Psyche out: Margaret Cook’s Thought for the Week

‘For true peace, I wonder if we are required to face this choice more directly.’

Many of us witnessed the extraordinary scenes in the Oval Office when Donald Trump (aided and abetted by J D Vance) tore into Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine. Their shredding of the visiting president was uninhibited and shocking: two powerful men tearing into a third like hungry wolves. 

On display was the human psyche at its worst; the next step would have been actual violence. It was a clear manifestation of the realities of the current US administration – evidence at its most stark.  

But in a more generalised sense, it was also evidence of the unconstrained, free-wheeling energy that can be found more widely in the human psyche. There is some level of this lurking within all of us, though we usually endeavour to tame, hide or deny it. What we witnessed in the Oval Office was just this energy at its most compelling and destructive. 

‘Perhaps it is time to be honest.’

Since early attempts by psychoanalysts like Jung and Freud, humans have spent much effort attempting to comprehend and describe this aspect of our psyche. It has a powerful character, and its nature can be wild, chilling and potentially uncontrollable. Although our understanding of it is still under-developed, humanity has had to contend with it for aeons, and learn to contain it, if it is not to cause unparalleled destruction.  

Psychologically speaking, such energy can probably only be restrained and contained by something of equal magnitude. Throughout human history, saints and moral leaders have demonstrated what this alternative energy might look like. We also see it described in straightforward and uncompromising language in the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy: ‘I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life’ (Deuteronomy 30:19).

Making this choice may feel equally straightforward to us, or something we are proud of having undertaken a long time ago. Perhaps even something so obvious as to ignore. But to find true peace, I wonder if we are required to face it more directly. To make the choice more overtly, and renew it on a more regular basis. We often tell of Advices & queries 31 (‘Search out whatever in your own way of life may contain the seeds of war’) but to address this most properly, perhaps it is time to be honest and say, as Prospero does at the end of The Tempest: ‘this thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.’  

Does this acknowledgment need to become a more conscious commitment – individual and collective – which we practise regularly? The episode at the Oval Office reminds us just how easy (and how ordinary) it can be to slip into the opposite. 

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