Introduction
by Andrea Scardovi
(Scientific Secretary of the Psychoanalytic Center of Bologna)
In this third contribution to the “Me, We” series, we publish the interview that Jay Greenberg gave to our colleague Filippo Barosi on the topic of the American political situation. Greenberg’s remarks draw on his valuable clinical experience, but also on a preface that emphasizes the importance of recognizing the risk of conflating personal thought with technical thinking. The reflections you will read in this text are about a concern with current events that first and foremost challenges us to reflect on ourselves, and which, rather than becoming polarized around a specific figure, seeks to consider macro-social and supra-personal movements of which the contemporary situation is an expression. Referring to the thought of Tagore, Jay Greenberg also reminds us of the value of a principle that is essential both for the citizen and for the psychoanalyst: the importance of integrating critical thinking with a sense of trust in the potential of the individual, without losing our confidence in human beings.
Happy reading.
Interview to Jay Greenberg
by Filippo Barosi (Associate Member of the SPI/IPA, Psychoanalytic Center of Bologna)
We are pleased and honored to be in conversation with a great American psychoanalyst: Jay Greenberg. Our guest is a training and supervising psychoanalyst at the William Alanson White Institute in New York. Together with Stephen Mitchell, he was one of the main proponents of the relational approach in psychoanalysis, beginning with the book Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory, published in 1983.
He is the author of over 90 scientific publications on issues related to psychoanalytic clinical practice and theory, comparative psychoanalysis, and the history of psychoanalysis. In 2015, he received the Sigourney Award, which honors outstanding contributions to psychoanalysis worldwide. He has served as editor of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Contemporary Psychoanalysis, and The Psychoanalytic Quarterly. He lives and works in New York.
This interview begins with a preface he wished to share with us.
New York, 18th april, 2026
I appreciate, with some reservations, the invitation to participate in this interesting and important conversation. To address the reservations first, I want to be clear that I am a citizen of a country that is going through a time that is leaving me and virtually all the people I am close to feeling intense anxiety, anger, and despair. Along with many others, I am feeling unable to do anything that will affect the course of events, or even to understand why things are happening that seem to be destroying so much of what I have valued and taken for granted about the world in which I live.
But I am also a psychoanalyst, and so for decades understanding has been my bread and butter. This means that I am vulnerable to believing that I understand more than I possibly can and, more insidiously, it makes me vulnerable to treating the roughly 40% of my fellow citizens who believe that we are living through the best of times as my patients. Patients whom I have never met.
So I need to be cautious, and to remind myself at the outset that I am speaking as a beleaguered citizen, a citizen who views his political surround through a sensibility that has been shaped by my clinical experience. I must be careful to recognize that my vision, like everyone else’s, is partial, and to avoid conflating moral outrage and diagnosis.
1) Over the past fifteen years, we seem to have moved from “Yes, we can” to imagery resembling a darker, more threatening representation of the United States.
On April 1st, 2026, Thomas Friedman wrote in The New York Times: “Trump is a man-child playing with matches—the world’s most powerful military—in a gas-filled room.”
How might we begin to think about how we have arrived at this point? From a political perspective, it looks clear that themes such as immigration played a central role, but as an analyst, what unconscious forces do you see at work?
First of all, some thoughts about how we (in the United States) have arrived at this point. It is important to note that we have been here before, although I’m not a historian I think it is possible that we have been here forever. There have been strong nativist, racist, and xenophobic sensibilities virtually from the beginning of our history. These have been embodied within living memory by the fascist aligned America First groups that were active during the Second World War and the neo-Nazi movements that emerged shortly after the war.
You mention immigration as a strong force energizing the current emergence of these groups, and certainly immigration has played an important role here and in other Western countries.
But immigration is only one of the changes that has been brought about by events that have shaken the world; we also have to consider the effects of globalization, changing ideas about sexuality and gender, the impact of upheavals in the kinds of work that are available, concerns about climate change, and so on. All of these point to looming changes in the kinds of lives that will be possible in the years ahead, and I don’t think that it is too great a leap to imagine that this leaves many people simultaneously mourning the past and dreading the future. The Trumpian “Make America Great Again” is a seductive call to imagine a past in which things were better, and certainly safer, than they are today or are likely to be in the future.
One thing that makes it seem likely that what we are living through now is different from the way things were in the past is the Internet. It is much easier today to find and make contact with people who share both the anxieties about where things are going and a way of understanding both their causes and social/political solutions to the problems. The so-called informational silos are likely to give right wing populism more staying power than it has in the past.
2) On social media (X and Instagram, as far as I know), there is a page called “Republicans Against Trump,” which publishes daily videos of unfiltered statements by Trump and members of his administration—content that we usually do not see in Italy. These are striking materials, because we are used to edited content, often shaped by what is sometimes called sanewashing (a selective editing that reorganizes speeches into a more coherent and orderly form).
This raises a question: how should we think about the current situation? Should we direct our attention more toward the dynamics of the group surrounding him, or toward the psychological functioning of the individual at its center?
I am much less interested in diagnosing Trump than in understanding his support even among people who seem, at least from an outsider’s perspective, to be harmed by his policies.
For one thing, I believe strongly it does a disservice to the complexities of psychoanalytic ideas and methods to believe that we can diagnose a person we have never met. However Trump appears to me, I must keep in mind that my view is the view of a citizen who finds both his policies and his character abhorrent.
And I can never forget the one moment, in the months before the 2016 election, that I thought he was brilliant in ways I could never conceptualize. It was when he said that he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue in New York City and that he wouldn’t lose a single voter. When he said that and in the decade since – during which the truth of it has been amply borne out – I have marveled at how a person could know that. I imagine that many cult leaders and dictators have known that about themselves, but few have capitalized on the knowledge on such a grand scale.
This, of course, makes diagnosis impossible.
3) In 2022, Endre Koritar wrote about Trump’s “hypnotic influence,” describing him as a “master hypnotist.” Referring to Ferenczi’s early work on introjection and transference (1909), he suggested that hypnotic suggestibility may be linked to a regression to infantile relational modes, mediated by the reactivation of trauma.
In light of the rise of far-right movements in different parts of the world, how might we think about these phenomena? Can they be understood in relation to forms of cultural or collective traumatization?
I would refer anybody who is interested to a wonderful article by Otto Kernberg entitled “Malignant Narcissism and Large Group Regression” that was published in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly in 2020. Kernberg argues that regressed groups – the kinds of groups that I have mentioned that are traumatized by loss and anxiety – are likely to choose malignant narcissists as their leaders. On Kernberg’s view, the relationship between the psychology of the group and the leader are reciprocal and mutually reinforcing.
4) What is happening in the United States reminds me—if I recall correctly—of the final scene of Ghostbusters II (1989), when New York, literally submerged by streams of hatred rising from the sewers, is transformed. Led by the Statue of Liberty, which comes to life, people stop fighting each other and begin a collective song of hope and fraternity.
As the midterm elections approach, do you see the possibility of a shift or transformation in the current climate?
Is it happening, or is it conceivable, in your view, that forms of collective elaboration might emerge, capable of containing or transforming these expressions of hatred?
You ask about the possibility of benign change, possibly beginning with the mid-term elections. There are encouraging signs, Orban’s decisive defeat in Hungary, the results of several special elections in the United States, Trump’s declining popularity that has accelerated with his pursuit of the war with Iran, and so on. But it is still too early to tell, and there is also the possibility that changes in the way our Congressional districts are apportioned will make shifts in our politics increasingly difficult. But when I think about this I am always reminded of something that the Indian poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore wrote in equally challenging times. In his essay “Crisis in Civilization” (1941) Tagore, at the end of his life and despairing about the devastation he was seeing in Europe, wrote “I shall not commit the grievous sin of losing faith in man.”
This is a challenging and a sustaining sensibility for a citizen, and it is an essential one for a psychoanalyst. As I look forward to the midterms and beyond, I hope above all else that I can maintain that faith.
5) One last question. Would you be willing to suggest two or three articles, essays, novels, movies—anything, not necessarily related to psychoanalysis—that have inspired your thinking on the themes you explore in the interview?
There's nothing I can think of that is directly related to what I wrote, but of course a great deal of what I have read has influenced me profoundly. There is the Tagore essay that I quoted, and a book by the philosopher Michael J. Sandel entitled The Tyranny of Merit has been important in shaping my sense of how the values of privileged classes (myself and almost all psychoanalysts included) have contributed to the anxieties and outrage of those who have turned to right wing populism as a way of restoring some sense of personal dignity.
From within psychoanalysis, my attention has turned recently to ideas that remind me that Tagore's characterization of losing faith (not just in humanity but in the potential of each individual) is not simply an error, but a sin, is essential if we are to meet the promise we implicitly make to our patients. These ideas come up in different ways in different conceptual systems. I think because of the state of our world I have been drawn to the concept of the paternal principle that is important in some French psychoanalytic traditions (the work of Marilia Aisenstein, for example), and to the Brazilian analyst Roosevelt Cassorla's idea that the acute enactments of which analysts tend to be deeply ashamed can be the start of progressive and constructive change within the analytic dyad. Both as a citizen and as an analyst maintaining faith is an obligation -- despair is a sin in Dante's Inferno -- and maintaining it is most urgent when it is most difficult, as it is in today's political climate.
Thank you for inviting me to participate in this project.
Bibliography
- Cassorla, R.M. (2001), “Acute Enactment as a ‘Resource’ in Disclosing a Collusion Between the Analytical Dyad”. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 82:1155-1170. See also the “Enactment” section in the IPA Dictionary
- Ferenczi, S. (1909/1994). “Introjection and transference”. In First Contributions to Psycho-Analysis (E. Jones, Trans., pp. 35–93). London: Karnac Books.
- Greenberg, J. & Mitchell, S.A. (1983), Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
- Greenberg, J. (1991) Oedipus and Beyond: A Clinical Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
- Kernberg, O. (2020), “Malignant Narcissism and Large Group Regression”. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 89:1-24.
- Koritar, E. (2022), “The Leader’s Hypnotic Influence and the Creation of Alternate Reality”, The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, (82)(3):349-363.
- Sandel, M. J. (2020). The tyranny of merit: What’s become of the common good? New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
- Tagore, R. (1941-2011), Crisis in Civilization. In The Essential Tagore, edited by Fakrul Alam and Radha Chakravarty, 209–216. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.