Bush on the Couch -- a thorough review

[rawstory]

We all know this book has been rolling around in Dem/DU circles but I found this review of it to be particularly insightful (and quite cogent).

By Pablo Mayhew
RAW STORY CONTRIBUTOR

In “Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President,” esteemed psychoanalyst and professor of psychiatry Dr. Justin A. Frank analyzes the motivations that drive George W. Bush’s decisions as president, and explains how Bush’s core thoughts are corrupted by a psychic imbalance that has plagued him since well before he reached adolescence.

Through the science of applied psychoanalysis, Frank dismantles, layer by layer, the enigmatic fortress surrounding the Bush family, and illuminates the familial factors responsible for Bush’s psychological and sociological underdevelopment.

In George H.W. Bush, Frank reveals a father who is too often absent from his son’s childhood, a father who — when he was present physically — remained, for the most part, emotionally detached from his young son. Frank describes George W. Bush’s mother, Barbara Bush, as an introspective and insecure disciplinarian, too deeply scarred by the emotional neglect that defined her own upbringing to supply the love her eldest son required. This dearth of affection and understanding, Frank maintains, forced the infant George W. to rely on his own, unavoidably inadequate, “crude tools” to deal with the negative feelings that his parent’s flaws in child-rearing prohibited from integrating into a whole and stable personality.

The significant emotional trauma of young George W.’s life (which, according to Frank, still affects the president’s thoughts and actions) surrounded the death of his sister, Robin, three years his junior. Robin died of leukemia when George W. was just 6 years old. Even more damaging than her death, however, was the complete absence of grief (no funeral rites whatsoever) displayed by the Bushes — a fundamental breakdown, as it were, in the observance of mourning, which children invariably learn from watching parents express grief of their own. Through their failure to impart in their son this vital coping tool, Frank holds that the Bushes, in effect, undermined George W.’s ability to embrace compassion and humanity in even its simplest forms.

http://www.rawstory.com/exclusives/mayhew/bush_couch_review_71804.htm

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1. This is why psychotic adults really ought to rethink having kids...

All they do is pass along their psychological issues to the next generation. For most of us it just means countless $$ and hours spent on a therapist's couch. But in *'s case, it led to him stealing the highest executive office and criminally abusing it...

Just think before you decide to unleash your mental issues on Junior. For all you know, you could be screwing up a kid who will one day steal a Presidency and attempt to become a dictator... Think of the millions of people that your emotional instability could affect!

(I'm only half joking.)