Because I have long been puzzled by Barack Obama, I decided to read Dr. Justin A. Frank's new book OBAMA ON THE COUCH: INSIDE THE MIND OF THE PRESIDENT (2011). Dr. Frank is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who uses a Freudian model heavily influenced by the work of Melanie Klein. Dr. Frank himself has never met or interviewed President Obama. Nor has Dr. Frank interviewed people who know Obama and/or have worked with him. All of Dr. Frank's information regarding President Obama comes from the public domain, including of course Obama's two autobiographies, two biographies of Obama, and numerous books and articles about Obama.
It turns out that Dr. Frank was an enthusiastic supporter of Candidate Obama in 2008.
In the introduction Dr. Frank raises eleven key questions about President Obama that he plans to address in his book (pages 6-7):
(1) "How does he come across so differently to different people yet remain an enigma to many?"
(2) "How does he attract identification from such a wide variety of people yet leave so many of them disappointed?"
(3) "Why has someone who campaigned for change so often seemed so tentative?"
(4) "What lies behind his exceptional facility with language - and why do his actions so rarely live up to his words?"
(5) "Why is he so driven to compromise, settling for positions that leave so few people genuinely satisfied?"
(6) "Why is he drawn to charismatic, narcissistic men who ultimately let him down?"
(7) "Why does he appear to resist confronting authority figures?"
(8) "What is the source of his famous, Zen-like calm, and how and at what cost does he maintain it?"
(9) "Does his reluctance to challenge the relentless attacks by his opponents mean that he doesn't recognize the hatred behind those attacks?"
(10) "If the president doesn't see red states and blue states, what does he see?"
(11) "How was the raid on [Osama] bin Laden - its planning, execution, and announcement - consistent with his character, and how was it not?"
Dr. Frank does not use these eleven questions to structure his book into eleven chapters, one chapter devoted to each question. Instead, the main body of his book unfolds with an introduction at the beginning and an epilogue at the end with ten roughly chronological chapters in between. But each roughly chronological chapter includes flash-backs and flash-forwards regarding Obama's life. A glossary of psychoanalytic terminology, source notes, acknowledgments, and an index round out the contents of the book.
In the introduction Dr. Frank says that Obama "is infinitely complex, the embodiment of one-who-creates-ambivalence-in-all-individuals" (page 1). How's that for a thumb-nail characterization of our president? Nevertheless, Dr. Frank says that President Obama is "generally in excellent mental health" (page 3). By his excellent mental health, Dr. Frank means "his emotional health" (page 4). But Dr. Frank makes it resoundingly clear that Obama has certain blind spots, which Dr. Frank interprets as probably arising from psychological repressions in his psyche.
Question: How many among us do not have psychological repressions in our psyches? As we read Dr. Frank's analysis of the president, many of us will probably wonder about our own psyches and psychological development.
As mentioned, Dr. Frank works with Melanie Klein's approach to psychoanalysis, which of course he has to explain to us. Because he does explain her approach to us with numerous concrete applications involving Obama, this book is a tutorial in her approach to psychoanalysis. Indeed, this book is a kind of tutorial in Freudian psychoanalytic thought. But Dr. Frank is obviously not working with transferences evoked in Obama's psyche and brought up in one-to-one sessions with Dr. Frank as the psychotherapist. If transferences from the client and counter-transferences experienced by the psychotherapist are the heart of psychoanalysis, then Dr. Frank's psychoanalysis of Obama can be described as heartless, lacking the heart of psychoanalysis.
Based on her observations of young babies, Klein posits that in their psyches babies split their impressions into two broad categories. But let's start with the basics: containment and abandonment. The "good enough" mother figures out how to hold the baby and appropriately respond to and thereby contain the baby's crying. The baby's crying is an expression of the baby's anxieties. The baby's expression of his or her anxieties register on the mother. The mother feels the baby's anxieties. The mother's experience of empathy for the baby's anxieties leads the mother to respond in an emotionally appropriate way to comfort the baby's anxieties.
But what happens when the mother herself is somehow the source of the baby's anxieties, in the baby's perception? In such cases, the baby begins splitting. Dr. Frank writes that "the healthy development of the splitting mechanism [is] a process that good parenting can facilitate" (page 14). Simple splitting involves splitting "our internal world as well as our perception of the external world into good and bad" (page 14). The splitting process "begins a process of establishing the two opposing attitudes that Klein noted the infant demonstrates toward aggression: [1] the `paranoid-schizoid position,' in which aggression is perceived as emanating from outside the self and the infant feels anxiety about being attacked, and [2] the `depressive position,' in which aggression is experienced as coming from within the self and the infant feels anxiety about being hurtful in a way that might harm a loved one" (page 15).
So without the benefit of transferences and counter-transferences, Dr. Frank proposes to undertake to psychoanalyze Barack Hussein Obama in terms of the two major constructs established by Klein: (1) the paranoid-schizoid position and (2) the depressive position. But don't jump to any conclusions regarding these two positions based on the highly suggestive names of the two positions. It turns out that each of these two positions can contributed positively and enormously to our mental and emotional health. "Compassion and acceptance of the `Other' are essential to the depressed position," Dr. Frank tells us (page 16). Obama excels in acceptance of the "Other." "A person firmly rooted in the depressive position takes responsibility and feels genuine concern for others based on self-knowledge of his own aggression and is generally mentally healthy and mature" (page 15). However, "Obama often seems unparanoid and unprepared for the hatred of his opponents . . . despite the evidence before his very eyes. Nor does he grasp the degree to which his opponents - like most people - are dominated by the paranoid-schizoid position of black-and-white thinking" (page 15).
Briefly stated, Dr. Frank sees Candidate Obama drawing on the orientation of the paranoid-schizoid position very effectively in his presidential campaign in 2008. But Dr. Frank sees President Obama more or less switching out of the paranoid-schizoid position and switching to the depressive position. "People who have put their internal splits into perspective can be more decisive because they are not afraid of destroying other parts of themselves" (page 27).
In any event, Dr. Frank says, "As the baby internalizes the mother's love, splitting lessens in degree and intensity, and the baby develops confidence in his love for her, and in the environment in general" (pages 13-14). Obama conspicuously abounds with self-confidence. So we can conclude that baby Obama internalized his young mother's generous love.
But in connection with containment, I also mentioned abandonment. Containment is not abandonment, and abandonment is not containment. Abandonment is accompanied by abandonment feelings. By definition, all forms of trauma involve abandonment feelings; trauma is accompanied by abandonment feelings. The psyche can work somehow to repress abandonment feelings, which include rage. This is known as repression. When the abandonment feelings are so strong that the child could not endure them, the psyche somehow represses them. In the context of psychoanalysis, as mentioned, transference can occur. Transference involves the evoking of repressed abandonment feelings from the past in the present. Because abandonment feelings include rage, transference involves anger. Obviously transference can occur in many situations in life, not just in the context of psychoanalysis. But in the context of psychoanalysis, the experience of transference hopefully can lead to some recognition of past situations in which the person experienced abandonment feelings and accompanying rage, which was of course repressed at the time.
Not surprisingly, Dr. Frank conjectures and hypothesizes that President Obama has repressed rage in his psyche as a result of repressed abandonment feelings. How many among us do not have repressed rage in our psyches as a result of repressed abandonment feelings? Most people do have repressed rage in their psyches as a result of repressed abandonment feelings. It's a safe bet that President Obama, like most people, has repressed rage in his psyche as a result of repressed abandonment feelings.
Not surprisingly, Dr. Frank says that Obama "cannot heal a split without facing the fact that there is a split - that he has repressed his rage at both his parents and that the splits are really closer to repressions than to traditional good guy/bad guy splits" (page 34). However, in order to resolve the split, Obama have to experience his repressed rage toward his parents, as would anybody else who wants to resolve the split in their psyches.
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