Just because.
Dr. Justin A. Frank, a well-respected Washington, D.C.-based psychoanalyst and Professor of Psychiatry, assembles a comprehensive psychological profile of President Bush and reaches conclusions that are at once highly persuasive and deeply disturbing.
Using the principles of applied psychoanalysis—the discipline of psychoanalyzing public and historical figures pioneered by Freud—Frank fearlessly sheds new light on the Bush psyche and impact the way he governs. He tackles head-on the question—Is our president psychologically fit to run the country?
Highlights include:
Bush suffered childhood losses, including the death of his sister, that were never mourned by his family—setting up a lifelong pattern of avoiding pain at all costs.
Bush developed a false sense of omnipotence, making it difficult for him to reason about, let alone even perceive, reality.
Bush uses fundamentalism as self medication against his internal fear of emotional collapse.
The president's history of untreated alcohol abuse affects him AND our nation. We are a nation of enablers led by an untreated ex-alcoholic.
Bush learns only by listening, not by reading. This makes integration of complex thoughts extremely difficult. It contributes to a black and white world view (Elvis?). He is constitutionally unable to question his own decisions.
Bush is driven to invent adversaries so that he can destroy them. It is a paranoid fantasy—not a conscious lie—that Saddam Hussein posed an immediate threat. That fantasy serves his grandiose mission: The United States is chosen by God to protect the world from that threat.
Bush has "malign indifference" to the suffering of others which as a passive manifestation of innate sadism. This indifference is so extreme that Bush included the overwhelming tragedy of 9/11 as part the series of jokes he used at political fundraisers from November 2001 through June 2002.
Bush's concepts of himself, of God, and of America have become interchangeable.
Bush's lifelong inability to mourn, mixed with sadism, makes him unable to take seriously the destructive consequences of his actions. He branded fraternity pledges with hot coat hangers but called the results "only cigarette burns"—part of a life-long pattern of denied destructiveness.
Bush found in religion a source of calm not wholly different from alcohol, as well as a set of rules that helps him manage both the world around him and his private world within.
Bush must keep an enemy around for psychological as well as electoral reasons.
Bush teases his constituents with false promises of support, teasing even the military. By doing so he mocks his own family.
When Bush speaks vaguely of evil-doers he is cruelly trying to evacuate his own fears into the rest of us. He turns the world into his stage and we live out his unexamined fear and rage.
When Bush speaks vaguely of "evil-doers" he is replicating exactly the words that Sigmund Freud used to describe symptoms of paranoid megalomania.
No limitations, no accountability: It's a recipe President Bush might recognize.
Defeating the evil-doers who humiliated his father has proven an effective way for George W. Bush to disguise his own wish to defeat his father—even from himself.
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