important than they actually are
Bragging (subtly but persistently) and exaggerating their achievements
Claiming to be an "expert" at many things
Inability to view the world from the perspective of other people
Denial of remorse and gratitude”


Subconscious:
Adjective:


subconscious: sub-conscious: of or concerning the part of the mind of which one is not fully aware but which influences one's actions and feelings.: "my subconscious fear".
Synonyms:unconscious, latent, suppressed, repressed, subliminal, dormant, underlying,
innermost.
.

Psychologic Defense Mechanism

Para:
“A defence mechanism is an unconscious psychological mechanism that reduces anxiety arising from unacceptable or potentially harmful stimuli.[1] Sigmund Freudwas one of the first proponents of this construct.[2]

Defence mechanisms may result in healthy or unhealthy consequences depending on the circumstances and frequency with which the mechanism is used.[3] Inpsychoanalytic theory, defence mechanisms (German: Abwehrmechanismen) are psychological strategies brought into play by the unconscious mind[4] tomanipulate, deny, or distort reality in order to defend against feelings of anxiety and unacceptable impulses and to maintain one's self-schema.[5] These processes that manipulate, deny, or distort reality may include the following: repression, or the burying of a painful feeling or thought from one's awareness even though it may resurface in a symbolic form;[3] identification, incorporating an object or thought into oneself;[6] and rationalization, the justification of one's behaviour and motivations by substituting "good" acceptable reasons for the actual motivations.[3][7] In psychoanalytic theory, repression is considered as the basis for other defence mechanisms.[3]” The later is very important in understanding Trump’s behavioral issues.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defence_mechanisms


Ego Mania (in the Donald):
Wicki lift; para:
Egomania

“Egomania is also known as an obsessive preoccupation with one's self[1] and applies to someone who follows their own ungoverned impulses and is possessed by delusions of personal greatness and feels a lack of appreciation.[2] Someone suffering from this extreme egocentric focus is an egomaniac. *The condition is psychologically abnormal.*[1]

The term egomania is often used by laypersons in a pejorative fashion to describe an individual who is intolerably self-centred. The clinical condition that most resembles the popular conception of egomania isnarcissistic personality disorder.[3]”


Psychological projection

 is a theory in psychology in which humans defend themselves against their own unconscious impulses or qualities (both positive and negative) by denying their existence in themselves while attributing them to others.[1] For example, a person who is habitually rude may constantly accuse other people of being rude. It incorporates blame shifting.


According to some research, the projection of one's unconscious qualities onto others is a common process in everyday life.”

“Projection (German: Projektion) was conceptualised by Freud in his letters to Wilhelm Fliess,[9] and further refined by Karl Abraham and Anna Freud. Freud considered that in projection thoughts, motivations, desires, and feelings that cannot be accepted as one's own are dealt with by being placed in the outside world and attributed to someone else.[10] What the ego repudiates is split off and placed in another.[11]


Freud would later come to believe that projection did not take place arbitrarily, but rather seized on and exaggerated an element that already existed on a small scale in the other person.[12] (The related defence of projective identification differs from projection in that there the other person is expected to become identified with the impulse or desire projected outside,[13] so that the self maintains a connection with what is projected, in contrast to the total repudiation of projection proper.)[14]


Melanie Klein saw the projection of good parts of the self as leading potentially to over-idealisation of the object.[15] Equally, it may be one's conscience that is projected, in an attempt to escape its control: a more benign version of this allows one to come to terms with outside authority.[16]
Theoretical examples:


Projection tends to come to the fore in normal people at times of crisis, personal or political[17] but is more commonly found in the neurotic or psychotic *in personalities functioning at a primitive level as innarcissistic personality disorder or borderline personality disorder.*


Carl Jung considered that the unacceptable parts of the personality represented by the Shadow archetype were particularly likely to give rise to projection, both small-scale and on a national/international basis.[20] Marie-Louise Von Franz extended her view of projection, stating that "wherever known reality stops, where we touch the unknown, there we project an archetypal image".[21]


Psychological projection is one of the medical explanations of bewitchment used to explain the behavior of the afflicted children at Salem in 1692. The historian John Demos asserts that the symptoms of bewitchment experienced by the afflicted girls were due to the girls undergoing psychological projection of repressed aggression.[22]
Practical examples (of donald’s behavior):


Victim blaming: The victim of someone else's accident or bad luck may be offered criticism, the theory being that the victim may be at fault for having attracted the other person's hostility.[23]

Projection of marital guilt: Thoughts of infidelity to a partner may be unconsciously projected in self-defence on to the partner in question, so that the guilt attached to the thoughts can be repudiated or turned to blame instead, in a process linked to denial.[24]

Bullying: A bully may project his/her own feelings of vulnerability onto the target(s) of the bullying activity. Despite the fact that a bully's typically denigrating activities are aimed at the bully's targets, the true source of such negativity is ultimately almost always found in the bully's own sense of personal insecurity and/or vulnerability.[25] Such aggressive projections of displaced negative emotions can occur anywhere from the micro-level of interpersonal relationships, all the way up through to the macro-level of international politics, or even international armed conflict.[20]

Projection of general guilt: Projection of a severe conscience[26] is another form of defense, one which may be linked to the making of false accusations, personal or political.[20]

Projection of hope: Also, in a more positive light, a patient may sometimes project his or her feelings of hope onto the therapist.[27]

Counter-projection: is something as an effect of projection that Carl Jung was brilliant enough to deduce:

Jung wrote, "All projections provoke counter-projection when the object is unconscious of the quality projected upon it by the subject.  Thus, what is unconscious in the recipient will be projected back onto the projector, precipitating a form of mutual acting out.


In a rather different usage, Harry Stack Sullivan saw counter-projection in the therapeutic context as a way of warding off the compulsive re-enactment of a psychological trauma, by emphasising the difference between the current situation and the projected obsession with the perceived perpetrator of the original trauma.


Clinical approaches:

Drawing on Gordon Allport's idea of the expression of self onto activities and objects, projective techniques have been devised to aid personality assessment, including the Rorschach ink-blots and the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT).


Projection may help a fragile ego reduce anxiety, but at the cost of a certain dissociation, as in dissociative identity disorder.[32] In extreme cases, an individual's personality may end up becoming critically depleted.[33] In such cases, therapy may be required which would include the slow rebuilding of the personality through the "taking back" of such projections.

Criticism (that he just hates and cannot help but to react to - he cannot ignore it):

Some studies were critical of Freud's theory. Research supports the existence of a false-consensus effect whereby humans have a broad tendency to believe that others are similar to themselves, and thus "project" their personal traits onto others. This applies to good traits as well as bad traits and is not a defense mechanism for denying the existence of the trait within the self.[

Instead, Newman, Duff, and Baumeister (1997) proposed a new model of defensive projection. In this view, people try to suppress thoughts of their undesirable traits, and these efforts make those trait categories highly accessible—so that they are then used all the more often when forming impressions of others. The projection is then only a by-product of the real defensive mechanism.
“

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection


http://endallsufffering.org

http://JamesGrayMason.US

Joke: She would be better at running Trump Co., than he has been. In the early morning hours Trump's followers are more likely to impulsively click on the TRUTH! 

#DonaldJTrump #Trump2016 #VoteTrump #MakeAmericaGreatAgain #USAElections
#UnitedStatesofAmerica #endallsuffering #stopallsuffering #projection #CarlJung #psychoanalysis #psychology-101 #psychologyPhD #Psychological #bullying #stopBullying #demagogues

Her First Lost Political Love & Cha Cha Cha Changes

I sat across from a 30-year-old “millennial,” recently. She had been mourning the primary loss of her first political love; senator Bernie Sanders. It was too early, for her emotional state of lost political love, to debate with her the merits of continued liberalism as it has been in recent years, as it has been moving, gaining ground rapidly since I’ve followed our political progress, and not be engaging with her, in her  grandiose considerations of a socialist revolution at this time.

But the debate ensued, with I defending a woman with more qualifications to be the president than anyone in recent history.

Recent history seemed to be a point of difference. She stated that she had majored in political science.

I did not ask her if she had ever questioned whether or not it was indeed a science, I let that one slide. I did not ask her how her knowledge of America’s political history, learned to her in those years pursuing that major had helped her thus far this year, I let that one slide. I suspected, but did not ask her how vital in that curriculum was psychology, sociology, cultural anthropology, evolution, communication, volunteering for elected representatives, voter registration, or investigating and reporting on one social ill within a community was to her degree, I let all that slide.

She had no idea of my history with American politics. My activism. My volunteering for my congressman, my registering voters, my radio and internet streaming broadcasting experience, my time as the child of a feminist (hippie) growing up in Washington, D.C. She didn’t know of my having 17 years to learn and study and ready the political opinions of hundreds of so-called experts in political science. She did not know I’ve published dozens of editorials in newspapers in 6 cities, 6 states. She has never seen my weblog that dates to 2006. She didn’t know me, big period.  I let it all slide. She actually told me I need to look at polls and statistics. Me. That’s okay, she’ll learn one day what I knew when she assumed my ignorance because long ago I had been a hard working, dirt filled, master plumber, going from one job another.

I think the entire context of our debate about the structure of democracies became soured after I asked to clarify (for my mind) if she had just stated:  “Hillary Clinton is not a liberal and not a progressive.”

“That’s foolish.” Was my impulsive and simple reply.

I knew where she had gotten that diatribe from. I had seen many of the outrageously ignorant memes produced by her generation, proliferated onto the easy internet. Easy to be emotional without reasoning - the internet. They were no better than any dishonest, name calling, ignorant candidates who are taking advantage of the youth of their constituents with very inconsistent, with statistics and legislative history of candidates’ statements about the opposition. Learned from the baseless statements of others.

Bernie Sander rally; UW, 2016

I did not feel a need to rattle-off the secretary’s history. I wanted her to learn in the coming weeks; but that was over-optimistically hopeful of me because it’s been 2 months and I doubt she has taken the uncomfortable initiative to investigate the truth for herself.

A few weeks later Green party candidate Jill Stein puts-out a television commercial, in which she states: “She has been working to tear down the social safety net.”  I am sure those Bernie or Bust millennials soaked it up. They don’t know that millions of people all working within the democratic party, including the democratic nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton,  have been on the frontline of protecting the social safety net for decades before those millennials were conceived. I was aghast. But minutes later, not surprised. That position is where they want to be. They’re likely going to cast a protest vote for Jill Stein, a candidate who went there on national television. Went where no reality exists. Where diatribe sinks in to validate to losers of their first political love.

That protest vote will not be heard. If cast it may be destructive simultaneously. It will be a wasted vote.

Democracy (with a small d) has made its choice among tens of millions of interested early voters and that’s how we play until a brand new Articles of Confederation are written.  Those parties we tend to blame it all on, are creations by sociological inevitability. Two kinds of parties eventually exist in all confined spaces of millions of voices all experiencing new changes. Two is what happens. Division is natural. Categorizing is easier for large populations.

Not tangentially, here’s the point: she wanted to disagree, I wanted to impart knowledge of decades of being out-there to her, with a learned appreciation for the entire political game of moderation in a democracy. That debate went nowhere.

Excuses were made why the evenings’ newly heated after dinner discussion should end. Sound bites were made by each other, trying to get in a final jab but the discussion that could have lasted all night long ended too quickly. With hard feelings toward one and others general philosophy of the state of the world.

The last statement I made (she immediately disagreed with) was something to the affect of:
“In the study of history, as a predictor of our future behaviors, as nations and of the people within them, we need to keep in mind that all events are happening faster now (more frequently). Change is more rapid because we are many more, now, in the same confined space. Complexities are arising that are new and more frequently occurring. Just see how many different the world and national news outlets cannot possibly cover each important event of each day.”

“Oh no.” She quickly replied as if I was completely wrong about an entire world view.

“People are having all the same problems at the same pace they always have. It’s the same.”

This difference of opinion is where a study of the sociology, psychology and cultural anthropology on the whole would (possibly) have caused her to agree.

Learning how populations react to changes is the key - no longer what Douglas said to Lincoln, or how Bacon felt about the colony of Virginia.

Learning that greater complexities await a population trapped in a confined space and moving faster with more energy and having collisions with one and other far more frequently - with that greater force of impact and so further spreading greater and more different change is what should be primary to anyone studying the human condition and the important method of organized communication called politics.

The graduate of a political science major should find that aspect of predictive analysis far more important today, than the dry facts of a people faced with far simpler times and far more visible (yet simplistic) causalities in their lives.

~~~~~

Ahh, those were the days. It was simpler times. When getting enough water from the well into the house was the greatest worry at the end of the day.  When a war was rumored for decades and not weeks to months prior to actions of war. When getting one new school in your community took decades, but it seemed a reasonable time for that quest. When rumor of equality and independence of any subset of any population, oppressed, discriminated against and held as unequal to the status quo, was a slow rising of agreement that spread slow and took many decades to achieve - those were the days.

The illustration below is a crowded canvas. The analogy is that we are the many multi-colored dots that crowd together on our limited planets’ landscape for the living and interacting with each other.
A huge canvas with allot of empty space for those dots to exist would be reminiscent of those “simpler times.” That cliche statement that times were easier back then, has the merit of truth. They were, for the individual, far more simple. Less interaction with less frequency and fewer changes to be created by that infrequency of interaction. Complex, we have become as we bounce off of each other’s problems with greater impact and create new complexities we likely could not have imagined.

The times; they are blowin in the wind.

© James Gray Mason / End All Suffering, 2016.

Update: Donald J. Trump has been our president for 120 days. It's been (like) 15 years in liberal hell.

I had told the two young people, in the conversation above, that "We do not have a safe margin for her to win the electoral college. Not a stay at home safety margin."

Below is a screenshot from political statisticians and pollsters Fivethirtyeight. Notice the 11% chance of Hillary winning the popular vote and losing the election.

 If you stayed home on election day, or voted for a third party candidate (with little chance of winning) based on an 11% chance you'd be wrong and an authoritarian ignoramus would take over the White House, and possibly bring this country backwards in progress by decades and take us into multiple wars and possibly WW3, then you need to reconsider the state of the world and the fragility of democracies worldwide. 

November 6, 2016:

End All Suffering‏ @EndAllSuffering  18s18 seconds ago

#Trumpvoters #millennials #election2016 #Greenparty #JillStein #libertarian Not safe odds: 11% GAMBLE #trump would win: war, suffering . .

James. 

5.17.2017 

http://endallsuffering.blogspot.com/

#psychology #sociology #politicalscience #polysci #populationexplosion #anthropology #demographics #history #AmericanHistory #endallsuffering #USACivics #JamesGrayMason #Cities #Communities #behavioralstudy #polyscistudent #polysciPhd

Senator Bernie Sanders and Dreamy Dreams of a Liberal Utopia in the United States

Sanders loyalists I plead with you to get real.  The anti-communist paranoia is not over yet. Your grandparents are alive and kicking and those who believed everything that generation ever said about socialism, and those who were equating that political bent to communism are still very much alive. Don’t screw this up by allowing senator Bernie Sanders to get the democratic party nomination. Not just yet. Not now. If your efforts result in the defeat of Hillary Rodham Clinton you will be sorry. Our entire nation will be sorry.

This sound warning comes to you from someone who is more socialist than Bernie Sanders. I know it's not the time to build the democratic utopia we know that the United States can be.  

We liberals tend to be huge dreamers. We actually have political dreams at night, in REM. But consider please what the opposition to senator Sanders will be. Scrolling map views of the U.S.S.S.R. where the camera slows down just a little bit over the word “socialist.” Fast flashing pictures of Chairman Mao, interspersed with pictures of bread lines and starving laborers working government owned vegetable fields. The announcer’s voice saying the S-word about 10 times in 30 seconds. Pictures of an angry Bernie Sanders in black and white switching back and forth between images of starving communists and Joseph Stalin.

Now imagine where all the money is going to come from to fund those ads. That’s right, plenty of locations for funding. This country has over 3 million people who earn more than 1 million dollars in one year’s earnings (each year). There are tens of millions of Americans who look-up to them as something they can become. Never mind the more than 1700 billionaires who will think that Donald Trump or some other asshole conservative monied capitalist will make a great U.S. president. The odds are against us. The campaign funding system is not yet on our side. Dreamy dreams of a true socialist who can make your dreams come true before you die are not timely at this time in the United States. If you continue to froth at the mouth over the peace and love and economic equality message of the true socialist then senator Sanders will be the nominee and we’ll be losing the entire country to conservatives with such backward thinking we’ll be moving toward corporate fascism so fast you’ll wish for the Watergate days.

Then you can just say goodbye to all those dreams of a single-payer health care system, banking reform that protects the middle class, criminal justice reform that protects the poor, Wall Street reform that reigns in greed and wealth distribution that grows us into what we can be, education reform that makes us the shining city on the hill that can actually compete in the twenty-first century. Just kiss it all goodbye.  

Please get real. The dream may come one day soon, just not yet, not this election year.  

~~~~~~

2/10/2016 Day after the first primary in the United States, the state of New Hampshire:

Congratulations Senator Bernie Sanders (D - Vermont)! I knew you would win the state next door to your own where you have been a political folk hero of liberals for decades, ever since you took over as the mayor of Burlington and fixed that medium sized city.

If you are a pundit get your recent past straight before making a fool of yourself. It was predicted as very likely by any smart politico who knows the senator’s past that he would win the votes of the liberal Democrats of New Hampshire. I have known this for all of this past year and (silly me) I expected that you political reporters would also have known this. I was expecting his big win there.

Hold on Bernie your real challenge is coming. In the Carolinas and those many states you are the tomato in the pickle barrel. Get ready for a Hillary Rodham Clinton win in nearly all of those states. That is where the delegate windfall begins for her.

Guess what voters: Hillary Clinton does stand for everything Bernie Sanders is touting as if those issues were his own unique and new advocacy. I have known this since the early 1990’s when her husband William Jefferson Clinton ran for the office of President of the United States and I witnessed a fighter who as a woman stood-out and fought against white male assholes, day after day. That white male machismo club has kept women like herself as an enemy to be subdued since the evolvement of bands of homo sapiens began to be thinkers and builders of their environment.

What Bernie says he will do is what Hillary has had close experience advocating for for decades. But she stands alone as the one candidate, between the two of you, who has stuck her neck out as a party participant who actually wanted the opposition to get onboard with her ideas. Bernie has mostly stood alone and has been comfortable as both a congressional representative and a U.S. senator from a small population state of voters in a demographic that is fairly new to the state of Vermont - not the old-timers of Vermont, but the demographic that fled the lower New England states, beginning in the late 1980’s, for cities like Burlington, who then voted for the passionate Jewish man from Brooklyn. As if he was more likely to understand the populace of the largest voting block population of that small state.  

Senator Sanders sir,

Your history as a politician clearly portrays that you have stood alone as a rebellious independent. Except for all those votes against a national waiting period and background check for gun buyers, in which you chose to listen to the National Rifle Association propaganda and so you thought that you were representing the people of a hunting state; Vermont. 

You have been voting as a minority who stuck to his guns for the price of getting very few of your issues understood and accepted in the very partisanly divided government that is the United States. You have very little history as a moderate who seeks to bring people together to have accomplishments. Hillary has been that person of the later. That is a distinguishing difference that makes her a far better candidate to take-over the highest office in the United States as our commander-in-chief - on day one.  You know of this difference sir, and your subconscious knows it also. Those dreamy liberals (I am often one of them) are mesmerized by an ideal that this country is not ready for. Not this entire country, a very different place than Burlington Vermont liberals portray your following as.

~~~

6/22/2016:

hmm. a new series developing that will have to be portrayed in tiny snippets for the internet attention deficit hyperactivity browsing public. The title of the series?:

What went wrong for Senator Bernie Sanders.

Know this readers: my predictions were public many months ago. I'm pretty pretty pretty sure you can find them. This series will extrapolate on those writings and the causality in reasons why they were made and why I knew with 90% certainty what would happen to his campaign for president of this greater country.

Point 1 (of many).

The aesthetics of the candidate.

Yes there are a shitload of very shallow people who make judgements about  people in a split-second. In your work or home environment, you have met one today.

Image for a meme: 10 or 20 young (youth is important for meme) African American people facing the camera. None expressing any interest. Collective cartoon thought bubble:

"Oh not another old white guy. He fits my adapted stereotype of an old white guy. Part of the damn problem. He's a curmudgeon too! Seems like he's whining about his Ensure being late."

~~~~~

Coming: Look out soon for another editorial from me about why it is a strong factor and it (really) is important to vote for a woman for president of the United States at this very time. A woman who is progressive and has a strong record of fighting for families. A woman who does not walk around the White House as if holding her finger on the trigger of a gun. War is coming you fools. The pattern of a world war has begun. 

James Gray Mason, August 2015.

The author: 1995, Starbucks, Monterey, California. Reading every single essay of political opinion in Liberal Opinion Weekly for more than 15 years. I now know conservatives and liberals of the United States very well. I know who they are and how they think. I choose liberal. I chose reason. I know it is not time for the progressive revolution. Not yet. Because I AM NOT RUNNING THIS YEAR. LOL. :-)  

All American Rights Reserved: End All Suffering / James Gray Mason, 2015, 2016. 

#HillaryClinton2016 #BernieSanders2016 #USAElections #Vote2016 #POTUS