Bush on the couch

Justin Frank is the author of "Bush on the Couch." Frank is a practicing psychoanalyst in Washington on the faculty of the George Washington University Medical School. He used applied psychoanalysis to analyze Bush. Here's an excerpt from an interview with Frank and a publication called 'Executive Intelligence Review':

EIR: One of the things that we've focussed on a great deal, more from the standpoint of a political assessment of the Administration, is that Bush seems to have developed a rather deep psychological dependence on Vice President Cheney as the person to make most of the really tough decisions in the Administration. Would you share that view?

Frank: I don't entirely share that view, because my view is that he is a puppet who chose his puppeteers, so in that sense he is dependent on him, 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, and so he had to go with Cheney to the 9/11 Commission. And that's about dependency, I agree with you. 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.

EIR: 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.

INTERESTING, eh? Sounds kinda right, too.