Psychoanalyzing the President

He did it before with the Freudian treasure trove that is George W. Bush, and now author and professor Justin Frank has unleashed another exercise in armchair analysis upon our sitting president with his new book, “Obama on the Couch.” Frank has observed our nation’s leader from his academic perch at George Washington University and believes Obama grapples with a different kind of Oedipal issue than his predecessor and that this “father hunger” even played a role in the assassination of Osama bin Laden under Obama’s paternally malnourished watch.

Right. Now will the contingent from Vienna please sit down? –KA

“Washington Whispers” in U.S. News & World Report:

This is Frank’s second psychoanalytical book about a president. While a sympathetic look at Obama, it follows Bush on the Couch, a sharply critical analysis that suggested then President George W. Bush was disturbed. In that book, he predicted that someone like Obama—”completely different,” “someone not … white”—would succeed Bush. What the nation ended up with, however, is “an almost tragic figure,” Frank writes.

The general theme is that Obama has been affected both by being biracial and by the abandonment of his two dads during his childhood. The result is that he is overly protective of his own nuclear family, desires greatly to see national unity, and yet harbors anger that he took out on bin Laden.

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