I am reading a great book right now called "Bush on the Couch," written three years ago by a renowned psychotherapist, Dr. Justin Frank. His analysis of Bush and the whole Bush family is dead on. I urge everyone to get a copy of it -- buy it or borrow it through the library -- it is that important a book. Here is a review of it:
Dr. Justin Frank has performed a courageous and insightful mission. On the eve of the most important Presidential election of our lifetime, he applied his decades of clinical experience as a psychoanalyst to offer an in-depth profile of President George W. Bush. To be more precise, Dr. Frank has provided American voters with a case study in what is called "applied psychoanalysis." As Dr. Frank describes it in Bush on the Couch, applied psychoanalysis is a relatively new field of investigation, in which teams of skilled psychiatrists utilize the vast reservoirs of clinical data on world leaders to do in-depth personality profiles. Years ago, the Central Intelligence Agency established an applied psychoanalysis unit, under Dr. Jerrold M. Post, a colleague of Dr. Frank at the George Washington University Medical Center. The CIA confines its efforts to foreign leaders. Dr. Frank has chosen to apply the same rigorous techniques to the sitting President.
Ironically, in the case of some world leaders, such as the American President, the clinical psychoanalyst is afforded access to more useful data than he can obtain on his own patients. Dr. Frank makes no secret of the fact that he has never treated George W. Bush. Yet, he had access to massive amounts of video footage of the President, autobiographical and biographical data on Mr. Bush and many of his most intimate associates, including virtually every member of his family, and other clinical data not often available on his patients. He rarely has the opportunity to observe the patient in his or her everyday life. With President Bush, Dr. Frank had access to hundreds of hours of unedited video footage of him going about the business of governing the most powerful nation on Earth.
When I first opened Bush on the Couch, I expected to read a highly entertaining, humorous partisan screed. I recalled that Dr. Frank had penned an insightful profile of Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr in the online magazine Salon at the height of the impeachment travesty against President Clinton. But Bush on the Couch is anything but a screed. It is a carefully written, clinical treatment that is a must-read for all American voters—Republican, Independent, and Democrat—before November. Had Dr. Frank been writing a clinical profile of George W. Bush for peer or court review, the document would have taken perhaps 20 or 30 pages. A great deal of Bush on the Couch is taken up with providing sufficient fundamentals of the clinical psychoanalytic process and bibliographical background on the field, to permit the lay reader to grasp the gravity of George W. Bush's psychological problems. The book is at once a devastating psychological dossier on the 43rd President, and a compassionate profile of a human being in need of care.
After reading Bush on the Couch and interviewing the author, I confess that I have been forced to rethink some fundamental assumptions about the Bush-Cheney Administration. It has been clear that the real power at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue resides with Vice President Dick Cheney, not with President Bush. It is Cheney, his alter-ego Lewis Libby, and the legions of neo-conservative wanna-be Liberal Imperialists ("Limps") who populate the VP's office and the civilian bureaucracy at the Pentagon who formulated the preventive war doctrine; revived an aggressive, offensive nuclear war doctrine; and made war on Iraq—not G.W. Bush. But, as Dr. Frank emphasizes, if President Bush is the puppet of Cheney, he is a puppet who chooses his puppeteers, and who carries out his Presidential decisions with a clear inner conviction that he is the true power, the ultimate decision-maker. Whatever the truth is about the decision-making process inside the Bush White House, Bush has a megalomaniacal conviction that he is the king of the roost.
I do not intend to use the remainder of this review to provide a detailed summary of Dr. Frank's diagnosis of the 43rd President. I urge readers to purchase and read the book. It cannot be done justice in a few short paragraphs.
Dr. Frank opens the first chapter with a crisp summary of his own, of what he meticulously documents in the 219 pages of text that follow: "If one of my patients frequently said one thing and did another, I would want to know why. If I found that he often used words that hid their true meaning and affected a persona that obscured the nature of his actions, I would grow more concerned. If he presented an inflexible worldview characterized by an oversimplified distinction between right and wrong, good and evil, allies and enemies, I would question his ability to grasp reality. And if his actions revealed an unacknowledged—even sadistic—indifference to human suffering, wrapped in pious claims of compassion, I would worry about the safety of the people whose lives he touched.
"For the past three years, I have observed with increasing alarm the inconsistencies and denials of such an individual. But he is not one of my patients. He is our president."
With clinical objectivity, Dr. Frank draws upon the mass of material available in the public domain about the President, particularly George W. Bush's own, documented remarks, to paint a picture of a man suffering from a number of serious, but potentially treatable psychological disorders. Among them: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), untreated and uncured alcoholism (what is commonly referred to today as "dry drunk"), an omnipotence complex, paranoia, an Oedipal Complex, sadism, a mild form of Tourettes Syndrome, and a diminished capacity to distinguish between reality and fantasy.
All of these disorders stem from what Dr. Frank describes as Bush's "diminished ability to manage anxiety."
How did George Bush come to be such a psychological wreck? According to Dr. Frank, who places significant emphasis on unresolved childhood trauma, in his clinical work, George Bush suffered several notable shocking experiences in his childhood, in which his parents, George H.W. Bush and Barbara Bush, failed to provide the needed loving adult care to help him through the experiences. In this sense, Dr. Frank provides a very compassionate picture of the President.
Dr. Frank described the most traumatic of those childhood experiences: "George W. was six years old at the beginning of the tragic episode that he has said yielded his first vivid childhood memories—the illness and death of his sister. In the spring of 1953, young Robin was diagnosed with leukemia, which set into motion a series of extended East Coast trips by parents and child in the ultimately fruitless pursuit of treatment. Critically, however, young George W. was never informed of the reason for the sudden absences; unaware that his sister was ill, he was simply told not to play with the girl, to whom he had grown quite close, on her occasional visits home. Robin died in New York in October 1953; her parents spent the next day golfing in Rye, attending a small memorial service the following day before flying back to Texas. George learned of his sister's illness only after her death, when his parents returned to Texas, where the family remained while the child's body was buried in a Connecticut family plot. There was no funeral."
This is but one of dozens of compelling, and shocking vignettes that pepper Dr. Frank's book. The complex and twisted world of President George W. Bush must be understood by the American people, to fully appreciate the mess that the United States has fallen into. To his credit, Dr. Frank included a chapter in his profile of the President, entitled "He's Our Man," which takes up the question of how and why the American people have backed this man, particularly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Here are a few comments from Dr. Frank, made in an interview:...my view is that Bush is a puppet who chose his puppeteers, so in that sense he is dependent on Cheney, but in another sense I think he is dependent on him for supporting his decisions, but I think that Bush makes the decisions. I think that he is dependent on Cheney for thinking them through in public, and for articulating them. And for being the kind of public, outspoken person who does not do well in off the cuff speaking, and so he had to go with Cheney to the 9/11 Commission. And that's about dependency. But my sense is that he really knows what he wants to do once he hears stuff, and he is basically focussed on very few things. The main reason for depending on Cheney, and I can see that politically, the main reason is that he does not like to do the work of thinking, because it makes him too anxious. And most of the ideas in my book are about Bush's functioning to defend against anxiety. And that's really basically what he's about.
Interviewer: What I found particularly striking is a kind of a deadly mix of experiences: the trauma over his sister's death, and the way the family handled that. Then developing an at least alcohol—some people say alcohol and drug dependency—for quite a number of years. It seemed to me that this is almost a kind of very extreme clinical case of somebody who's nominally walking around as functional, but really has got deep, deep psychological scars.
Frank: Yes, it has to do with the fact that he was never able to mourn, and when you don't mourn, you can't integrate your inner life. What happens is that, as I write in the book, sorrow is the vitamin of growth, and until you face who you are and what you've lost, you really can't organize your mind, and so what happens is when you're the first born, and the next one dies, you're left with a lot of unworked-out hostility, anger, guilt, that maybe your wishes killed them. You have lots of magical thinking, and if you don't have a family that helps you gather those things together, you can be in a lot of trouble.
So then you have to manage your feelings yourself. And one of the ways people do manage them when they are that age, is they have friends to talk to; but he doesn't seem to have had anybody to talk to much. But they also read, and pay attention to things, so they learn about human beings from reading about other people, if their parents aren't responsive to them. But he really has such a hard time reading, that it's like swimming with weights. I mean, it's just too much for him. So he didn't have that avenue either, so he became sometimes cruel to people, with animals, which is one way of managing your aggression, and then to drink in order to manage his anxiety, and he became a very heavy drinker, that's very clear, till he was 40, at least.
Interviewer: Again, the idea that someone doesn't cure the alcoholism, but just simply stops the drinking, doesn't deal with the underlying issues; is this somebody who could go back to drinking?
Frank: Yes, in fact I think that's one of the reasons why the press walks on egg shells: Nobody confronts him about falling off the couch, nobody confronts him about falling off of his bicycle. People are too afraid to even ask the question. It's one thing to make an assumption—I don't think you should assume that he is drinking again—but you need to be free enough to ask the question; but when you are an alcoholic who's untreated, family members—and I've done a lot of studies of families with alcoholics, and treated a lot—they tiptoe around, and they are afraid to throw their father or their mother back on a drinking binge. And I think that is what the press has done, they're walking on egg shells.
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