The Paris Review

Trump Disappears up Himself

Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?
—Donald Trump, as reported in The Washington Post

Q. What is a “shithole”?
A. It is an anus.

Life is painful and full of disappointment. The French psychoanalyst Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, one of the great forgotten geniuses of the twentieth century, identified a bit of make-believe that might comfort a hurt, disappointed child: “the illusion that, with his pregenital sexuality, his immature and sterile penis, he is an adequate sexual partner for his mother and has nothing to envy in his father … so that he may be able to pretend to himself and to others that his pregenital sexuality is equal, if. It is important to utter her meaning again in our time. 

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