Crossposted at My Left Wing
Imagine traveling as a kid with your family. Your violent dad is driving. And he's drunk. What do you do? What I did was shut my eyes, curl up into a ball on the backseat floor and try to go to sleep.
Is that what we as a country are now doing about a president who is careening destructively across the globe and may be insane? Sometimes it seems so.
Dr. Justin Frank, an experienced expert in psychoanalysis and a clinical professor in the Department of Psychiatry at George Washington University Medical Center, wrote the book Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President, published in 2004. It is a fascinating and disturbing study. Dr. Frank cautiously concluded in his book that Bush is a megalomaniac. His conclusion seemed a little understated to me at the time. In a recent interview with Buzzflash Dr. Frank updates his observations and acknowledges that Bush may be a sociopath.
A sociopath is ... a person who can be very charming, but psychologically is so massively defended against experiencing guilt that he cannot feel empathy. If you don’t feel guilt, you can’t empathize, because you never can feel concern about having hurt somebody else, or anybody else suffering. Guilt reins in destructive behavior. But if you don’t have any guilt, you don’t have to feel any anxiety or anything that will hold you back in terms of being destructive or being hurtful. And that leads you to being unable to feel empathy, because empathy actually threatens your safety.
How do we handle an insane president? This is more serious than ordinary politics. We are in more trouble than we realize. The bottom line of the interview is this shocking statement by Dr. Frank.
... I think the only way to deal with somebody who is this embattled and this delusional is to invoke the 25th Amendment....
.... I’d rather have Cheney than Bush.
.... A lot of people would disagree with me. I really think that Bush is not competent to be President. He is unconsciously destructive. He is out of touch with his cruelty. He is unable to think clearly when presented with new information. He cannot do it. He cannot read. He cannot pay attention to the Baker-Hamilton Report. He never looked at that report. He looked at the opening title, about a new way forward or something, and that’s what he’s been using as his slogan now. He is not able to process information.
I think Cheney, as much as he is malevolent and destructive and greedy and self-interested as an oil executive and wants absolute power, he’s out front about it. I think that he would have to negotiate in a way that’s different because he can’t not think, whereas Bush doesn’t think.
We keep trying to find rational explanations for the President's continuously crazy decisions. Is he the puppet of nefarious forces, too stupid to make decisions himself? Is he part of a grand imperialist conspiracy to conquer the world and steal its wealth?
It's natural to search for explanations of the behavior of powerful people. If we can just understand what motivates them, we can predict what they're going to do next and protect ourselves. If we use assumptions of rationality as we try to interpret the actions of someone driven by his own irrational demons, it just doesn't work.
In his book Dr. Frank explored the effect on Bush of growing up with a distant absent hero father and a distant cold critical mother. He sees as an especially formative event the parents' handling (or not handling) of the death of Bush's younger sister around to same time that Jeb was born.
... the way he’s conducted himself as President, for instance, with Katrina, with not preparing the troops, with various examples of failure of empathy and of failure of concern, and a failure to act and take care of people. It has to do with a replay of his own childhood that he is imposing on the rest of us, and we are all paying for that. I think the power of his psychology is such that he really has flipped his own failure or pushed his own failures or his own conflicts onto the rest of us. He’s gotten all of us to sort of live as potential Katrina victims. That’s how he is, because he was a Katrina victim in his own psyche when he was a child.
His father never was there to protect him against a very tough-minded, critical, harsh mother. .... his father was, on the one hand, a hero, but on the other hand, a huge disappointment, because he was never available emotionally. I think that what Bush now is doing is that he is essentially attacking his father yet again.
I think what he does is he turns everybody who disagrees with him into his father. It doesn’t matter whether it’s actually the concrete representation of his father, like Baker, or the voters who vote against staying in Iraq. We have become his father. We are the people he is now defying. He will turn everybody, any authority, anybody who disagrees with him, into a father figure who he’d have to defy.
It comes down to his psychic survival. It’s the fear of being wrong. It’s the fear of shame and humiliation at needing other people. It’s a fear of dependency.... He is determined to never be wrong, and to never make a mistake, because shame is a terrible thing for him.
Dr. Frank's view of Cheney's relationship with Bush is much stranger than "Cheney the puppeteer" that I'd assumed.
I think that, unconsciously, Cheney is the father that he can control and have work for him. It’s not just a father he can rely on; it’s a father who has to do what he -- Bush -- says. I think that it has much more to do with control and domination. Bush is taking people who worked with his father -- and converting them to his way of working, which is far more radical, far more defiant, far more domineering as a President than his father ever was.