Authoritarian Sadism

In the first part of this paper, “Authoritarian Sadism in U.S. “Foreign Policy” (Part 1),” Dissident Voice, July 25, 2023, I introduced some psychoanalytic concepts and explained their application in revealing the latent motivations of high-ranking policy-makers in recent U.S. presidential administrations.  This approach was long ago studied by the eminent political scientist Harold Lasswell, […]

Freudian depth-psychology remains an under-utilized tool in interpreting motivation and personality of recent American “leaders”  who have chosen to deploy massively destructive military force on large civilian populations in places like Serbia, Iraq and Afghanistan.  A president may deny (or repress) his own destructive hostility, projecting it onto “the other.”  Splitting-and-projection readily enables a clear […]