Laura Miller critiques a new mind-probing study of the President by GWU Psychiatry Professor Justin Frank - who, so far as I can tell, has never even met Bush, let alone evaluated him in a clinical environment. I'm no fan of '43, but this book seems to reveal more about the dubious state of Freudian psychoanalysis today than it does about the current occupant of the White House.
"If political commentators often resort to overly simplistic notions of character, psychoanalysts tend to overly personalize politics. Frank regards every act of the Bush administration as a direct emanation from the psyche of George W. himself. He seems unaware that a presidency is a collaboration, or that sincerity is not always a viable political option ...
Psychoanalysts also have an annoying propensity to interpret every behavior that they don't approve of as a manifestation of pathology, teeming with hidden meanings. As a result, Frank, your basic liberal, never honestly engages with the conservative ideology that Bush espouses and all the counterarguments it makes to liberal ideals of good government. The underlying premise of "Bush on the Couch" is that because Bush is a conservative, he must be suffering from "an array of multiple, serious and untreated symptoms." Bush may indeed be gravely troubled emotionally, but that conclusion doesn't automatically follow from his conservatism and it's neither respectful nor adult to act as if it does."
Posted by Alan Allport at June 18, 2004 06:55 AMSome wonderful paragraphs!
I don't know if the problem is unique to psychoanalysis, though. Remember the sociologists who came out with a study last year proving that all conservatives were mentally unstable? It's just a way of demonizing your opponents in a way that's less transparent than calling them all "anti-American".
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at June 18, 2004 08:45 AMTo be fair, conservative and Cold War liberal shrinks started this pattern in the '60s by claiming the antiwar and counterculture movements were disorders brought on by "permissive parenting."
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at June 18, 2004 02:06 PMI'm sure they did, though "you started it" is not much of a basis for argument ...
Posted by: Alan Allport at June 18, 2004 02:08 PMNo, it's not a basis for argument at all. When someone spends as much time in the public eye as a president does, you think you know him, but I don't suppose we know him as well as a shrink would have to. BTW Billmon was carrying on the theme in a post yesterday. Cited but not necessarily endorsed. At the risk of ruffling Mr. Brumfield with a Britishism, I think Billmon is about 20% OTT.
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at June 18, 2004 04:09 PMOTT? Otter-Transplant Therapy?
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at June 19, 2004 11:58 AMThen there is Wilhelm Reich, one of Freud's students, who thought that fascism was a result of sexual repression. This sort of thing is really just fit to be ignored, I think.
Incidentally, anyone interested in reading critiques of Freudianism might want to check out some of Frederick Crews's work. Unfortunately, some of his best articles are only available on the NYRB site for a fee.
Posted by: Alan Hogue at June 19, 2004 12:38 PMRemind me never to tangle with academic psychologists. It sounds like some of them have a very strange relationship with truth.
That's a priceless article if ony for this nicely cadenced sentence:
...for example, the story of Freud's greedy and fatal meddling in the life of his disciple Horace Frink.