Lessons from Watergate. A derivative for psychoanalysis.

Abstract

Periods of social upheaval, by revealing aspects of behavior ordinarily repressed, provide an opportunity for deepening out insights into the nature of man. The searing experience of Watergate is viewed not as the psychopathology of a man, or the group psychology of forty men under the ex-President, but as reflecting psychic processes at the base of the population pyramid. The people supported Nixon for a quarter century during which his character traits were known, and were in collusion with the cover-up to the end during the two and half years of Watergate. The theory is advanced that this was due to an identification with Nixon based on the universal wish to triumph over the superego. Ego-superego conflicts are as ubiquitous and ongoing in mental life as the struggle between ego and id. The latter results in neuroses, the former in compromises of integrity. The 'syndrome of the compromise of integrity' is on a par with neurosis in human affairs.