Collective Trauma and the Construction of a Political Myth: A Psychological Interpretation of the Obama Phenomenon
Summary This article explores how collective trauma, emotional fields, and archetypal projections shaped public perceptions of Barack Obama during his rise to the American presidency. Drawing on political psychology, trauma research, and sociological models of elite power, the article argues that Obama became less a political figure and more a symbolic container for a traumatized society’s unresolved emotional needs. The result was a population responding through low-frequency psychology: dependency, projection, idealized hope, and symbolic identification. 1. Introduction Political leaders are not chosen solely on the basis of policy programs or rational debate; they are also shaped through collective emotions, historical wounds, and archetypal narratives. After 9/11 and the subsequent political and social destabilization, the American population entered what researchers describe as a collective threat environment (Huddy et al., 2005), marked by fear, meaninglessness, and fragmented id...
