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Louisa and Isaac, a lively, warm, and bright couple in their 40s, fell in love two decades ago. They were intellectually engaged with each other, adventurous, and, for years, shared “deep blue” affiliations. That changed during Donald Trump’s first term.
One of their earliest arguments about politics, they told me recently, erupted when Isaac announced he thought a wall on the southern border made sense. Louisa was shocked. She worked with undocumented immigrants; the spirit of protectiveness for the vulnerable was a deep part of her identity.
As Isaac became more engaged with a conservative worldview, their arguments grew more heated. Louisa described how their political divisions made them fearful of each other. “I didn’t recognize him,” she said. “I was afraid — maybe he wasn’t a compassionate person? Who is he? Is he even kind, loving? Does he care about people?”
I was introduced to Isaac and Louisa (that’s her middle name) by a director of my Showtime series, “Couples Therapy.” In my work as a psychoanalyst and couples therapist, I see a deep resignation in response to our political divide and a newfound fear of “the other side.” Due to our political differences, people in this country are deeply alienated from one another.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, I see how political disputes follow dynamics similar to disputes between couples, albeit amplified. People typically come to any event with differing views
of the world informed by their life and background. Couples negotiate these differences by creating their own political system and guiding ideologies.
Grasping the degree to which each of their “truths” emerges from a deeply subjective place is their most important challenge. This process is difficult — for a couple or for a country. A psychoanalytic approach offers a path.
As children, early in our psychological development, we all resort to a defense mechanism identified by the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein as “splitting.” To cope with negative or inexplicable experiences, we divide our perceptions of people into either all-good or all-bad.
This splitting allows us to avoid dealing with feelings of vulnerability, shame, hate, ambivalence or anxiety by externalizing (or dumping) unwanted emotions onto others. We then feel free to categorize these others as entirely negative, while seeing ourselves as good.
In political environments, this kind of splitting manifests in an “us versus them” mentality — where “our” side is virtuous and correct, and “their” side is wrong and flawed — which produces the kind of rigid, extreme, ideological warring we are caught up in now.
The technologies that mediate our access to reality only exacerbate this dynamic. The algorithms used by social media prioritize sensationalist and divisive content, creating “bubbles” that limit our exposure to diverse perspectives, rather than fostering a balanced discourse.It’s important for us to recognize just how gratifying this process can be, both for individuals and larger groups. Splitting produces a kind of ecstatic righteousness. There’s an intoxicating thrill in hate — in feeling that you’re in the bosom of a like-minded brotherhood, free from complexity and uncertainty. In this state, we’re prone to ignore information that contradicts our idealized version of ourselves, we become allergic to dissonance, and those with differing views are cast out or canceled.
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Cecilia Erlich
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