Putin’s Self-Deception

The Russian invasion of Ukraine offers an example of how inner conflict, the war zone in our psyche, is a driving force capable of producing devastating warfare among nations.

Let’s look at one individual psyche—Russian president Vladimir Putin’s—and put him on the psychoanalytic couch. From all the evidence, he’s very conflicted about Russia’s status in the world. He feels deeply and painfully that his nation has been undermined, beaten down, and humbled by Western powers since the collapse of the Soviet Union’s eastern European empire three decades ago.

Putin has angrily accused the West of encroaching on his borders, but what he really fears are democratic and enlightenment values flooding the minds of eastern Europeans, especially Russians. For him, democracy is a psychological threat to his primitive consciousness, which is an authoritarian mentality that extols raw power. Putin himself is a particularly rigid personification of the resistance in the human psyche to the transition from an ego-based, individualistic consciousness to a more holistic one.

In a rendition of militant ignorance, Putin declines to grow psychologically. Becoming wise is not what dictators do. If they did, they’d stop being dictators. When we grow psychologically, we create an inner democracy in our psyche where our best self is in charge. From this vantage, authoritarian impulses are experienced as primitive, far beneath our dignity.

Putin’s vendetta against the West is a symptom of his refusal to let go of the humiliation he has felt about the Soviet Union’s collapse. On the surface, his humiliation appears as lost imperial pride. But beneath the surface, in what is highly neurotic behavior, he’s simply been refusing to let go of his personal suffering.

His suffering is not even about the status or plight of Russia. It’s more about his own unconscious willingness to take the sense of humiliation deep into himself and suffer neurotically. He very likely believes his anguish is about Russia’s humiliation. But that’s a reflection of how unconscious he is. His suffering is all about himself, what he’s too weak to let go of. He knows nothing of this: His self-deception is breathtaking. His many years possessing absolute power, while surrounded by sycophants, has made him vain, stupid, and evil.

All peoples have a tendency to identify, in some measure, with their country and it’s standing in the world. Any esteem our country secures is taken by us as validation of our own self. We bask in our country’s glory. It’s even more enticing to identify this way when one’s country has maintained an empire. The Romans, Turks, British, and Russians weren’t happy when their empires collapsed. Ideally, people release their sorrow and get past their grief—providing they’re able to find consoling compensations, perhaps even to identify more with their better self rather than to depend emotionally on the egotistic satisfaction they’ve derived from their country’s alleged supremacy.

Putin’s refusal to evolve has compelled him to blame the West, accusing us of hypocrisy, hostility, and decadence. Obviously, we’re not perfect, but nonetheless his blame still serves as a psychological defense covering up his unwillingness to let go of his painful humiliation. The unconscious defense reads as such: “The West is causing my pain and the pain of my people. It’s not me. I’m not holding on to a sense of degradation. I’m angry at the West. That proves I don’t want to feel humiliated.”

The war in Ukraine is frequently attributed mainly to Putin’s ethnic-nationalist view of empire. Many scholars have suggested that he’s mainly driven by an instinct to protect the language, culture, and blood of a Slavic heartland from the allegedly corrupting influence of Western values. I believe this gives too much credit to Putin’s ideology, not enough to his psychology.

The psychological conflict is also between wanting to feel respected while being highly sensitive to feeling disrespected. The stakes are raised until respect needs a sense of supremacy to suppress the sensitivity to feeling disrespected. Supremacy is a frequently coveted emotion, even if it’s all illusion. Billionaires love to feel it. Dictators and white supremacists, too. The creepiest politicians in Washington and greediest players on Wall Street summon this hallucination. Putin is just another villain in the tragedy of human lunacy, slaughtering innocents in Ukraine to make Russia great again and ease his own pain. He’s another top dog trying to avoid the crushing humiliation of facing himself and acknowledging the lowly cur that he unconsciously identifies with. Flooded with such inner conflict, he’s bound to experience his world in terms of conflict. It’s the worst kind of inner conflict, the one between needing to feel supreme to cover up an unconscious emotional identification with the sense of being a deplorable loser.

That’s the kind of desperation inner conflict can produce, the willingness to commit the vilest acts of evil, the willingness to destroy democracies and incapacitate if not murder the best people, in order to avoid looking into the core of one’s own psychological constitution to expose the dynamics that churn up self-doubt, self-criticism, self-rejection, and even self-hatred.

It’s not that Putin would necessarily see evil by looking inward. Rather, he would discover inner truth, the degree to which he’s emotionally identified with a puny sense of self. He was easily crushed emotionally by the Soviet Union’s demise because he was likely neurotic to begin with. His KGB background certainly doesn’t speak to his character. His psychological state has declined over time because, emotionally, the human psyche usually can’t handle the absolute power of being a dictator. The ego goes berserk.

Putin can’t stop strutting around foolishly and pompously. The only way to maintain the facade, it feels to him as reality closes in from all sides, is to become more supreme. To him, that means restoring the Russian empire at whatever cost in blood and destruction. His inner conflict is also his conscious wish to feel great, like another Peter the Great, versus that unconscious yet haunting feeling of collapsing emotionally into nothingness were his dream of a geopolitical resurrection to remain unrealized.

He has become the lowest of the low, on a par with a madman gunning down people in a shopping mall. All those bullets flying in Ukraine are ricocheting back on the Russian soul. The people there have to do more than just duck.

So, what about them? The Russian people also must be steeped in inner conflict. If so, would that conflict also have contributed to the invasion of Ukraine? The Russian people have allowed corrupt opportunists, headed by Putin, to take over their country and rob it of much of its wealth. Many of them, it would seem, must have been tormented by painful inner conflict about this highjacking of their country.

Did they not feel helplessly passive and cowardly paralyzed? Looking at their circumstances from an American perspective, the conflict is apparent. Wouldn’t they yearn to be the kind of person who stood for truth, decency, and freedom? As individuals, they must have wanted to feel good and strong. Yet they’ve been threatened with imprisonment for speaking out. It would seem the only way they could avoid feeling conflicted about the kleptocratic takeover of their country—and now the slaughter in Ukraine—is to behave like sheep, which for humans is obviously a pathetic state of consciousness.

Is it the case that dictator Putin is acting brutishly, yet predictably, through the absolute power that the passivity of the Russian people has bestowed upon him? Is he only being as excessively aggressive as they are deplorably passive? Of course, Russian people must have some weariness with their long, hard history. I don’t want to blame them—only encourage them. Perhaps they need more courage than the rest of us can imagine.

As we go about our daily business, people of all nations can at times feel some degree of inner conflict between the wish to be strong versus the propensity to become emotionally entangled in a sense of weakness and helplessness. We all know what it’s like to feel brave versus fearful, decisive versus indecisive, inspired versus disappointed. Many of Russia’s citizens do want to feel strong and free—yet they’re obviously fearful of challenging their totalitarian overlords. They may wish to be better informed about the Putin regime’s corruption and lawlessness, but perhaps they’re afraid this knowledge will only spawn guilt for their failure to become engaged citizens or reformers.

From the American perspective, people determine the quality of their government according to the degree of freedom they feel from within. The American Revolution succeeded because the people’s righteous aggression overthrew a passive allegiance to despotism.

Many Russians have protested against the war and many more have fled the country. Putin’s evil regime arrests and jails protesters, oppressing the country’s best people. That’s a rendition of what happens in the human psyche. The best of who we are is oppressed by our inner critic, while the weakest part of us, inner passivity, absorbs the punishment as guilt, shame, and fear.

If Russians don’t liberate themselves from their oppressive regime, they’ll suffer even more through an increasing loss of dignity, self-respect, better living conditions, and perhaps, too, what’s worst of all, the dissolution of the “Russian soul,” the people’s spirit, that Dostoyevsky extolled.

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