Like many people, I experienced Wednesday’s storming of the United States Capitol by Trump supporters as deeply disturbing but not really surprising. If anything, the seeds of insurrection have been brewing for the last four years and quite probably have been simmering long before that. I’m specifically thinking about the collective unconscious of our nation and even our entire world from the perspective of group dynamics theory.
We all have an unconscious, that part of ourselves that is inaccessible and entirely out of our awareness. Sigmund Freud brought the concept of the unconscious to our attention and believed that a primary goal of psychoanalysis is to make what was previously unconscious conscious, thereby empowering ourselves around the choices we make that can impact our futures. While things remain unconscious, we can do little to effect change, but once we become aware of these previously unconscious pieces of self, we then are empowered to make conscious choices about our behaviors to improve our lives now and into the future.
But this concerns the individual level of behavior. There is also the interpersonal level of behavior, which is focused on the relationship between two people. When I am conducting couples counseling, I am mostly attending to the interpersonal level and sometimes the individual level of behavior. What most people do not know about or fully understand is a third level of interaction, the group level. When I first learned about this third level, that of unconscious group dynamics, it was like seeing something in 3D for the first time. It was, and still is, an utterly fascinating lens through which to see the world. This concept takes time to really click and make sense. It is very complex. It is easy to confuse this unconscious group phenomenon with the individual or interpersonal levels. And it is not either/or. All three levels exist. We all have personal responsibilities over our behaviors. Keep in mind that I am talking about processes that are out of our awareness. They are unconscious. This third level is ubiquitous to all groups, no matter the size or affiliation. No exceptions. Just like every single one of us has our own individual unconscious, every group, whether it is three people or a million people, has a group level unconscious. It is this third level which has been on my mind since Wednesday. And it is this third group level that addresses the phenomenon known as the collective unconscious.
If you have been swept up in the excitement of a large crowd at a rock concert, a protest rally, or a sporting event, this may help you get closer to what it can feel like to experience the power of the collective unconscious. Mobs of people rioting like they did on Wednesday is another example. Obviously, lots of people are not Trump supporters and never have been, expressing sentiments such as “Not my President” from the time he was elected. But this is individual and group behavior which is conscious, not group behavior as it applies to the collective unconscious. All Americans are a part of the “group” known as the United States and the larger “group” known as the world. Even if as individuals we are not in support of Trump or if we are members of subgroups such as Republicans, Democrats, or Independents, this is separate from what it means to be a part of the collective unconscious. Within any group, there are always subgroups that are in support of the group leader and there are those that are in opposition to that leader. But again, on an unconscious group level, we are all participants in what occurs. From this perspective, we are all complicit in electing this President. We are all complicit in creating the events that occurred Wednesday.
One phenomenon that has been observed by people who study this group level of the unconscious is the incredibly strong pull to uphold White male authority, even by people who are not White men. Trump has many supporters who are female and/or identify as coming from races other than Caucasian. There are many possible ways to understand this, one of which is that on an unconscious level, aligning ourselves with a straight Christian White male in authority may be the closest we can get to having power ourselves. We have always upheld White male privilege, long before there was a United States of America. In America, White men have firmly held onto the role of President until Barack Obama took office in 2009. In 2016, Hilary Clinton was preparing to be the first female U. S. President. Globally, there have been relatively few countries that have had a female leader and even fewer that have had more than one, and even fewer where that one female leader stayed in office for a significant amount of time. Now we have our first interracial, female Vice President elect in Kamala Harris and Joe Biden is intentionally appointing people who identify as other than straight, White, and male to make up his Cabinet. If the unconscious pull -- not just from White people but from us as a whole -- is to uphold White male authority, then the intense backlash to this authority being threatened is not at all surprising.
This is why I said that the 2016 election of Trump and the recent events to overturn the 2020 election have been simmering for a long, long time. Obama, Hilary, and Harris represent threats to our deep-rooted, unconscious need to preserve White male privilege. What we see are violent displays of aggression like what took place Wednesday. But I believe that much deeper down, these actions are motivated by primal, unconscious anxieties that our lives are in danger -- that these are threats to our very survival. While there are certainly Republicans who do not believe the election was taken from them, there is an enormous faction of people who genuinely believe that it was. They believe that they are defending America and democracy. We cannot convince them otherwise. Denial is an incredibly powerful, primitive, unconscious defense mechanism. And here it is being employed on the group level by a large subgroup of our country. This is different from people who are lying or playing along to protect themselves. This is how so many people believe that we don’t need to wear masks and why there is such a large anti-vaxxer movement. Denial is protecting people from those primal fears and anxieties that are buried deep, deep down. I know I sound like a broke record, but this is operating on the unconscious group level. So even if many of us do not believe these things as individuals, we are all a part of the collective unconscious that needs to uphold the status quo.
Please bear in mind that these are very complex concepts to absorb and not easily understood right away. What I attempted to propose here is obviously much more complex than can be addressed in a short blog post, but it is food for thought and perhaps an introduction into a different lens with which to think about what happened on Wednesday. More so, what has been happening in this county and in this world since the beginning of humankind.