Interview with Justin Frank

Q: After reading "Bush on the Couch," I felt afraid for your safety. What kind of responses have you gotten? Have you received hate mail, death threats?

A: I've gotten no death threats. I've gotten a couple of hate letters but hardly any. My office has been burgled twice since writing the book but it's hard to know, since I work in Georgetown, how much of that is random. Although I've been practicing there for 30 years, it's only happened one other time. So that was disturbing. Nothing was taken. Things were strewn about so it made me think that people were looking for files or were trying to scare me in some way. The only other negative response has been from several colleagues who were concerned about my practicing psychoanalysis on a sitting president. They felt it went against the Goldwater Rule which was passed in 1964 by the American Psychiatric Association saying that doctors are not to make public diagnostic statements about public figures.

Q: That was one of the questions I had. Some critics would say you were using psychoanalysis to support your bias. What is your response to them?

A: My response to them is that I am political. I've been a long-time liberal. I started to write the book because I was very frightened by George Bush. It scared me just watching him on the television in the year 2000 when he was having his first series of debates with Gore. It was my concern also and I did my best to not be biased. I read everything written by him; about him; by his parents; his mother wrote two memoirs; his father wrote one; and I found I actually ended up liking him much more than I thought I would. I don't see him as evil the way some people on the left do, and one of the things that I've learned as a psychoanalyst is that we are able to see the humanity in all our patients. I had much more criticism from the left who said that I humanized him too much. It was a very interesting experience. So I don't think I used him to fit into my preconception. That's a danger we all have as psychoanalysts, if we're trained as Freudians, if we're trained as Kleinians, we're trained in different ways and we try to fit people into our theory, whatever it is. We look for certain things. I think that's a danger that's intrinsic to the profession. I don't think its any worse for me than it is for all of us, and that's why we have analysis and spend time thinking about what we're doing. I spent a lot of time thinking about what I was doing. I was concerned that a lot of the material I found I felt was also a projection on my part. I was looking for all kinds of things. It was a painful book for me to write. So I don't feel that I was trying to fit him into any preconception.

Q: What I was most impressed with is how much empathy you had for him, especially since he has so little or no empathy himself. How were you able to do that?

A: It's funny. I saw this movie, it was done by Nancy Pelosi's daughter, Alexandra Pelosi, called "Journeys with George," and she made this movie of the primary campaign in the year 2000. I remember noticing just how attractive he was with his boyish charm with his kidding around and the way he handled the press I really appreciated it, and I found him very endearing in a fraternity-boy style but endearing nonetheless. And I linked that with his need to compensate for early losses that he had, and I felt empathy for him having such a cold, unavailable mother and a kind of drive-by father who went in and out of his life. In reading the mother's first memoir there is five times as much material about Jeb as there is about George and he's the first born so you wonder why that is. I just felt bad for him, and I was struck by his various efforts to manage anxiety. I was also empathetic because I have a little bit of the dyslexia problem, not nearly as bad as his, but I'm aware of sometimes struggling to read long articles. I sensed his frustration and I could identify with him. And I think one of the roots of empathy anyway is about being able to put yourself in somebody else's shoes. And I think your question is so interesting because how can one feel empathy for someone who has so little empathy himself. You're right he has very little empathy for anyone else. It's really striking and disturbing, and it's been one of the major discoveries and it's obvious once you start thinking about it.

Q. You talk in the book about how much of his life is based on projections, especially regarding having enemies. Do you think that his religion play s a role or it's more his psychology?

A. I think that it's his psychology. He has a peculiar form of practicing his religion, but I don't think it plays a role in terms of his thinking about the enemy. I think that his psychology has to do with his having to project his own destructiveness and so I think the enemy is always outside of himself and one of the functions that that kind of projection leads to is an inability to take responsibility for his own behavior. The more he projects the harder it is to acknowledge things because he might have a full-blown need to confess everything.

Q: So if he has that full-blown need to confess everything is the anxiety that he would fall apart?

A: It's an anxiety about falling apart.

Q: Over the last week we've been hearing about a book called "Tempting Faith" and how the administration has used Evangelicals. It's a real lack of accountability.

A. From a psychoanalytic point of view it's a defensive use of contempt, and the purpose of contempt is to avoid accountability. The purpose of contempt is to be outside of rules and restrictions of any kind; they come from being outside of the Ten Commandments if you want to talk religiously, or being outside of parental rules and parental laws. The more I think about his misuse of words and of language, I think he has contempt for words themselves. That nothing means anything. There was a movie that I highly recommend to you and anybody who is interested, which is a "Face in the Crowd." It was made in the late 1950's or 1960's with Andy Griffith and Patricia O'Neil. It's about a southern politician who was very seductive and he goes very far until somebody actually has on tape his contempt for his constituents. And that's what's coming out now except it would be nice if it was on tape because you could really hear the contempt because it's really there. And when he said to Diane Sawyer, which I wrote about in the book, when she asks, "What if they find there are no weapons of mass destruction," and he says "What's the difference?" He means that. He does not care. He uses the idea of weapons just to get people to do what he wants and it doesn't matter; the ends justify the means. But it's even worse than that.

Q. Do you think he really believes what he is saying?

A: Yes, I believe he believes what he's saying. There are people who are able to fool lie detectors, and there are people who are able to lie without fully knowing it because they really do believe what they're saying. And I think he's one of them. It's a form of splitting or dissociative behavior where they are disconnected from the very thing that they're talking about. And so they believe what they say. It's a cousin of denial and everybody can do that a little bit like we can lie to ourselves about eating too much. That's why they make people at Weight Watcher's write down everything they eat because there's a great deal of self-deception when you don't think about it. It's quite shocking when you write everything down. You realize how much self-deception we have. His is just very massive.

Q: I've heard Bush talking about this "third awakening" meaning a religious revival in America. To me it seems more like a spawning of fanaticism. It may be a small percentage of the population but I'm wondering if you see this happening.

A: His followers are like some of the characters in a novel the "The Day of the Locust" by Nathanael West which he wrote in the 1930's about people having this desperate need to believe in something and have massive hope that completely transcends anything that has to do with reason. This has always been the way with groups like this. Mark Twain wrote about it. Freud wrote about it. People understand about that kind of thing. I think that Bush uses religion the same way he uses weapons of mass destruction. He takes advantage of people who are not necessarily fanatical, but of well-meaning people who are deeply religious and takes advantage of their belief in their wish for a better world and he whips them up into a frenzy of hate and fear and that's something he's adept at doing. And Karl Rove has helped him to do that. But I think that as far as the advantage of being Born Again for somebody like George Bush is that he can completely disown his past.

Q: It's as if he's wiped the slate clean and he doesn't need to reflect on anything from the past.

A: Right and he confuses looking at yourself, looking in the mirror, with staring at the rear view mirror and never looking ahead. In other words, if you start looking at the rear view mirror at all you'll crash your car according to him. And a good driver does both.

Q: Many people have said that Rove is the architect and the brain and there are other people that attribute all that's going on to Bush himself. I'm wondering with Bush and his need to be the center of attention, what are your thoughts about Rove's ability to influence Bush?

A: I think that Bush relies on Rove and is comfortable relying on him as long as Rove knows his place. And that Bush really is in charge and that you can have a great architect who is a strategist and a planner. A good over-view general may have somebody who is great at certain kinds of tactics about going behind enemy lines, and Rove is expert at that. He's expert at dividing people, he's expert at setting people against one another, and that's something that he is really comfortable and familiar with. He is able to use ridicule and do the kinds of thing for political gain that Bush can instinctively do when he's in verbal repartee with people. So Rove is like a brilliant strategist so he can take the thing about gay marriage and make into a huge event. On the ballot there were about 17 states that had a gay marriage referendum during the election of 2004. So you know that's going to bring out a lot of people to vote who would have otherwise stayed home. So I think that Rove is a particularly brilliant architect. I do not think he's at all threatening to Bush as long as he doesn't overstep his bounds. There was an episode at a barbeque that I wrote about in the book where Rove was making a joke at Bush's place in Texas when he was still governor and Bush really got mad at him for stealing the spotlight. Bush is not the architect; he's not like Frank Lloyd Wright, to be concrete about it, but he is the person who knows what he wants and tells FLW what to do, what he wants. Make a building that looks like this, and I think that's what he wants. And I think that one of the things that I learned a lot about in researching the book and thinking about it is the process of enabling with alcoholics. I treat some alcoholics but it's not the centerpiece of my practice. One thing is clear about enabling: even the left is enabling Bush when we say he can't have been the architect, or he's run by Cheney, or he's run by Rove. I think we're enabling him to evade responsibility even there. People put him down because they think he's not smart enough and I think that's just wrong.

Q: Something I've noticed about his supporters is how strong they come out against anybody who dares to criticize him, and I thought they must see him as someone who is fragile and is in need of such support and defense.

A: Yes, I think that's also something you learn when working with alcoholics is that fierce protection that children of alcoholics will give to the alcoholic parent. They're so afraid-especially with one who has stopped drinking and when one is not in a 12-Step program-they are very afraid that the person is going to start drinking again. And Bush invites that kind of loyalty. Now it's true that all Presidents all have a certain core group of loyal people that goes with the territory, but his group is fierce.

Q: Yes, and they equate democrats with terrorists. What has happened to the democrats? It seems that all Republicans have to do is criticize the democrats, call them unpatriotic, and they run for the hills. How do you understand what's happened to the Democratic party?

A: Joseph McCarthy would be very happy with what's happened. I remember as a kid during the McCarthy era the hatred that people would have if you were at all sympathetic to liberal causes. You were right away called a communist sympathizer or a pinko. It's the same kind of thing. People who are so murderous in their hatred are quite frightening. And the democrats pick that up and they're afraid. What do you need to be able to stand up? Do you need to have lost a son like Cindy Sheehan or do you need to be a minority and a victim of racism like Barak Obama to be able to stand up? I don't know but for some reason the democrats are afraid to stand up and their handlers are really afraid to stand up.

Q: What were you hoping to accomplish by writing this book?

A: There were three things. First, I was hoping was that the book would be published and that it would contribute to helping people make a better choice during the election of 2004. I really felt the urge to make sure it got out before the election because I was concerned. I ended the book essentially with just a sentence that said, "The enterprise he is poised to add to his history of failures is the future of our nation. Our collective denial helped put him in that position and unless we overcome that it'll keep him there." It turns out that we needed to overcome more than our denial which is that we had to overcome our fear. And the caution that Kerry showed was outrageous. So I wrote the book because I felt that people should know who they're dealing with. Two, I wrote the book because I thought it was an important thing for people to start looking inside themselves and looking at their leaders. This could be a paradigm for other future character studies of other candidates. I think it's shocking that we know less about the people running for office than we do about employees that we hire. A psychoanalytic dimension can help people make sense of what they see and I think that is important. I think that psychoanalysis has been sidelined as something that's esoteric and not useful. And actually some of the insights that psychoanalysis offers about just the power of the unconscious, the return of the repressed, looking for patterns of behavior, and dealing with issues of projection and cruelty and looking at various retaliation fantasies, I really think that if people stopped to think about it in an organized way it would make political discourse much richer.

Q. Many people talk about Bush's Oedipal issues, but what you describe are his pre-oedipal issues.

A: His isuses are pre-oedpial. Everybody who has pre-oedipal issues goes through Oedipus too but they go through in their own particular pre-oedipal way. In his case, it's a need to annihilate any kind of opposition; it's pre-ambivalent. It's very primitive, and I don't think he's really achieved the depressive position in any kind of real way. He doesn't have the capacity for concern for other people. His issue is entirely castration anxiety rather than ambivalence toward the father. It's much more the paranoid side of Oedipus. Every single developmental mile stone, I think, is negotiated from a paranoid stance. So in that sense he's pre-oedipal.

Q: And you also write about the loss of his sister and his inability to mourn given the way that was handled by his parents.

A: It was very terrible. I think that it's unclear whether he'd have been able to mourn if he'd had different parents. I think he probably would. I think he's amazingly perceptive in certain ways, he knows how to go for the jugular, he knows how to flatter and to attack and to make people uncomfortable. I would think that that could be a precursor of empathy if he were ever allowed to develop it. He never had a chance to mourn.

Q: I also notice that when he tries to express compassion, especially around issues of loss, it doesn't ring true.

A: No it's really hollow. I think in order for one to feel compassion one has to feel some sense of responsibility, otherwise compassion is never genuine. If you can't acknowledge your own hate or destructiveness or aggression it's very hard to feel genuine love and concern about other people. And I think that's something that's always been missing in him, and it's quite striking. He has two kinds of problems. One is when he talks about compassion and it rings hollow. The other thing is when ever anybody confronts him about a mistake, he freezes and he develops the Hurricane Katrina look or the look that he had on 9/11. And I think that's really from affective flooding. There are a number of studies coming out of UCLA and from Alan Schorr about how affective flooding makes it really hard for a person to think. I think that's when he gets really dissociated and it happens quickly in his case.

Part of taking responsibility is acknowledging the damage you've inflicted and if you don't acknowledge the damage you've inflicted, it's impossible to take responsibility. I spent some time in the book about his torturing and branding of fraternity pledges with hot coat hangers on the buttocks. When he was interviewed about it he said it's no worse than a cigarette burn. First of all, who goes around burning people with cigarettes? But secondly, the dismissal of destructiveness is so great and so natural that I think that's what he does now with Abu Ghraib and things about torture.

Q: How is the book doing?

A: It was a best seller for a while and every time I'm on Randi Rhode's Air America show it zooms up in the ratings. I think it sold very well. I get letters from people all over the country and all over the world. It's been translated into different languages.

Q: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me.