FOR RELEASE, COMMENT,
AND/OR QUOTE: January 1, 2008,
and thereafter
Is Bush Insane?
CONTACT: Elliot Sanders
elliotsanders@benjaminfranklinpress.com
Phone: 831-624-6037. Fax: 831-626-3734
[1890 words]
By David Loye
Will World War III be the U.S. presidential present for the New Year? With 365 days to
go before we can stop worrying about it, a question nagging at many of us needs to at last
be faced openly and squarely. Is he, or isn’t he?
During the drum beating for invasion of Iran outright queries by leading U.S. columnists
(Krugman, Dowd, Rosa Brooks) and bedlam on the internet pointed toward a universal
“Yes.”
The answer, however, is No, it’s worse.
To back up my own diagnosis for a year end report now in print moving into global
circulation I did the customary wide search for everything I could find for what other
professionals had to say. I offer this quick sketch of results as a public service in a critical
time.
The first jolt was this. During nearly seven years of increasing alarm, out of more than
200,000 psychiatrists and psychologists in America, only a scanty handful dared to risk
losing a client or a research grant—or were able to gain more than a paragraph or a stray
column in the media—to publicly state what in private they knew or suspected was the
case.
The lone bold public diagnosis in a whole book by a bona fide psychiatrist was Bush on the
Couch: Inside the Mind of the President by Dr.Justin Frank, a highly respected
psychoanalytic practitioner and professor of psychiatry at George Washington University
in Washington, D.C. The fact Dr.Frank’s rather horrifying diagnosis was published well
before the 2004 election, yet could be so widely ignored the president in question was reelected, indicates why Frank’s findings call for a close new look. Particularly with what
looks like a close election for the U.S. with Republican candidates high in the polls still
mainly proclaiming a lock step continuation of Bushist policies.
Contrary to the carefully engineered image of the decisive leader grounded in honest and
forthright good old time moral values and basic horse sense, the picture of an “untreated
ex-alcoholic with paranoid and megalomaniac tendencies" was noted in 2004 reviews. In
retrospect this looks like an attempt to describe a tornado with a fuzzy snap shot of a
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funnel whirling across some distant prairie elsewhere.
Prior to Bush’s re-election, in 2004, chapter by chapter Dr.Frank laid it out for everyone
who could bear to read the book. The roots in family and childhood of a “drive to rid the
world of dangerous people as not simply the policy judgement of a president—but as the
drive of an undernurtured and emotionally hobbled infant, terrified of confronting the
dangers within his own psyche.” Message in the Bottle fills a chapter on how “remarkably
little attention has been paid to Bush’s twenty-plus years of problem drinking.” In God I
Trust probes shock after shock foreshadowed by the pre-2000 year election quote: “I feel
like God wants me to run for president. . . I know it won’t be easy on me or my family, but
God wants me to do it.” Twisted Tongues probes how “his abuse of language can be seen
as the psychic equivalent of a smoker’s persistent cough—easy to overlook, perhaps, but
all too frequently a warning that something in the patient has gone very, very wrong.”
Without the professional ability to understand the real world consequences for what Frank
was writing—or see the ongoing connection to current and prospective events—this might
seem rather mild. But in the chapter Outlaw—which probed the link between a pattern for
pathological lying and arrests for disorderly conduct in college days, for drunk driving
later, on up to defiance of the U.S. Constitution and international law—what Dr.Frank is
getting at begins to come across with full tornado force.
“He behaves more and more like a criminal who sticks tenaciously to his story,” Frank
wrote—later noting “The individual who lives outside the law ultimately stops seeing the
world as being real.”
Relentlessly, but also with a touch of the healer’s compassion conspicuously missing from
so-called compassionate conservatives, Dr.Frank ticked off more of the symptoms that
thousands of American psychiatrists and psychologists recognized, and commented on
privately, but publicly, or by exclusion from the media, remained silent.
The symptoms of Adult Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, or ADHD—short
attention span, impulsiveness, disinterest in abstractions or complexities, impatient, easily
frustrated, poor control of emotions.
The symptoms of dyslexia, or the symbol-processing difficulty recorded in all the
purportedly humorous little books compiling the scrambling and mangling of words and
thoughts when forced to speak without a script.
“He may seem decisive, but his behavior represents the fall-back position of someone
trying to manage the anxiety of not being able to think clearly,” Dr. Frank observed.
Here Frank’s analysis most directly connects with my own experience as a psychologist.
It’s a mistake to try to write off the American president in question—or any alarming
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leader who anywhere else, as in Iran or North Korea, gains power—as “stupid,” or as only
the simple puppet of others.
You don’t gain the kind of power in question without unusual “street smart” personal
survival skills and capacities as an actor able to both disarm and instill the crazy-making
roller-coaster mix of hope with an underlying gut-cutting edge of fear into the pliable
others.
As with the pathology of leaders past, present, and—should we again fail to learn from
history —the future, we’re faced with the riddle of what seems to be an unstable amalgam
of two or more people. Crafted both by oneself and by others paid to do so—as is
customary for most people of celebrity or notoriety—one persona is the reasonably
“normal” person that his adherents and supporters see, prone then to discount anything that
conflicts with this impression.
Another persona, however, is the quite definitely “abnormal” man behind the “normal”
man that psychologists, psychiatrists, and both progressives and in this case many alarmed
conservatives have come to see, prone then to discount anything that conflicts with this
impression.
The psychiatric diagnosis here is Dissociative Identity Disorder (DSM-IV, 300.14), or as it
used to be known, Multiple Personality Disorder.
My own research with dyslexia and background in testing long ago sensitized me to the
link between the quasi-normal or otherwise impaired intellect and the development of both
positive and highly commendable, and negative and immensely destructive, compensatory
capacities for coping with these deficits.
Along with a high degree of gut level shrewdness, as Frank documents, this syndrome can
include truly incredible skills for lying, cheating, and the fashioning of the blend of
charming and bullying that allows one to get away with it and continue to advance despite
a history of failures.
The problem with being able to gain power in this way—while beneath the facade one is
unable to think or express oneself clearly—is what has become the globally unsettling
question for our time.
Why has the world so rapidly fallen apart during the Bush years? Again documented by
Dr.Frank, what happened during the Bush years is a case of what in my report I suggest be
called the Global Family Breakdown Factor.
A familiar scenario for family counselors and therapists is the case where after a period of
stability, where both parents and children pretty much know what to expect of each other,
one or more of the parents begins to act not at all “like himself or herself normally,” or a
disruptive new mate comes into the picture who’s not “like mom or dad was.”
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Suddenly the children begin to whine, become defiant, to hit and fight among themselves,
one or more may become so violent this family literally falls apart and winds up in the
police station or in mandatory therapy.
Looking back, the same dynamics can be seen in the fall of empires—as in the case
Thucydides portrays of the death of the Golden Age of Greece out of the insanity of the
launching by Athens and Sparta of the 27 year Peloponnesian Wars, or indeed also in the
case of the madness of King George IIIrd and the loss of America.
Even when rulers are tyrannical and hated, troubled nations and empires tend to hang
together as long as the rulers act according to reasonable expectation. But a grounding fact
for the new psychiatry of evolution I propose in my report is recognition that central power
figures serve among nations as stabilizing analogues to the father or the mother in a
family. And when the actions of these power figures exceed a certain limit—when they
depart so radically from expectations long established through customs, laws, treaties, and
values in common that both leaders and followers elsewhere have no idea of what they
might do next—like a jug dropped to the floor breaking into pieces, or like breakdown in a
family, the region or world falls apart.
Hence, America and so far its 2555 day impact on our world.
Beyond history, within the over-riding perspective of evolution, everything we know about
the function of catharsis in psychiatry tells us it’s absolutely crucial that Americans be
officially forced—that is, beyond any possibility of evasion—to face the fact this was a
man, and a cohort, and an ethos, they twice allowed to be engineered into election and reelection. And yet here we sit with the astonishment of a clear cut U.S.Constitutional case
for impeachment and imprisonments—as happened in the case of Nixon and Watergate; a
continuing lack of the sufficiently relentless congressional and the other needed official
investigations of what, why, and what can be done about what happened; and a blind
lemming intransigence of ongoing leadership for the disgraced Republican party and a
waffling school boy ongoing leadership for the nation’s only hopeful alternative
Democratic party.
In Dr. Frank’s final chapter, I Am the Chief, the roar of the dark inner funnel bursts out of
the distance into one’s own living room.
“The evidence suggests that behind Bush’s affable exterior operates a powerful but obscure
delusional system that drives his behavior,” Dr. Frank observed. “The most precise
psychiatric term to describe his pathology is most frequently used to identify a particular
condition exhibited by schizophrenics that, as we’ll see, has broader applications as well:
megalomania.”
Technically, megalomania is not per se insanity, being endemic among thousands of us
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still classified and operating as normal among CEOs and other leadership figures globally.
In the nine pages concluding this chapter Dr.Frank explains what megalomania is in
consequences to rival the paintings of hell by Heironomous Bosch.
“Megalomaniacs love to break things,” he observed. “It makes them feel all powerful.”
To the defining symptoms Frank lists can be linked specific policies, actions, events—and,
again and again, the unsettling unguarded glimpses behind the mask—of the Bush years.
Yet to the astonishment of much of the rest of the world an amazing number of Americans
have been able to discount what happened to the nation originally founded to serve as a
beacon of hope to the world as no more than the fun and free-for-all partisanship of a good
prize fight or football game.
Which brings us to the pathology of enablers and followers. And the virus that remains in
the bloodstream of America when Bush and cohort are gone. And the requirement for the
investigation and exposure by a shamed and emboldened Congress and mainstream media
to provide the catharsis required for our healing.
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This 1890 word article is based on chapter one, The Pathology of Leadership, in
Bankrolling Evolution: A Scientific Guide to Global Recovery from the Disaster of the
Bush Years, by David Loye. Dr.Loye is the former Research Director for the Program on
Psychosocial Adaptation and the Future, Neuropsychiatric Institute, UCLA School of
Medicine, and author of the award-winning The Healing of a Nation. Bankrolling
Evolution is a year end report to the Council of the Darwin Project
(www.thedarwinproject.com) composed of over 50 leading American, European, and
Asian scientists. To provide immediate global access, on January 1 this report will be
available through main online book sellers in the U.S., Canada, Europe and Asia and
through the Benjamin Franklin Press website: www.benjaminfranklinpress.com Press
contact: Elliot Sanders, elliotsanders@benjaminfranklinpress.com
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