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Banned
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Mental health of the president and electorate
What are symptoms of sound mental health ?
I'll admit at the outset that Clinton exhibited symptoms of
psychological problems. However, I do not think that
Clinton's mental and emotional problems were as serious or
impacting as those of Reagan and GW Bush.
It seems to me that the American electorate has been choosing
presidents with serious psychological problems since Carter was
voted out in 1980, and that the implications of what that says
about a majority of American voters is worthy of discussion.
The observations of Lloyd deMause, director The Institute for Psychohistory and those of the authors of "Types of Presidents"
are, IMO, an interesting starting point for debate
If a practice of avoiding war until it is an absolutely necessary
solution is a sign of sound mental health, Carter and Eisenhower
deserve high marks. (What are all these negative comments that
I read about Carter on these threads motivated by, anyway?
What specific Carter policies diminished his record?)
Here's a link to Carter's famous 1979 speech, intended to respond to an
American malaise. It seems refreshingly frank and it unhesitatingly
addressed and provided a plan for solutions of our now, much worse,
energy dependence and consumption problem:
<a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/carter/filmmore/ps_crisis.html">http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/carter/filmmore/ps_crisis.html</a>
Quote:
<a href="http://www.psychohistory.com/reagan/rp18x28.htm">http://www.psychohistory.com/reagan/rp18x28.htm</a>
The columnists had been right. There would have to be a magical sacrifice by "a tribal shaman who calls on the unseen Spirits to work their healing effects." It was the oldest principle of mankind: When the world seems full of guilt, rage and despair, when everything seems polluted and you are certain the end of the world is near, sacrifice. For in this sacrifice-whether of animal or human-the group will be purified. Bad feelings will be purged and all bad blood between us will be cleansed.(25) All rage will be vented on the sacrificial object, the group will experience a rebirth and the nation will feel whole and able to love again.
Jimmy Carter knew well the principle of the cleansing power of sacrifice. Like a majority of Americans, he celebrated the sacrifice of Christ for the sake of the world every Sunday of his life. Like a majority of Americans,(26) he had experienced the rejuvenating power of Christ's
A LITTLE SACRIFICE 25
sacrifice in a personal born-again religious experience. In his July 15th address to the nation, analyzed above, he reminded us of the necessity of sacrifice in bringing about national rebirth. First he described the severi-ty of the emotional crisis: "We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives. . . threatening to destroy the social and political fabric of America . . ." Then he told us the source of our problem, our prosperity: "too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption . . . we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing... piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness. . ." And finally he promised us that a sacrifice, "a little sacrifice from everyone" would produce the needed "rebirth of the American spirit."
Where, then, might this sacrifice take place? America was, after all, a civilized country, which meant that we would feel guilty about too open-ly sacrificing our citizens for our emotional needs. It was therefore necessary to set up our sacrificial stage on some foreign soil and to find an "enemy" to take the blame for the sacrifice.(27) Which country was the most likely to respond to our suggestion to become our sacrificial executioner? Which country would we most like to designate as our "enemy"?
The answers to these questions could be found in a Gallup Poll taken in February of 1979. Gallup regularly asks people about the popularity" of various foreign nations, and the two which had the lowest favorable ratings in 1979 were Cuba (26%) and Iran (27%):
GALLUP POLL: FAVORABLE RATINGS
HOW AMERICANS RATE FOREIGN NATIONS 1979 1976 % Change
Canada 91 91 even
China (Mainland) 29 20 +9
China (Taiwan) 59 55 +4
Cuba 26 15 +11
Egypt 63 49 +14
Iran 27 48 -21
Israel 68 65 +3
Mexico 72 74 -2
Russia 34 21 +13
Cuba, of course, was a previous "enemy" of America, and a brief attempt was made by Carter in the fall of 1979 to stir up interest again in Cuba, with a "discovery" that Russian troops were on the island. Yet Cuba, for its own internal reasons, didn't seem interested in being our executioner, so the other unpopular country, Iran, would have to help us perform our sacrifice.
28
The poll cited above was also important in revealing how Iran had fallen in the eyes of the American public in the previous three years. It is rare for any country to fall 21 points in so short a time. Since the poll was taken in February of 1979, the Shah was still in power, so it was not just "revolutionaries" which were hated by Americans. Later in the year, when revolutionaries took American hostages, tore down American flags and chanted "Death to the Americans" in mass rallies, it became obvious that they were willing to participate in our sacrifice. In the face of these threatening actions, the prudent course for America to have taken would have been at least to beef up our security in Teheran and to avoid taking any actions which might provoke the revolutionaries to take hostages again. Yet, despite repeated pleas for help by embassy personnel, Washington refused to do anything to increase security substantially. So blatant was the invitation to grab hostages that after Iranian mobs had again stormed the embassy, one American general asked in frustration, "How many Americans will have to die before we do anything?"(28)
In June of 1979, Newsweek had reported that a White House advisor told them that Zbigniew Brzezinski had said that "a 'small war' might be useful to prove the President's toughness."(29) Obviously, if Iran grabbed American hostages, this might lead to a "small war" which would restore Carter's failing potency and divert the country's rage onto an "enemy" abroad.(30) Though no one said it aloud, the unconscious shared fantasy grew that American embassy personnel would have to be designated as the sacrificial victims. The only problem was to find a way to get Iran to act, and soon.
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Quote:
http://www.personalityinhistory.com/...cy_Project.asp
There appear to be eight distinguishable types of presidents.<a href="http://www.personalityinhistory.com/Types_of_Presidents.asp">http://www.personalityinhistory.com/Types_of_Presidents.asp</a>
A president’s character has no relation to how good a president’s historians judge him to be.
A number of personality traits and qualities do predict presidential success.
The ability to lie and deceive is an important quality for success in the White House, and presidents who are less straightforward typically make better presidents.
Despite his recent popularity and reputation for integrity, John Adams’s personality closely resembled Richard Nixon’s.
Presidents are much more Extraverted today than in the past and less intellectually curious than in the past. They may also be lower in character.
Jimmy Carter is the only modern president that much resembles Founding Fathers Jefferson and Madison and the greatest president of the 19th century, Abe Lincoln. Eisenhower is the only modern president much like Washington.
Franklin Roosevelt seems to be the template for modern presidents, with recent presidents showing high (Kennedy, Clinton) or moderate (LBJ) similarity to him. Reagan resembled his as well.
Modern Democratic presidents tend to be very Extraverted, achievement-oriented, ebullient, and sympathetic to the poor, but are willing to deceive and relatively unprincipled.
Modern Republican presidents tend to be less sympathetic to the less fortunate and much more inclined to rely on traditional sources of moral authority than average Americans.
George W. Bush appears to have fewer traits related to presidential success than most presidents. He most resembles Andrew Jackson and Ronald Reagan.
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Quote:
<a href="http://www.psychohistory.com/reagan/rp36x50.htm">http://www.psychohistory.com/reagan/rp36x50.htm</a>
THE MAKING OF A FEARFUL LEADER
"Where's the Rest of Me?"
When Ronald Reagan wrote his autobiography in 1964, he entitled it Where's the Rest of Me? in order to indicate, he said on the opening page, that he had lived most of his life with the feeling that part of him was missing.
The moment when he felt most acutely that part of him was missing, he wrote, was in 1941, during the filming of the motion picture, King's Row. The first description he gives in his autobiography is his growing terror while making the film.
My key scene was to be played in a bed. This environment was the result of the plot which had me injured in an accident in the railroad yards. Taken to a sadistic doctor (who disapproved of my dating his daughter and felt it was his duty to punish me), the doctor had amputated both my legs at the hips.
It was the portrayal of this moment of total shock which made the scene rough to play. . . . A whole actor would find such a scene difficult; giving it the necessary dramatic impact as half an actor was murderous. I felt I had neither the experience nor the talent to fake it. I simply had to find out how it really felt, short of actual amputation............
.........The night before I could not sleep. I appeared wan and worn on the sound, stage, still not knowing how to read the line. Without hope, with make-up pasted on and in my nightshirt, I wandered over to the set to see what it looked like. I found the prop men had arranged a neat deception. Under the gay patchwork quilt, they had cut a hole in the mattress and put a supporting box beneath. I stared at it for a minute. Then, obeying an overwhelming impulse, I climbed into the rig. I spent almost that whole hour in stiff confinement, contemplating my torso and the smooth undisturbed flat of the covers where my legs should have been.
Gradually the affair began to terrify me. In some weird way, I felt something horrible had happened to my body. Then gradually I became aware that the crew had quietly assembled, the camera was in position, and the set lighted . . . There were cries of "Lights!" and "Quiet, please!" I lay back and closed my eyes, as tense as a fiddlestring… I opened my eyes dazedly, looked around, slowly let my gaze travel downward. I can't describe even now my feeling as I tried to reach for where my legs should be. "Randy!" I screamed . . . "Where's the rest of me?"(1)
That the "sadistic doctor" had cut off the legs of his daughter's boyfriend as punishment for his sexual desires was made explicit in the movie,(2) so it.was understandable that the scene could be an upsetting one for an actor to play. Yet the portrayal of the punishment of a young man by a father figure for his erotic wishes was hardly a unique theme in the theatre. Why did having to say a single line throw Ronald Reagan into such a "panic"? What personal meaning did it have for him that he chose to use it as the title of his autobiography, that he referred to it hundreds of times in his speeches since then, and that he even asked to have the movie's theme music played at his Presidential inauguration? Why has it been so difficult for him to separate himself from the movie character who screamed out "Where's the rest of me?"
From the description he gives of his emotions during the filming of the scene, it appears that for some personal reason he was unable to separate
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the portrayal of this "castration" scene before the cameras from his own castration fears. Yet to say he had "unconscious castration fears" is only to begin to understand why he was so panicked by the scene. Every man, to some degree, has unconscious castration fears, and every woman, to some extent, fears of body mutilation. What must be asked is what was special about Ronald Reagan's life to that point which might make him so identified with the movie character who had his legs cut off? What family background, what personality development and what cir-cumstances in his life in 1941 can help explain why this one line has remained identified in his mind with his self-image for the rest of his life?
From a look at Reagan's career, it soon becomes evident that the castration theme has always been a major concern of his. To begin with, he often refers to himself as "bleeding," from his oft-repeated description of himself as once having been "a hemophilic liberal-I bled for 'causes'" to his regular use of such phrases as "I bleed real blood for the unemployed" and "no fighter ever bled as I did." Even his favorite childhood poem contains the bleeding image in its opening line, "I will lay me down for to bleed a while." Sometimes this preoccupation with himself as bleeding expresses itself in the negative, as after the Carter debate, when he said to a reporter, "I've examined myself and I can't find any wounds."(3) But usually his castration imagery is overt, references to the "cutting and slashing' of "hemorrhaging budgets" having been part of his political language since the beginning of his career.
Typical Reagan doodle shows himself with hinds and legs missing.
The castration anxiety shown in his choice of language extends to his drawings. Although Reagan is an excellent graphic artist, he has difficulty in drawing hands, legs and horse's hooves in his sketches and doodles. Most of his drawings show his preoccupation with castration in some way, and his self-portraits usually come out looking like graphic illustrations for the "Where's the rest of me?" scene, with his hands and legs often missing.(4)
In addition to just his choice of words in his speeches, Reagan will often work open references to mutilation into conversations, usually in connection with the issue of capital punishment. For instance, when he became Governor of California in 1967, he refused to give clemency to Aaron Mitchell, a black man who had been given a death sentence for having shot a policeman during a robbery. When asked by a group of civil libertarians why it was necessary for Mitchell to die, he startled them with a detailed, graphic description of "one of the most macabre cases in California annals. . . which involved the sexual mutilation
DREADED SEXUAL MUTILATOR 39
of the male victim,"(5) even though the mutilation case was totally unconnected with Mitchell. A few days later, in a speech before the National Sheriffs Association, he changed to a graphic description of the bloody mutilation of a ten-year-old girl, who, he told the sheriffs, "had been stabbed 60 times and had been mutilated in a savage and depraved manner,"(6) again a case unrelated to the topic of his speech. The reason he related the story, he told his listeners, was to show that sexual mutilations were so commonplace that misdeeds must be followed by "punishment immediate and certain."(7)
The original version of this dreaded sexual mutilator who so haunts the life of Ronald Reagan, the childhood source for his overly severe castration fears, was his father, John Edward Reagan. This connection is shown by the fact that immediately after relating the "Where's the rest of me?" scene in his autobiography, Reagan turns to his relationship with his father and his father's life-long alcoholism. Even though Reagan always tried to avoid talking about his father to interviewers-one biographer said that when asked about his family life he would "talk nonstop about his mother" but never mention his father(8) -he relates in the autobiography how as a child he would be "pretending sleep" during his father's "week-long benders," and how he would "fill myself with grief for my father" when he found him "spread out as if he were crucified" on the front porch.(9) The father, a violent Irishman, who was later described by his son as having lived a life of "almost permanent anger and frustration,"(10) used to kick young Ronald "with his boot" and often "clobbered" him and his brother.(11) From even the few memories which emerge in his scattered comments about his father, it is evident that Ronald's relationship was filled with frequent episodes of terror and a longing for closeness, feelings which he shared with many others of his generation (he was born in 1911) due to the generally much harsher childrearing practices then common.(12)
His overwhelming fear of his father made young Ronald a "good" boy, a "loner," who was "afraid of the dark," someone who suffered since childhood from various phobias, or irrational fears of various kinds.(13) The first phobia he mentions in his autobiography is his fear "to the point of hysteria" of being piled upon by "the mass of writhing, shouting bodies" in a football game.(14) Although he always loved the physical violence of football-enjoying the "clean hatred. . . where two men can literally fling themselves bodily at one another in combat"-he said he always panicked when he felt trapped by the pileup.(15) His claustrophobia, his fear of being trapped in an enclosed space, was a "lifelong" problem, he told one biographer.(16) Most of the time it indicated fears of physical closeness, usually with men, as when he had a "claustrophobia problem" when filming a movie in a submarine in close quarters with other male actors.(17) Other phobias would be temporary,
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depending on his life situation, as when he was afraid to fly during his eight years of speaking engagements for General Electric, when he had to write a clause into his contract guaranteeing his travel would be only by train,(18) or as in his avoidance of New York restaurants because the tables were so "close together . . . your shoulders are virtually touching the fellow's shoulders at the next table."(19)
In all cases, however, Reagan's phobias are similar in purpose to those of other phobics in helping him to avoid any situation which might lead to a loss of control over his feelings, positive or negative. This avoidance is necessary whenever any situation might tempt him to express emotions of love or hatred too directly, and thus invite punishment by "the father in his head," his extremely severe conscience.(20) Reagan shares with others who have phobias the fear of loss of control and the over-concern about humiliation and being made to feel worthless, situations which might force him to show his rage and invite punishment, symbolically, by castration.
Phobias are one of the most thoroughly understood neurotic symptoms, going back as far as Sigmund Freud's accurate analysis of a phobic in his early work, The Interpretation of Dreams, an analysis which has a direct relevance to Reagan's phobias and even provides a clue to what was really going on in the crucial scene in King's Row. Freud says:
I had an opportunity of obtaining a deep insight into the unconscious mind of a young man whose life was made almost impossible by an obsessional neurosis. He was unable to go out into the street because he was tortured by the fear that he would kill everyone he met. He spent his days in preparing his alibi in case he might be charged with one of the murders committed in the town. It is unnecessary to add that he was a man of equally high morals and education. . . . After his father's painful illness and death, the patient's obsessional selfreproaches appearedhe was in his thirtyfirst year at the timetaking the shape of a phobia transferred on to strangers. A person, he felt, who was capable of wanting to push his own father over a precipice from the top of a mountain was not to be trusted to respect the lives of those less closely related to him; he was quite right to shut himself up in his room.(21)
Freud's account provides the solution both to Reagan's phobias and to the mystery of his castration anxieties during the "Where's the rest of me?" scene. First, we must take into account Reagan's personal circumstances during the filming. He had just gotten married, in January of 1940, and had just had his first child, Maureen, in January 1941, both
THE DEATH OF HIS FATHER 41
dangerous actions on his part, revealing that he had sexual wishes and inviting punishment from his father. Then-though this date is mentioned neither in his autobiography nor in any of his biographies-his father died four months later, on May 18,1941.(22) Like Freud's patient, Reagan felt that ever since he was a child and was kicked and beaten by his father, he had wished for his father's death. When his father really died, in 1941, Reagan unconsciously felt he should be punished, as the King's Row character was punished. During the filming, a few months after his father's death, when he found he had to portray a scene showing that his legs had been cut 'off, he panicked. It was too real, an almost exact duplication of his personal situation at that time. When he looked at the flat covers "where my legs should have been," he "felt something horrible had happened to my body" because he felt he himself deserved castration, for marrying, for being sexual, for becoming a father himself, for having wanted his own father dead.
After the death of his father and the making of King's Row, Reagan went into the army. When he got out, his personal life quickly began to slide downhill. He first spent six months doing nothing but building model boats. Then he went back to work in such a depressed mood that he spent most of his time quarreling with his studio and avoiding his wife, Jane Wyman, by spending all his free time at Screen Actors Guild meetings. His need to sabotage his marriage soon became so severe it led to a divorce. In the court proceedings, Jane Wyman stated that the mar-riage had ended because his union activities took all his time. But perhaps more to the point was her remark to Gregory Peck, after the hearings, that the reason why she left Reagan was that "I just couldn't stand to watch that damn King's Row one more time."(23) Reagan obviously had continued to be obsessed by the castration scene, viewing it repeatedly in an attempt to master its personal meaning for himself.
By 1947, Reagan's despair about his life reached its climax. He began carrying a loaded pistol-ostensibly, he said, as protection against mutilation threats,(24) but also as a return to his earlier having owned guns as a child and in his twenties.(25) He let his physical condition run down so badly he came down with pneumonia, went to the hospital and became aware that he wanted to die. While in bed, he hallucinated that Hum-phrey Bogart was in the room with him (Bogart was a father-figure to him at that time.) He describes the hallucination in his autobiography:
Humphrey Bogart appeared, and we played an interminable scene exchanging and wearing innumerable trenchcoats, and trying to say lines to each other, always with a furtive air of danger in the surrounding darkness. Someone else can take a crack at analyzing what this Freudian delirium meant. This was evidently the night-"Big Casino, bet or throw in." . . . I decided I'd be more comfortable not breathing.(26)
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Reagan had become so depressed, he felt he wanted to "exchange trenchcoats with Bogart"-that is, exchange places with his dead father (trenchcoat = shroud). His guilt at outliving his father, his conviction that his wishes had actually killed him, had grown to such a point that only the ultimate punishment, his own death, would suffice. At that moment on the hospital bed, he was thrown back to his childhood, when he sometimes used to feel so depressed that he wished for death, once writing a poem extolling death as a salvation from "life's dreary dirge."(27) If a devoted nurse had not coaxed him to continue breathing, he said, he would have quit living then and there.(28) Something would have to change in himself if he was to go on living with his guilt.
What Reagan changed was his life goal itself. After his pneumonia episode, he suddenly decided to become an anti-communist. As for many Americans, anti-communism was for Reagan a perfect solution for his parricidal wishes. It solved the problem of his guilt for his father's death by putting his disturbing wishes into the communists. Without being consciously aware of why, he found that his new anti-communist activities made him feel better, saying to himself, in effect, "It's not me who wants to kill daddy. It's the commies who want to destroy all authority. And if I fight them, I'll be able to control my own wishes in them."(29)
His conversion from acting as a career to being an anti-communist politician was, Reagan said, like finding "the rest of me," like moving from a "monastery" into a life of action.(30) Now, rather than accepting the self-image of a passive boy, guilty of his father's death, he could assume the active role as a fighter against those who want authorities dead. Rather than staying at home and endlessly watching himself on the screen without legs, he could-like FDR, another man who had used politics to conquer the loss of his legs-take action against those who now embodied his dangerous wishes. The moment he switched from being a liberal Democrat to a crusading anti-communist, he not only found the rest of himself, he solved the problem of guilt in his life, by taking all the things he felt guilty about and putting them into an "enemy." At the age of 36, Ronald Reagan had finally found how to live without crippling anxieties.
His new defensive mechanism even enabled him to remarry without conscious guilt. In marrying Nancy Davis, he was able to repeat the crucial mutilation scene from King's Row . . . except that this time the outcome was one of triumph rather than defeat. Nancy's father, like the sadistic father in the movie, was also a surgeon, and Reagan made sure he repeated the film's sceneno as closely as he could by arriving for their first date on crutches, having broken his leg in a baseball game.(31) This time, however, he could marry the surgeon's daughter because he was able to externalize his guilt for his sexual wishes by putting his guilt-
BLATANT SEXUAL MISBEHAVIOR 43
provoking wishes into the communists, "the most evil enemy mankind has known in its long climb from the swamp."(32)
For Reagan not only saw communists as parricides, but also as extremely active sexually-completely in contrast to the actual sexual code in most communist countries. For instance, when he ran for Governor of California, one of the central themes of his campaign was "the mess at Berkeley," a place where, he said, they held "sexual orgies so vile I can-not describe them to you," promising if elected to "investigate the charges of communism and blatant sexual misbehavior on the Berkeley campus."(33) A good part of the reason why he was elected was that, as one biographer put it, "hidden away in the hearts of parents was the fear that their own children might one day go away to college, grow beards and march against authority."(34)
Reagan promised these voters that his first targets as Governor would be the students at Berkeley, "advocates of sexual orgies, drug usage, and filthy speech," who wanted only to "disrupt the academic community" and who therefore must be brought under control immediately.(35) The situation at Berkeley, he told a woman's club in April of 1966, was now so bad that their "morality gap is so great that we can no longer ignore it." He had proof, he said, that the Alameda County District Attorney had just investigated a student dance which had turned into "an orgy," where they had displayed on a giant screen "pictures of men and women, nude, in sensuous poses, provocative, fondling."(36) Since Reagan had waved a piece of paper in the air during the speech, saying that he had the report of the DA's investigation "in his hand," curious reporters later asked the DA for a copy, only to be told that "my office made no investigations of the college dance."(37)
This typical incident illustrates one of the problems with using politics as a way of solving internal problems. For those who externalize their own anxieties, action is more often taken to solve current personal problems than to deal with actual situations in the real world. A vast gulf separates the anti-communist crusade of Reagan and others and rational actions taken to reduce real threats by communists and others. The crusading anti-communist sees dangers when his or her own feelings are about to get out of control rather than when reality is actually becoming dangerous. Orgies at student dances could hardly be considered one of the major dangers to the State of California in 1966. Reagan's political actions are far more likely to stem from current dangers in his own inner life than from dangers in the real world. Because of his severe personal problems-ones which he shares with many Americans-he is likely to overlook reality conditions which need attention in favor of situations which represent wishes of his own which are giving him problems.
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The following is an observation about a president who would order our
troops to war with these justifications:
Quote:
<a href="http://lists.topica.com/lists/psychohistory/read/message.html?mid=1711896246&sort=d&start=4389">http://lists.topica.com/lists/psychohistory/read/message.html?mid=1711896246&sort=d&start=4389</a>
Do notice that as the day of American invasion of Iraq comes closer,
Bush's language is more and more centered on how the need for
invasion is "he is lying," "he is duplicitous," "he is playing games
with us," "he can't be trusted" and other phrases that sound very
much like what his mother said to him, both early in his life when
"she slapped us around a lot" and later when he was "playing games"
with her on his alcoholism. Less and less of his language is directed
to any threat to the U.S., more and more toward him as a Bad Boy who
needs punishment.
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