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MIGNON NIXON

In its search for a leader the group finds a paranoid
schizophrenic or malignant hysteric if possible; failing
either of these, a psychopathic personality with delin-
quent trends will do; failing a psychopathic personality
it will pick on the verbally facile high-grade defective.

—W. R. Bion, Experiences in Groups (1961)

An anxious group will typically select its maddest member as its leader. Here
is a kernel of psychoanalytic insight, formulated by Wilfred Bion, pioneer of the
psychoanalysis of groups, that might have proved salutary in the recent election
cycle.1 Reading Bion in a psychoanalytic reading group at Cambridge University in
the autumn of 2015, at the height of the Republican Party presidential debates, I
wondered aloud if we should worry. The question was interpreted as an attempt to
be droll, so I dropped it. That was a mistake, minor in significance, but perhaps
not entirely trivial if multiplied by innumerable others’ small acts of self-censor-
ship and disavowal, mounting up to a collective denial of reality. “Silence is the
real crime,” observed Hanna Segal, the late British psychoanalyst, outspoken critic
of American foreign policy, and legendary anti-nuclear activist.2 It is the responsi-
bility of psychoanalysts, Segal observed, to bring psychical realities to bear on poli-
tics, even if such interventions are likely to be dismissed. Perhaps we all—artists,
critics, teachers—have a similar obligation now.

The Republican Party primary debates tested the candidates’ abilities to play
crazy more than anything else, to prove themselves, in Bion’s terms, a “case.”
Their proposed policies were, many analysts observed, fanciful, irrational, even
delusional—in pure economic terms, for example—but there was more to it.3 The

W. R. Bion, Experiences in Groups and Other Papers (London: Routledge, 2009).

2.
(London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 143–56.

Hanna Segal, “Silence Is the Real Crime” (1987), in Psychoanalysis, Literature and War

3.
For a darkly comic appraisal of the primary candidates and their proposals, see Eliot
Weinberger’s essay “They Could Have Picked . . . ,” London Review of Books 38, no. 15 (July 28, 2016),
pp. 7–8.

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OCTOBER

debates became auditions for the role of a mad president. And far from turning
off primary voters, these spectacles proved highly popular, first as television enter-
tainment, and then as a means of winnowing the field to the maddest contestant, a
hands-down winner. “Only a madman would say, ‘I am the most wonderful and
strongest person in the world,’” remarked one writer in a memorial tribute to
Segal. “Yet, groups say things like that all the time about themselves.”4 In 2016, this
cleavage between what is deemed pathological in the individual and normative in
the group was eroded and then erased. In his convention speech, the nominee
who in April had dubbed himself Wonderful Donald now declared, “I alone can
fix it.”5 The political consensus on the affair seemed to be that while Republican-
primary voters might constitute a mad group, general-election voters were more
reality-based and would rescue the country from this folly.

Throughout the summer, the Clinton campaign took to the airwaves with
advertisements relentlessly repeating Wonderful Donald’s mad speech. The
refrain that a mad president poses an existential risk to present and future genera-
tions was an echo of the past. In the 1964 election, Vietnam War president Lyndon
Johnson—like Clinton a progressive hawk with formidable political chops but
“high negatives”—prevailed over the right-wing Republican nominee, Senator
Barry Goldwater, by seizing on Goldwater’s avowed willingness to use nuclear
weapons. The allusion to the Johnson-Goldwater matchup played to the collective
expectation that Clinton, like Johnson, could not only win but win decisively, by
showing that her opponent was too mad to be granted control of the nuclear
codes. This time, the fail-safe strategy failed. There are many sophisticated data
sets and analyses to explain this, but what is beyond dispute is that nearly half the
electorate voted for a candidate who showcased his mad tendencies as the core of
his appeal. It is worth asking what this reveals about the group.

By using this term, “the group,” I am resisting the political culture of the algo-
rithm, which dices us into categories—working-class white men, single mothers, tea
partiers, millennials, Duck Dynasty fans—and so enables professional analysts to
model and, in theory, predict our behavior. Such empirical analysis has the virtue of
efficiency, but it ignores historical and theoretical knowledge of the group, which
would counsel that the group is difficult to study, let alone lead, in part because it is
prone to be anxious, unstable, volatile, impulsive, destructive, and in flight from
reality. It also ignores a central purpose of politics, which is laboriously to connect
people and groups. In Bion’s terms, this is the political work of structuring: “The
belief in the holiness of idiots, the belief that genius is akin to madness, all indicate
this same tendency of the group to choose, when left unstructured, its most ill mem-
ber as its leader,” he remarks.6 In contemporary presidential politics, individual can-
didates are subjected to a kind of psychological scrutiny, and the delusions of indi-
vidual groups come in for of a measure of wonderment, but we live in a virtual, and

4.
17, no. 3 (2012), p. 319.

C. Fred Alford, “Hanna Segal—A Memorial Appreciation,” Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society

Rebecca Savranksy, “Trump Coins New Nickname: Wonderful Donald,” The Hill, April 24, 2016.

Bion, Experiences in Groups, p. 122.

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Crazy

willful, theoretical vacuum concerning the psychical dynamics of the group. That
contemporary politics, despite its fascination with group behavior, is untouched by
psychoanalytic theories of the group is another symptom of the denial of reality—in
this case psychical reality—that afflicts us as a group.

A group, in Bion’s terms, is the repository of the mad parts of ourselves. The
group helps us to tame our madness, but it may also exaggerate it, reviving infan-
tile trends. For it is in infancy that we feel most mad—fragmented, frightened,
threatened, and “paranoid-schizoid,” as Melanie Klein evocatively described the
state of anxiety in which the premature ego must temporarily exist.7 The mad
leader is a kind of baby king, an avatar of our infantile past, a figure toward whom
we feel pity. The grandiosity, impulsivity, and self-infatuation of the mad leader
revives atavistic memories of our own infantile rages, mania, and megalomaniac
ecstasies, and we can derive pleasure, Bion suggests, from indulging the omnipo-
tent fantasies of a helpless psychotic. The group may spoil the leader and be capti-
vated by his excesses to a degree that an individual would not.8

The elevation of a mad leader is the predictable outcome of failure to attend
to the “basic assumptions” of an anxious group, which, as Bion explains, often
expects “to obtain security from one individual on whom they depend,” the baby.9
The infant leader’s dependency is the psychic correlate, or mirror image, of the
group’s own dependency on the baby king (“I alone can fix it”). Bion divides
groups into two principal types, work groups that are task- and reality-based, and
basic assumption groups that are emotionally driven. The two categories overlap,
and work groups, which in Bion’s terms are ego-like, are “constantly perturbed” by
unconscious trends.10 A wise work group, Bion observes, can only be alarmed by
the “spontaneous development of leadership” and by any move to nominate a
leader “by ‘unconstitutional’ means, that is to say, by a spontaneous act of choice
in which the emotions are not cooled.”11 When politics becomes unstructured,
overheated, and driven by basic assumptions, the group loses contact with reality,
which is the province of work and, crucially, of cooperation. “A group acting on
basic assumption requires no organization or cooperation” because it is not con-
strained by reality.12

The baby king (a usually masculine despot) licenses a departure from reality
and, in particular, a denial of our own badness. To put this another way, the mania
of a mad president relieves us of the responsibility to mourn. For Segal, the failure
to mourn the effects of our own destructiveness is a defining feature of modern

7.
The Selected Melanie Klein, ed. Juliet Mitchell (New York: Free Press, 1986), pp. 116–45.

Melanie Klein, “A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States” (1935), in

8.
accustomed to associating its behavior with its physical development, is really insane” (p. 122).

In our unconscious, we know, Bion observes, “that the baby, if only we had not become

10.

11.

12.

Bion, Experiences in Groups, p. 66.

Ibid., p. 129.

Ibid., p. 122.

Ibid., p. 136.

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OCTOBER

American politics. In her writings on “nuclear mentality culture,” Segal observes
that all groups resist assuming collective responsibility for war, but the history of
the United States from Hiroshima to the Cold War to Vietnam to the First Gulf
War to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is one of manic disavowal.13 The psychic
legacy of the denial of guilt is, in psychoanalytic parlance, a pathological mourn-
ing. It is not only that we do not face up to the death and destruction we have
caused, but also that our energies are consumed in denying their significance by
manically declaring our own omnipotence.14 Every time we begin to mourn the
destruction we have authored, it is morning, or infancy, in America again.15 And
the broader implication of this perpetual recourse to historical amnesia of our
own destructiveness in war is a negation of reality itself.

In the spring before the election of the mad president, his predecessor
performed a symbolic act, assuming a measure of collective responsibility for past
destruction. In May 2016, after visiting Vietnam, Barack Obama became the first
sitting US president to make an official visit to Hiroshima. After touring the
Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, he laid a wreath at the cenotaph in the
Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, met survivors of the atomic bomb US forces
dropped on the city in 1945, and made a speech in which he called for the elimi-
nation of nuclear weapons. This simple, long-deferred action, taking place over
seventy years after the event but still during the lifetime of some survivors, marked
a shift from an enduring triumphalist rationalization of the atomic bombings of
Japan (mania) to a more hopeful stance (mourning). The annihilation of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki might still, the president observed, occasion “a moral
awakening.”16 Here was a different vision of mo(u)rning in America, one in which
we might finally be able to acknowledge and grieve for the losses we have caused
as well as for those we have endured.

Following his election in November 2016, months after Obama’s visit to
Hiroshima, the president-elect moved swiftly to stock his cabinet with former gener-
als. Days before Christmas, he would announce, with his trademark studied casual-
ness, that he was toying with the idea of restarting the nuclear arms race. The non-
fake news over the festive period was filled with speculation about the possibility that
nuclear testing would be resumed under the watchful eye of a secretary of energy
who had, as a presidential candidate, called for the elimination of the Department
of Energy. There was still some uncertainty about the target of this new nuclear

13.
Ambivalence,” in Psychoanalysis, Literature, and War, pp. 157 –68.

Hanna Segal, “From Hiroshima to the Cold War and After: Socio-Political Expressions of

14.
(1940), in The Selected Melanie Klein, pp. 146–74.

On this dynamic, see Melanie Klein, “Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States”

The most influential contemporary account of this syndrome, and the ethical implications of
15.
pathological mourning, is Judith Butler’s Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London:
Verso, 2004).

16.
Revolution,” New York Times, May 27, 2016.

Gardiner Harris, “At Hiroshima Memorial, Obama Says Nuclear Arms Require Moral

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Rachel Harrison. More News: A Situation. 2016.
Installation view at Greene Naftali, New York, April 2016.
Courtesy of the artist and Greene Naftali, New York.
Photograph by Jason Mandella.

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buildup, given the president-elect’s personal regard for the leader of the historical
archenemy, but there was a certain logic to his tweet that the nuclear show must go
on. For if, as Segal had argued, nuclear politics is a form of mass psychosis in which
the prospect of annihilation arouses mania—makes us crazy—then the enemy might
truly be a secondary concern. What is crazy about the nuclear attitude, the psychoan-
alyst explained, is that it actively creates the conditions for what it most fears, the
end of the world, while also—and this is crucial—denying the catastrophic reality it
risks. To the extent that the president-elect himself represents a kind of political
nuclear option, which the group has now exercised, the corollary of a reinvigorated
nuclear arms race is a logical extension of that radical act.

Writing in the 1960s, at the height of the Cold War and the American war in
Vietnam, about the psychical implications of the nuclear threat, the Italian psycho-
analyst Franco Fornari framed the problem as “a collective delusion of negation of
reality.”17 The reality Fornari had in mind was the “pantoclastic prospect” of
nuclear annihilation, a catastrophic possibility so overwhelming as to arouse our
most primitive manic defense, a denial of reality. In this situation, the psychoana-
lyst observed, we urgently require some “instrument of verifying reality.”18 That
instrument, he speculated, might be another, contrasting form of madness, name-
ly, melancholia. The possibility exists, Fornari observed, that the melancholic,
“while insane,” is still “closer to the catastrophic reality of our times” than “the
unsuspecting victims of a collective delusion of negation of reality.”19 In a climate
of reality negation, the melancholic vision of doom has the potential to enlighten.
Perhaps this is our opening. Afflicted as we are by a manic negation of reali-
ty—the realities of climate change, nuclear armaments, the pain of others—we
also, and not coincidentally, live in a time of mass melancholia.20 Under the head-
ings of an epidemic of opiate addiction and economically induced despair, mass
melancholia was a significant, if unheralded, theme of the 2016 campaign. The
selection of the maddest member of the group as our leader might be seen as a
radical response to this morbid state, or as the psychical equivalent of the nuclear
option that risks self-annihilation in a frenzy of energizing paranoid-schizoid
destructiveness.

“Love trumps hate,” Clinton’s swan song to the 2016 campaign, attempted to
salve the anxiety of the group but also risked a negation of psychic reality to rival
the negation of objective reality promoted by her nemesis. For the individual, love
has in some circumstances the power to overcome hatred, but love between

17.
Books/Doubleday, 1974), p. 160.

Franco Fornari, The Psychoanalysis of War, trans. Alenka Pfeifer (Garden City, NY: Anchor

18.

19.

Ibid.

20.
By 2030, depression will be the leading illness worldwide, the World Health Organization
warns. The phrase “mass melancholia” was recently coined by Juliet Mitchell. Together, she and I have
recently begun a research project on melancholia and politics with the working title “Mass
Melancholia: Cultural Counteractions.”

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Crazy

groups, as Fornari observed, is far rarer. A principal psychic function of the group,
he argued, is to pool our terror and hatred and to export those emotions else-
where—as onto our enemies in war. Today, our group is split, and this divide can
seem to replicate the psychical conditions of war.

Yet, even this intensifying war at home cannot discharge the destructive
reserves of nuclear mentality culture, a destructiveness that, as Fornari warned, has
precipitated us into a prolonged state of crisis. By resorting immediately and
reflexively to the rhetoric of nuclear escalation, the mad president has laid bare
the underlying and persistent predicament of our group: that our failure or
refusal to mourn demands an unending and unexpendable accumulation of
destructiveness to ward off melancholia. This might be crazy, but it reveals a psy-
chical reality we may be forced to confront for our own survival.

What now? We who are writers, teachers, and artists can bear witness to the
psychical reality of melancholia, the morbid pull of the death drive, and help turn
it into creative resistance. We can work to foster a politics of connection. We can
promote cultural counter-actions to “verify reality,” including historical reality. We
can “fight with the mind,” as Virginia Woolf taught us to do, and make meaningful
use of the hard-won theoretical and political insights previous generations have
bequeathed to us.21 Silence is the real crime.

January 17, 2017

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(London: Penguin, 2009), p. 2.

Virginia Woolf, “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid,” in Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid MIGNON NIXON image

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