Trump on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President

191 Pages·2018·6.7 MB·English

by  Justin A. Frank

an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
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New York, New York 10014
The author gratefully acknowledges permission to quote from the following:
“Old Man Trump,” words and music by Woody Guthrie and Ryan Harvey. Copyright © 2016
Woody Guthrie Publications Inc. and Ryan Harvey Music. All Rights for Woody Guthrie
Publications Inc. Administered by BMG Rights Management (US) LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Used by Permission. Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC.
“Mock Confessional,” by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, from These Are My Rivers, copyright © 1973 by
Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
Copyright © 2018 by Justin Frank
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Ebook ISBN: 9780735220331
Version_1
To Karen and Steve Scheinman,
dearly loved lifelong friends
Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot
be trusted with important matters.
—ALBERT EINSTEIN
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction
PART ONE
ORIGINS
Chapter One
MOTHER
Chapter Two
FATHER
Chapter Three
BROTHER
Chapter Four
RIVALS
PART TWO
PATHOLOGIES
Chapter Five
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF LYING
Chapter Six
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF NARCISSISM
Chapter Seven
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DESTRUCTIVENESS
Chapter Eight
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RACISM
Chapter Nine
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SEXISM AND MISOGYNY
Chapter Ten
THE LANGUAGE OF DONALD TRUMP
THE END OF THE BEGINNING
Glossary
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index
About the Author
INTRODUCTION
I have a feeling I’m falling
On rare occasions
But most of the time I have my feet on the ground
I can’t help it if the ground itself is falling.
~Lawrence Ferlinghetti
There is something really raw about the ground shaking. As
humans, we think we can rely on solid ground. If that
shakes, too, it shakes you to the bones.
~Francis Cristobal, resident of Hilo, Hawaii, 2018
Trump on the Couch is a book I never expected to write.
Midway through George W. Bush’s first presidential term,
my concerns about Bush’s mental health led me to undertake an
in-depth exploration of his psyche, using the discipline of applied
psychoanalysis—the practice of applying psychoanalytic principles
to the consideration of the motivations and limitations of historical
figures, which Sigmund Freud pioneered when he was developing
his theories of self and psychoanalysis. In 2004, I published my
findings in Bush on the Couch, which struck a chord with readers
and demonstrated that applied psychoanalysis can shed unique
and invaluable light on who our current leaders are—and how they
got that way.
My second book reprised the applied psychoanalytic approach
to explore the psyche of a much different, if still enigmatic,
individual, drawing in part upon his extensive writings to trace his
psychological development. In Obama on the Couch I described
our forty-fourth president as suffering from “Obsessive Bipartisan
Disorder,” a characterological need to avoid partisan positioning
that was rooted in his biography as the son of a broken, mixed-race
marriage; as we have learned more about the motivations behind
Obama’s remaining silent about the Russian manipulation of the
2016 election, it has become painfully clear that his Obsessive
Bipartisan Disorder did indeed set the stage for Trump’s victory
and attempts to eradicate Obama’s record. Published in 2011 in the
early years of the Tea Party, Obama on the Couch also explored the
psychological underpinnings of some of the positions embraced by
the Republican opposition, as well as the psychological blind spots
that enabled Obama’s and the Democrats’ failure to appreciate
fully the strength of that opposition. I concluded with my concern
that these unexamined pockets of denial could pave the way for a
successor who poses even graver risks to the nation and the world
than did his predecessor.
Donald Trump is in part a logical product of those blind spots.
We are faced with a president whose mental health is widely and
openly questioned, and an awakening on the Left to the depth of
the hostility with which the Right views them. Much has been
written about Trump’s psyche during the 2016 campaign and the
first year of his presidency, but very little was actually grounded in
psychoanalytic theory. That said, Trump on the Couch is likely not
the first in-depth attempt to try to define Trump’s personality and
character through the discipline of applied psychoanalysis.
However, I can’t say I’ve read the treatises that I suspect have
preceded my own, because I don’t speak Russian.
The discipline of applied psychoanalysis has long been used by
the CIA and other intelligence agencies to study foreign leaders and
politicians, and I have no doubt that the Russian effort to interfere
on Trump’s behalf in the 2016 election was preceded by an
extensive assessment of his psyche. Russian intelligence has access
to the same psychoanalytic theory as American intelligence
agencies (and psychoanalysts); assuming the Russians ground that
theory into a lens through which to carefully review Trump’s
known biography, what they would have seen was a person who
was uniquely positioned to be coopted—knowingly or unknowingly,
or both—by an authoritative Putin regime looking to manipulate
America’s voters and destabilize its democracy at home and
influence abroad.
My analytic approach is informed by the Freudian tradition as
well as the work of psychoanalytical theorist Melanie Klein, who
expanded on Freud’s discoveries and focused in particular on the
mental attitudes that the individual demonstrates toward
aggression and destructiveness. As Trump has quickly established
himself as the most aggressive, destructive president in memory,
the Kleinian approach is particularly apt for understanding him.
Klein posits that the individual’s struggle to manage his own innate
destructiveness begins in early childhood, and we will use that
insight as a tool for understanding a broad range of Trump’s
behaviors.
As a Kleinian, my approach to analyzing the last two presidents’
psyches has relied heavily on previously published biographical
information about their childhoods and their families. The
historical record on Trump’s family and early years is considerably
thinner by comparison, but remarkably revealing. We will work
with what we’ve got. Fortunately, Donald Trump’s own published
record—from books he has authored over the years to his more
recent, incomparable Twitter output—provides an unprecedented
amount of material that depicts how these unconscious patterns
developed in childhood still influence his words and deeds in
adulthood.
This book is divided into two parts. Part one will look at
Trump’s family history and early years to identify the sources of the
dynamics that are most essential to understanding Trump’s
psychology. In part two, we’ll look at a range of defenses and
disorders that he demonstrates as an adult, with an eye toward
identifying their psychoanalytic underpinnings as a means toward
understanding their influence as well as his defenses against their
impact. Finally, a glossary will revisit some of the terms that have
been central to our discussion.
Psychoanalysis, as practiced in the consulting room, is not a
linear process. We start where the patient is at the moment and
eventually spiral around and around from past to present, from
dreams to reality, from wishes to actions—and then back again.
Sometimes the first dream a patient describes can contain all the
issues of a complete analysis, and becomes something to which we
return time and again.
This means that we will often return to familiar material from
Trump’s life, but with different perspectives that depend on his
particular behavior at the time. Reexamining fundamental
conflicts, called “working through” in the consulting room, is a way
of showing how underlying core character traits or meanings are
recognizable in different circumstances. Readers may often find
themselves “working through” by recognizing the essential Trump
in various settings. We see repetition of Trump’s childhood
patterns, anxieties, and the behaviors he has employed to address
(or avoid) them.