The Psychological Dynamics of Authoritarian Politics: An Interview with Dr. Simon Rogoff, Part I

© R.T. Greenwald, 2025. The questions, commentary, and original frameworks presented here are the intellectual property of the author. Interviewee responses remain the intellectual property of the interviewee. Citation is required when referencing, quoting or adapting this material.

I recently interviewed Dr. Simon Rogoff, the author of the Substack column Narcissism, Trauma and Celebrity, to explore how narcissism connects to Hannah Arendt’s analysis of totalitarian regimes.

The behaviors Dr. Rogoff discusses are remarkably similar to Hannah Arendt’s portrayal of the masses in The Origins of Totalitarianism. As you read this interview, think of specific examples for:

• How Trump’s personality and relational behavior fit the narcissistic dynamic.
• How members of Trump’s cabinet play into this dynamic.
• Why some citizens are attracted to these relationships.
• Why citizens repulsed by these relationships inadvertently bolster them.

Dr. Rogoff leads a treatment service for the National Health Service in London specifically for people with personality disorder, and has over 20 years’ experience with this client group. He received a doctorate in clinical psychology and a master’s degree in forensic mental health. The views expressed in this interview are his own and don’t represent his employer.

R.T. Greenwald: I want to start with the narcissistic dynamic, which is something you have written about in your essays. Could you summarize its essence and explain what it’s supposed to accomplish?

Simon Rogoff: Thanks for suggesting this interview. There are a range of definitions of narcissism, but through all my reading, I keep coming back to this relationship between power and vulnerability. It is the use of power, admiration, emotional distance, and condemnation as a way to avoid felt experiences of vulnerability, shame, and humiliation. Its function is to find emotional distance so that one gets far enough, as far away as possible, from emotional experiences attached to vulnerability, shame, and humiliation.

Some say narcissism is a kind of person. I’ve come to look at it as a set of strategies on a continuum. Narcissism is always relational. I don’t think it could function with somebody on a desert island because it’s a relational dynamic, whether it’s a person with an audience of millions, or whether it’s a married couple in a flat in an apartment, it’s still a relationship, and it relies on that.

If my priority is to stay far away internally from any experience of shame or vulnerability, I can be on stage with a microphone. It might be one way of achieving that, or I can find somebody else in a relationship of some kind, somebody else who’s vulnerable or controlled or denigrated or shamed.

Greenwald: Can you give an example of people you’ve written about, someone who is a performer as opposed to a perpetrator?

Rogoff: I looked at the 1920s comic director Charles Chaplin, whose persona is one of a comedian, lovable and sad, admired throughout the world in the early days of cinema. When we look at his childhood, we can understand why he might be somebody who had made a priority of staying away from vulnerability and shame—his experiences in Victorian London, being homeless at one point himself. But in his personal life, he was also a perpetrator.

Greenwald: So it sounds like people present in different contexts differently.

Rogoff: Yeah, I think it’s important to say that just because somebody is an iconic performer doesn’t mean they necessarily also use perpetrator strategies. And because somebody is a perpetrator doesn’t mean that they automatically are a performer. We find, though, that behind the performer Chaplin, there is a perpetrator, genuinely a kind of outlier, extreme perpetrator, really.

Greenwald: How does this kind of behavior develop?

Rogoff: Most theories of narcissism come back to attachment trauma in infancy and childhood. That doesn’t necessarily mean abuse or something illegal happening. It’s about what the infant has to manage emotionally and whether it’s too much. Human infants are acutely vulnerable. When we compare them with other mammals, they can’t walk for 12 months. They have this set of programs that we call emotions. We can never step inside the mind of an infant, because we can never remember what it was like for us, and we can’t know what it’s like for an infant. But these are powerful chemical experiences that we know as adults. They’re uncomfortable, but by the time we’re an adult, we know something about what’s going on. But infants don’t know what emotions are, and they cannot manage them without an adult.

That intense experience of emotional dependency in a relationship can go different ways as an experience, and of course, that explains a number of different mental health problems. Attachment theory says that infants cry out for adults to help them with these emotional experiences that would otherwise be overwhelming. And that experience of calling out can either be quite a safe, manageable one, where the emotion is dealt with. They become less afraid, become less sad, or it’s worked through, and the experience in the relationship of vulnerability is manageable. This works most of the time. And then there are other children who are less lucky, whose experience is that when they cry out, it makes things worse.

The child primed for narcissism has an experience of emotional vulnerability, not being safe, so the experience of needing another is a painful experience. It’s an overwhelming experience because of how the other person responds. For whatever reason, you know, maybe the parent is a drug addict, maybe they need to shame somebody, and the child is powerless. In these childhoods, in addition to emotional neglect or shaming, there’s also both idealization or being treated as special. And we think of these as being different kinds of treatment, but if you’re a really judgmental parent, there are both kinds of judgment: my kid’s special or my kid’s terrible. So we get the lack of empathy and dismissiveness–both the denigrating, judgmental role in adulthood and the performing, idealized role in adulthood as well.

Charles Chaplin, for example, could have chosen other strategies, but he had two actor parents–there’s often a distant performing parent. Winston Churchill’s father was also a very distant, but performing parent. I think Churchill read every single speech his father wrote, although this man gave nothing back to him.

Greenwald: So when you’re talking about someone like Chaplin or Churchill, why is it so difficult for people to detect the shadow side of the behavior?

Rogoff: The main reason is because narcissism’s priority is to hide the shadow, to find maximum distance from shame and vulnerability. Shame and vulnerability are not going to be visible, because the person needs to be admired. If I were one of the wives of Charles Chaplin, I would first meet the idealized, non-vulnerable, non-shameful, worshiped man. And then at some point, I would have a very strange experience of meeting another side of him. It’s a similar experience with Marlon Brando and the women and men in his life. Really, the people who got close to him would gradually find another side and have a terrible time.

Why don’t people see the shadow side? It’s the performance phase. There’s this idea of love bombing—it’s a trajectory where we see the bright, idealized face of narcissism, and we’re attracted to it. And then over time, another face emerges where we then struggle to extract ourselves from a relationship that is abusive. There isn’t this kind of stepping back and looking at the facts in the cold light of day, much as a court of law deliberately does. The cold facts looked at in an impartial way are really part of what narcissism tries to avoid. It’s completely the opposite of why law is so important.

Greenwald: The idea that narcissism is the opposite of the law seems important. It has me thinking about how authoritarian political situations distort rule of law. What are your thoughts about the relationship of narcissistic behavior to the political structures Arendt described in The Origins of Totalitarianism?

Rogoff: I was reading what Arendt says about the front organization [hiding the inner circle’s true aims], and it may be that in some ways, some of these phenomena are individual narcissism just on a massive scale. Because if you look at someone like David Bowie or Marilyn Monroe, there was an entourage, and the entourage knew the truth about the person. Someone close to Marilyn Monroe sees her at a party and says, “What were you doing last night? You’re no dumb blonde. What’s this act you were performing at this party?” She wasn’t in a film. She was pretending that was her real self. And he could see that this was a persona.

People in David Bowie’s inner circle would almost practice together making up lies about themselves. I think one biography calls it “bullshit stories,” literally practicing lying about themselves to kind of develop some kind of persona. There are different levels of access to the truth until the masses know only a lie, ultimately.

Greenwald: How then does Arendt’s political analysis of mass movements line up with contemporary understandings of narcissistic personalities and dynamics?

Rogoff: There’s this idea about those who are looking for false consistency–this thing that’s too good to be true. I found that Arendt talked about gullibility and cynicism being both foundations for totalitarianism. I think Arendt says as you get closer to the leadership, the proportion of cynicism gets greater. And yet if we go over to a completely different area of research of personality disorder and narcissism, we find people talking about these two same things being consequences of childhood adversity. Childhood adversity can lead to epistemic credulity—also known as hyper-epistemic trust—that is, buying someone’s credibility too easily when they mark themselves as being the source of helpful knowledge. Then the other side of epistemic trust is a kind of paranoia, which is mistrust. This sounds like it relates to [Arendt’s] cynicism. And so you might have two groups of people who think of the narcissist as necessarily the cynical calculated person, but actually, both parties’ experience of adversity makes them vulnerable to getting into an abusive relationship. The narcissist can be either gullible or cynical. It’s surprising that people don’t think of narcissistic people as being gullible, but there is a kind of narcissistic gullibility which we can think about …

In Part II of this interview, Dr. Rogoff will discuss in more detail the false consistency that the narcissistic relationship offers and why putting reality aside can be so seductive. He will also explore why the chaos and violence in authoritarian and personal situations can be paradoxically comforting and how the need for self-protection in narcissistic systems, big and small, creates interesting alliances. Until then, consider how the Arendt quote below relates to Dr. Rogoff’s understanding of the narcissistic dynamic.

[The masses] do not believe in anything visible; they do not trust their eyes and ears but only their imaginations, which may be caught by anything that is at once universal and consistent in itself. What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism