Inside the Mind of a President

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Inside the Mind of a President

« on: June 16, 2004, 09:25:59 pm »

Much of this lifted from my read at http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2004/06/16/bush_on_couch/index.html

Was just reading about the three new books coming about that refer to the inner workings of Bush's mind.

"Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President,"
"The President of Good and Evil: The Ethics of George W. Bush,"
"Personality, Character and Leadership in the White House: Psychologists Assess the Presidents,"

All these forthcoming books have created an interest in me about what's going on in Georgie's head.

Now, from all accounts "Bush on the couch" is a terrible book, made worse by it's pure partisanship. But, I've been hearing of a few interesting tid bits of truth that led light into what sort of man is running things.

The most interesting of which is the death of his younger sister Robin, from leukemia, when Bush was 7 and she was 3. What makes this interesting is that Bush's parents dealt with Robin's death by squelching any expression of grief; there was no funeral and they played golf the day after she died.

"If a child's parents teach him that his feelings of suffering, fear, weakness and rage are so unacceptable that they can't even be acknowledged, he is likely to spend his life projecting those feelings onto other people and punishing them for it. It's one of the ways bullies are minted."

It get's better:
>>>
George W. would find plenty of opportunities to practice the art of projection as he grew up. Frank, who is always on firmest footing when he's working from concrete biographical material, points out that from an early age, George W. Bush consistently failed in everything at which his father excelled. He got poor grades at the same schools where his father did well, and was a disaster in the same industry (oil) where his father made his fortune. His father was a varsity athlete; George W. had to settle for the cheerleading squad. His father was a fighter pilot in World War II; George W. was a desultory member of the Texas Air National Guard.

Frank's psychoanalytic training pays off in one aspect by giving him an eye for the eloquent detail. There's George W.'s first, abortive engagement at 20, the same age at which his father married. And then there's George W. celebrating his role in the purchasing of the Texas Rangers by printing up baseball cards with his picture on them, a pathetically transparent effort to erase the fact that "he could never be the baseball star his father was." Even the exhaustively analyzed "Mission Accomplished" charade on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln in May 2003 takes on new meaning when you interpret it as a "pantomime of [George W.'s] father's war heroism."

Some observers have read George W.'s obsession with ousting Saddam Hussein as motivated by revenge for Saddam's attempted assassination of his father. It could also be seen as the determination to pull off something that his father failed to achieve. But dig a little deeper and it also looks like an attempt to exorcise what must be one nasty case of Oedipal resentment. By Frank's formula, families like the Bushes, where difficult emotions are banished, produce children who cast other people as the symbols of their own unintegrated negative urges and feelings: "I don't want to kill my father, he does, and to prove that I'm devoid of such bad impulses, I'll take him out."
<<<

All in all it's quite a read, the salon article. I expect we'll be hearing more about this sort of subject in the next few months.


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