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The Psychological Foundation of Obama’s Political
Problems
Excerpts by
Justin Frank
28 November 2011
Since being elected president,
Obama has consistently displayed a cool demeanor, one
that has confounded many of his former supporters. His
detachment has led many to think that he is oblivious,
disinterested, even frightened of direct confrontation.
The latest instance has been his passive observation of
the failure of the Super Committee, which has spurred
pundits and politicians from both sides of the aisle to
accuse him of lacking the fire to be president. MSNBC
news host Chris Matthews, once one of the president's
biggest fans, recently placed direct blame for the
country's malaise on the President's lack of emotional
leadership. “There's nothing to root for,” he
complained.
The fact that the President has
failed to address, hands-on, such a critical problem
should make us realize that his reluctance to take
charge is not a cognitive issue, but a psychological
one. It's not that Obama doesn't understand what he
ought to be doing—it’s that the structure of his
personality won't allow him to constructively address
the problem.
This is where psychoanalysis can be
of benefit. By recognizing Obama’s behavior patterns we
can illuminate the unconscious thought processes that
might be influencing them. Fortunately, one needn’t
treat Obama as a patient to undertake a thorough
analysis of him. After all, there is plenty of public
material available—not least, his autobiography
Dreams from My Father—from which to sketch an outline of the
President’s personality using a technique called
“applied psychoanalysis.”
First, some psychological
preliminaries. The President's detractors are suggesting
that he doesn't feel enough passion or emotion. But a
basic tenet of psychoanalysis is that everyone has rage.
The question is what one does with that rage, and why.
On a psychoanalytic level, Obama is
someone who tries to disconnect himself from fury
through intellectual exertion and by strenuously trying
to keep matters in clear focus. He doesn’t simply
contain his rage or hold it inside his mind; he
dissociates–a psychoanalytic term for disconnecting
thought from feeling. This allows him to operate in a
purely intellectual state, protected from the disruptive
influences of excessive passions.
The 1789 French
Revolutionary saying, “The tongue is the enemy of the
neck," describes the approach Obama has always lived by.
He turns a blind eye to his own rage; he seems almost
sleepwalking when others would be screaming. This is
not simply a matter of the president’s public persona
pushing aside the private, enraged one. It is a
profound ability to disconnect himself from feeling the
full force of his own rage.
Ultimately, this is
an expression of his fear of abandonment. In fact, what
appears as detachment is the latest manifestation of a
long history of removing himself from the fray in
idiosyncratic ways. Growing up as a mixed-race child of
two broken homes, and living in two dramatically
different countries, Barack Obama learned to survive by
carefully noticing everything around him while at the
same time not allowing himself to feel the full
emotional impact of his experience.
He dealt with loss
without protest. He didn't complain when his mother
abandoned him to pursue her passion for anthropology on
far-flung expeditions, or when she removed him from the
home of his stepfather in Jakarta when he was ten.
Instead, Obama focused on surviving by getting along. He
pursued inclusion relentlessly, even when circumstances
repeatedly cast him in the role of the outsider.
It's not an
accident that one of the strategies he developed to
maintain his membership in groups was to keep his mouth
shut. Indeed, his autobiographies show that he was
repeatedly taught as a child to keep his feelings to
himself. His stepfather Lolo told him regularly never to
complain if he were hurt or in trouble. His high school
basketball teammates reinforced that message some years
later. And so by keeping careful and cautious watch of
his surroundings, he learned to be at home in different
groups, easily shifting from one to the other.
This kind of
dissociation is at the core of some his greatest
political strengths. It helped him become intellectually
nimble, and acutely alert to his surroundings. It's only
by adapting this kind of psychic position his entire
life that Obama was able to easily joke at the White
House Correspondents Dinner while knowing there was an
active mission underway to kill Osama bin Laden.
But assuming this
perpetually peripheral role has also taken a lasting
toll. The anxiety of not belonging has grown to occupy
an ever-greater part of his psyche. He writes in
Dreams from My Father that when, as an adult, he was
walking through the most dangerous parts of Chicago late
at night, the greatest fear he had was the fear of not
belonging. But now there is a new tension, between his
need to belong and the demands of standing up for what
he believes. The former is driven by his related fears
of not belonging and being abandoned; the latter carries
the risk of alienating others irrevocably.
In material
reality, his concern with alienating conservatives is
wholly unproductive: it is unlikely that he can be more
hated by the Tea Party than he already is. Nonetheless,
he continues to relentlessly pursue compromises with
Republicans that will never happen. Indeed, so concerned
is he with his own degree of belonging that he
jeopardizes the sympathies of those who actually have
felt a natural and authentic connection to him. Whatever
other political and personal advantages it confers,
Obama's observational caution doesn’t give jobless
participants in “Occupy Wall Street” or Wisconsin’s
striking public employees the sense that he is
concerned.
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Obama on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President—Justin
A. Frank, M.D.—Obama’s transformation over the
course of his brief but incredibly well-examined
political career has left some supporters
disillusioned and has further frustrated opponents.
To explore this change in behavior, and Obama’s
seeming inability to manage the response to his
actions, Dr. Frank delves into his past, in
particular, the President’s turbulent childhood, to
paint a portrait of a mixed-race child who
experienced identity issues early in life, further
complicated by his father’s abandonment. As he
addresses everything from Obama’s approach to health
care reform, his handling of the Gulf Oil spill, to
his Middle East strategies, Dr. Frank argues that
the President’s decisions are motivated by inner
forces—in particular, he focuses on Obama’s
overwhelming need to establish consensus, which can
occasionally undermine his personal—and his
party’s—objectives. By examining the President’s
memoirs, his speeches, and his demeanor in public,
Dr. Frank identifies the basis for some of his
confusing or self-defeating behavior. Most
significantly, he looks at the President’s
upbringing and explores the ways in which it has
shaped him—and what this means for our nation and
its future.
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Murder as
Instrument of Foreign Policy—Liaquat Ali Khan—3 November
2011—President Obama has openly deployed murder as
an instrument of foreign policy. Soon after assuming
office, Obama authorized the Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) to plan and execute the murder of terrorists and
other enemies, regardless of whether they are U.S.
citizens. Osama bin Laden, Anwar al-Awlaki, and Muammar
Gaddafi are the prominent murder victims while numerous
others in Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Iran, and
Pakistan have been purposely targeted and killed. The
legitimization of extra-judicial killing is a disturbing
development in international law as other nations are
certain to follow suit. In pursuit of pre-meditated
murders, the collateral damage (the killing of the
obviously innocent) has been extensive. The claim that
such murders can be executed with electronic precision,
though false, serves as an incentive for other nations
to develop drones to perpetrate their own surgical
assassinations. For now, however, the CIA enjoys the
monopoly over drone kills.—InformationClearinghouse
Farrakhan:
Gadhafi fought U.S., NATO Terrorists with Honor / Olbermann Calls Obama A Sellout, Republicans Treasonous
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The Left’s
Confused Reactions to Qaddafi’s Death—Joseph
Klein—26 October 2011—The Left’s Obama cheerleaders also
conveniently forget that Qaddafi would have posed a far
graver danger to his own people and to American security
interests had he not been forced to abandon his pursuit
of weapons of mass destruction, including his nuclear
arms program. Qaddafi did so directly as a result of
President George W. Bush’s successful military
intervention in Iraq that brought down Saddam Hussein.
Although Obama did
not seek congressional approval for American military
intervention in Libya – which President George W. Bush
did obtain prior to initiating military action in
Afghanistan and Iraq – the Left’s congressional
“anti-war” Bush critics heaped praise on Obama. For
example, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman
John Kerry (D-MA), who famously was for the Iraq war
before he was against it, gushed about the Obama
administration’s “clear-eyed leadership, patience, and
foresight by pushing the international community into
action after Qaddafi promised a massacre.” Once again,
Kerry seems to have gotten things backwards. It was the
Arab League, United Kingdom’s Prime Minister
David Cameron and France’s
Nicolas Sarkozy
who pushed hard for military intervention and led the
effort to obtain the UN Security Council’s blessing
under the pretext of protecting Libyan civilians. Obama
reluctantly joined the bandwagon already in motion,
“leading from behind,” as one of his senior advisors put
it.—FrontPageMag
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Not Gone
With the Wind Voices of Slavery—Henry Louis
Gates, Jr.—9 February 2003—Unchained Memories,
an HBO documentary that makes its debut tomorrow
night, provides a powerful answer to that question.
It gives us, through the faces and voices of
African-American actors, an introduction to a vast
undertaking that took place in the 1930's: the
collection and preservation of the testimonies of
thousands of aged former slaves in an archive known
as the Slave Narrative Collection of the Federal
Writers' Project. This archive unlocked the brutal
secrets of slavery by using the voices of average
slaves as the key, exposing the everyday life of the
slave community. Rosa Starke, a slave from South
Carolina, for example, told of how class divisions
among the slaves were quite pronounced:
''Dere was just
two classes to de white folks, buckra slave owners
and poor white folks dat didn't own no slaves. Dere
was more classes 'mongst de slaves. De fust class
was de house servants. Dese was de butler, de maids,
de nurses, chambermaids, and de cooks. De nex' class
was de carriage drivers and de gardeners, de
carpenters, de barber and de stable men. Then come
de nex' class, de wheelwright, wagoners, blacksmiths
and slave foremen. De nex' class I members was de
cow men and de niggers dat have care of de dogs. All
dese have good houses and never have to work hard or
git a beatin'. Then come de cradlers of de wheat, de
threshers and de millers of de corn and de wheat,
and de feeders of de cotton gin. De lowest class was
de common field niggers.''—NYTimes
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest /
Black World
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update 27 December 2011
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