Gary Greenberg’s beautifully written but flawed account of the first two years of the Trump presidency highlights the limitations of using psychoanalytic concepts to explain wider political and social developments (Analyse this, The long read, 12 October).

Far from Trumpism representing the return of “our archaic heritage”, our deep instinctual need to “consume, to pillage, to destroy, to wall out our neighbours and to hate people living in shitholes”, it is rather, like Brexit, a response to 30 years of neoliberal inequality and increased exploitation, an era during which millions of people both here and in the US have seen their lives get worse and their dreams evaporate.

Recent victories for socialist candidates in the US, however, (and the real possibility of a Corbyn government in the UK) show that the discontent need not inevitably flow to the far right. The most appropriate response is not to rush to our therapists but to challenge the racism and fascism that are products of neoliberal despair. In the words of the great American socialist Joe Hill, “Don’t mourn – organise!”

Iain Ferguson

Author, Politics of the Mind: Marxism and Mental Distress (Bookmarks, 2017)

Glasgow

• Yes, the grief around the election of Trump – and other similar events around the world – has to do with a loss of expectation of a better future, and more fundamentally of the loss of the belief in “progress”. This emptiness and loss of hope can either lead to terror, nihilism and despair, or the possibility of trusting that it is precisely into an empty place that something new and creative can arise.

John Coatman

Sheffield

• Of Trump’s election, Gary Greenberg asks: “Why were we all so sad?” Could the answer be that the psychotherapy clients who came to him were predominantly, like him, Democrats?

David Murray

Wallington, Surrey

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