Truth and lies: the narratives of Trump and Hegseth

Newspapers around the world have reported in recent days on a serious example of mistrust in the US: Trump and Hegseth are outraged by a leak. After more than six months of missiles being fired at Iran and its allies, US missile stocks have dwindled. In itself, this is to be expected in any war. But Trump does not want this to be discussed. He tends to explain many difficulties by attributing them to leaks and ‘conspiracies’ against him. As for Hegseth, he is not only in charge of Defence: he is also responsible for the Trump-aligned misogynistic ideology known as the Manosphere (in Italian, ‘androsfera’, or post-feminism).

The American missile industry employs vast numbers of people. It is unclear how many of them might have remarked, ‘These days, missiles are distributed like Coca-Cola!’ However, Trump must project the image of someone who has everything under control. To identify those who had spoken out of turn, approximately fifty of the thousands of individuals with access to missile information were administered a ‘truth test’, otherwise known as a ‘polygraph’ examination.

Reading this, the reader’s mood darkens. Then they ask themselves: “What is a polygraph?”

Let’s take a step back to the beginning of the 20th century, which, amongst other names, has been called the ‘Century of Psychoanalysis’. Freud’s "The Interpretation of Dreams" had just been published. The master shattered two common misconceptions. First of all, dreams are not a jumble of meaningless images: on the contrary, they are useful in the search for meaning. Psychoanalysts observe this dynamic every day. A patient seeks help: ‘I have a good job, I adore my children and my wife, but I suffer from anxiety.’ At the next session, they recount dreams in which they are courting a colleague or savagely beating their child. So, when the ‘rational consciousness’ speaks of itself, it tells only part of the story: our personality is more complex. What’s more, the question arises: ‘If it isn’t really “me”, but in my dreams I commit acts that I disapprove of, who is acting in my place?’ Psychoanalysis’s answer is: the unconscious. An answer that means everything and nothing; the unconscious is an abstraction. No one has ever seen it.

It is not ‘visible’, but it is ‘real’. Thought itself is not visible, but it is real: on this we agree. Even this ‘second type of thought’, which manifests itself in dreams, and which we call the ‘unconscious’ (using the word as an adjective), is ‘real’: if that patient’s family falls apart, the consequences will be very real indeed. The dream was a self-representation of one of his inner contradictions.

Also in the early 1900s, the exceptionally precocious Jung was the deputy director of the Burghölzli, the university psychiatric clinic in Zurich and the most prestigious in the world. Swiss institutions were already wealthy and advanced. Jung read Freud’s works avidly. He wrote to him, praising him: their meeting gave rise to the fruitful development of psychoanalysis. It also led to one of the greatest intellectual clashes between two masters: but that is not what we are discussing here.

In his work at the Burghölzli, Jung sought to demonstrate the existence of the unconscious experimentally: his procedure was called the ‘Association Experiment’. Not a ‘Test’ as in certain later derivations: a test presupposes a correct or incorrect answer from the outset, whereas in the Experiment the answer was open-ended. Nor was it a ‘Truth Test’: as it would later become in other variants, and as it is of interest to politicians today (especially those who have a bone to pick with the ‘truth’).

The Association Experiment led Jung to ‘discover’ that within each of us (not only in ‘pathological’ cases) there exist ‘complexes’: more precisely, ‘affectively coloured complexes’. It is worth noting that the word ‘complexes’ conveys a truth so profound that it has entered everyday language. We say, ‘That person is full of complexes!’ – just as we say, ‘I’m an introvert’, without realising we are using Jung’s terminology, which has now become commonplace. The second volume – 700 pages – of Jung’s Collected Works is devoted to experimental studies of the unconscious. The main one is the Association Experiment. The practitioner gives the subject a simple instruction: ‘I will say a stimulus word and you reply with the first word that comes to mind.’ Jung reports the results of a case involving someone who had suffered a romantic trauma. To the stimulus word ‘table’, the subject replies ‘chair’, quickly and without emotion. But upon hearing the word ‘tear’, they remain paralysed for a few seconds, then exclaim, ‘Now she’s always crying!’ Without being asked, they are revealing their problem. This essay by Jung is entitled ‘The Use of Psychological Diagnoses in Legal Proceedings’: it served (in 1906) to establish the truth, just as it does today.

However, 120 years have passed, and this is worth bearing in mind. The ‘empiricism of the unconscious’ is interesting: but it comes up against its own limitations. When faced with certain ‘trigger words’, most people may react emotionally due to a ‘complex’ that prevents them from concentrating and following the simple instructions given: they might fall silent, repeat the ‘trigger word’, stand up and pace round the room. For example, at the word ‘death’, many show a certain emotional reaction: who enjoys thinking about it? The presence of some unconscious reaction is quite normal. Let us therefore remain in Switzerland, where psychiatry wields great influence. In the 1970s, there was no internet, but the postal service was extremely well-organised: letters, even between friends, were typed, with the exception of job applications. Companies seeking staff would assess not only the CV but also the handwriting. When we write, the content of the letters is conscious, but the individual movements are highly personal. It so happens that, in certain people who later proved to be aggressive, one can already detect uncontrolled outbursts in their handwriting. But handwriting remains individual; it contains no true ‘predictive’ elements: human beings retain their free will. Indeed, from handwriting alone, one cannot even determine with certainty whether the writer is a woman or a man.

The ‘empiricism of the unconscious’ has given rise to endless hopes: above all, of producing a ‘measurement of emotions’ (or feelings: even though the terms are not equivalent). However, it has not made it possible to build a ‘lie detector’. It provides interesting clues, not proof. Today, neuroscience has made giant strides. Yet it does not provide a map that definitively explains how the psyche works. A neuroscientist observing a brainwave trace can understand many things: but they cannot even say with certainty whether the waves are their own or someone else’s. Today, artificial intelligence analyses polygraph data with infinitely greater precision: nevertheless, a subject who is lying can deceive it too. A skilled liar deceives everyone, even themselves. It was Jung himself who diagnosed Hitler as suffering from ‘pseudologia fantastica’: that is, someone who tells lies but gradually becomes convinced of them.

Even before the advent of psychoanalysis, in 1883, the philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey discussed ‘inner experience’, which does not manifest itself materially, yet contributes to knowledge. His Introduction to the Sciences of the Spirit pointed out that, until Goethe’s anatomy reveals why ‘his brain’ – and not another’s – wrote Faust, the ‘sciences of non-material objects’ will remain necessary: those of the spirit or the psyche.

Why are figures such as Trump and Hegseth incapable of making these distinctions and ‘still trying’ with lie detectors? They have probably never read Freud or Jung, let alone Dilthey. But it is also because they live in a world of money and power, which feeds illusions: a ‘lie detector’ can be bought online. For a fee, one can even engage an organisation to administer the device and produce highly detailed reports. At the end of the article I was referring to, Jung concluded (p. 374): ‘As things stand [in 1906], one cannot place too much trust in this method. However, one may hope for some progress.’

‘Truth’ is an intangible and moral quality: absent from screens. Morality is subjective but also decisive. Let us return to the example of the trigger word ‘death’, which provokes negative feelings in ‘normal’ people. Are Trump and Hegseth normal? If they were still moved by the idea of death, how could they order bombings every day? They must simply shrug their shoulders and say to themselves, ‘that’s the way the world is’. Meanwhile, ‘they are concerned with the truth’.

The hope of developing a ‘lie detector’, first mooted in 1906, has lost its relevance. Due to a series of circumstances, I witnessed this decline at first hand. In Zurich, during the 1970s, I worked at the Klinik am Zürichberg. The director was C.A. Meier, Jung’s successor in many institutions: an imposing man with a booming voice and a pipe perpetually clenched between his teeth, just like Jung. However, he lacked Jung’s charisma. According to an article in the Tages-Anzeiger (Zurich, 26 July 2025), it was primarily Meier who maintained relations with German psychiatry in the 1930s, represented by Matthias Göring, cousin of the Nazi leader sentenced to death at Nuremberg. These contacts fuelled criticism of complacency towards Nazism, which was also levelled at Jung.

The Clinic had a basement for experiments into the ‘empiricism of the unconscious’, a subject on which Meier published. However, he was always absent. In front of the basement was his parking space, which was always empty: in fact, I began to use it myself. Years later, Meier died, the Clinic closed, and the machines were dismantled.

Almost half a century on, the world seems to be at the mercy of Trump and Hegseth: they never ‘take apart’ their own narratives, even when the facts have already disproved them.

Jung’s essay is entitled “Uso di diagnosi psicologiche nella procedura giuridica”: its purpose (in 1906) was to establish the truth, just as it is today. However, 120 years have passed, and this is worth bearing in mind. The “empiricism of the unconscious” is interesting, but it comes up against its own limitations

Today, artificial intelligence analyses polygraph data with infinitely greater precision; however, a subject who is lying can still deceive it. Today, the world seems to be at the mercy of Trump and Hegseth: they never ‘debunk’ their own narratives, even when the facts have already disproved them.