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Michael Cohen has lied and threatened others in covering over the transgressions of his former boss Donald Trump but more recently has attacked that same boss and become part of an effort to bring him to justice. How can we understand this very contradictory behavior?
I call this phenomenon an animating relationship to guilt, by which I mean a transformation of feelings of intense self-condemnation into a sense of responsibility toward combating the destructive forces one has been part of.
I came across this psychological process in Hiroshima in 1962, while I was conducting my study of atomic-bomb survivors. One of those survivors, Ichiro Moritaki, was a prominent activist who developed a policy of sitting zazen style at the Cenotaph (the monument to the victims of the bomb) whenever any country tested nuclear weapons. During World War II, Moritaki had been a professor of philosophy and ethics, loyal to the Emperor and to the militaristic Japanese regime, who had taught his students “love of nation” and “dedication to victory.” Yet after the war he changed direction and brought a similar ethical passion to his work for peace, which he spoke of as “atoning for my mistakes.”
Moritaki’s change was anchored in his bodily injuries from the bomb (he lost sight in one eye). He was especially moved by the suffering of children who had been orphaned by the bomb, and he experienced intense feelings of guilt towards victims of both the Japanese militarism he had supported and the atomic bomb itself. He emphasized to me that the idea of atonement “[gave him] power.” He channeled most of his bomb-related emotions, including anger, into his antinuclear passion, seeking to “[prevent] it from happening again.”
Similarly, in my work with Vietnam Veterans in the 1970s, I found that they also refused to assume a static stance of mea culpa in confessing the atrocities they had perpetrated or witnessed. They instead expressed active resistance to their own war, turning against it while it was being fought, and did so with much credibility, since they were the ones who had “been there.” With them I came to name and elaborate the principle of animating guilt. Antiwar veterans converted that self-condemnation into their own anxiety of responsibility and did so with the special authority of those who had participated in the destructive Vietnam War.
This concept of animating guilt is necessary for grasping Michael Cohen’s radical reversal. We have watched him change from being, in his own words, “knee-deep into the cult of Donald Trump” to insisting that his loyalty would instead be “To my wife, my daughter, my son, and the country,” and that he would not “lie for President Trump any longer.” His form of atonement was his apology in court to the American people “for lying to them, for acting in a way that suppressed information that the citizenry had a right to know in order to make the determination of the individual who was seeking the highest office in the land.”
Animating guilt is a behavior of people who, as Cohen put it, “violate their own moral compass.” It is a way to derive energy for achieving a sense of one’s own reintegration of self, and of being an ethical person. Cohen is experiencing very strongly the anxiety of responsibility. Opposing Trump and the Trumpist movement has for him become a lifelong struggle, a form of personal mission.
References
Lifton, Robert Jay. Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima. New York: Random House, 1967.
Lifton, Robert Jay. Home From the War: Learning from Vietnam Veterans. New York: Other Press, 1973.
Lifton, Robert Jay. Witness to an Extreme Century: A Memoir. New York: Free Press, 2011.
