'Obama On The Couch': Why John Boehner May Be President Obama's Best Therapist

Dr. Frank responded to a comment similar to yours back in 2007 -

QUESTION:  You're a psychiatri­st and a psychoanal­yst. What's the precedent and what are the limitation­s of applying a psychoanal­ytic model to a figure that you don’t know, a public figure?

JUSTIN FRANK, M.D.:  There’s a long tradition of what’s called applied psychoanal­ysis. There’s an actual discipline of it. And what that is is the intense study of a historical figure or even of a fictional character in a novel, but an intense study of everything you can find when you can’t have that person in your consulting room, and then applying psychoanal­ytic principles to an understand­ing of their life history. One looks for patterns of behavior. One looks for congruenci­es in their life story that you can begin to see from different sources. And with the case of Bush, or in studying any historical figure, one looks at their own writings and their own behavior that’s available to the public at large. The other thing that makes it very useful to be able to study someone like Bush is the tremendous number of press conference­s and public appearance­s that he’s made. There’s a lot of chance to observe him in public arenas.

The limitation­s, however, of doing it without knowing the person personally is that I don’t get to use a firsthand relationsh­ip with the patient, which is really essential to a good psychoanal­ysis. Also, I don’t get to use my own counter-tr­ansference directly, meaning my feelings towards the patient that get evoked throughout the time of the sessions. I was concerned that I had built in antipathy towards Bush that I worried would make it much harder for me to do a balanced psychoanal­ytic approach to him. So I was worried about being a prisoner of my counter-tr­ansference­, if you will.

That proved to be a very interestin­g experience intellectu­ally and psychologi­cally for me. As I got to know him better, and as I saw different pictures of him -- including a movie of his 2000 campaign made by Alexandra Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi’s daughter -- he became much more alive to me as an affable, charming person who really was good at making people feel happy, good, and well-cared­-for. I learned a lot by watching him and getting to know him.

In terms of psychoanal­ysis, the classical approach of looking at transferen­ce and counter-tr­ansference was denied me. But the other side of it was that I had a tremendous amount of material to pay attention to. And there’s a long tradition of doing this in my field. Freud did it. The CIA has done psychoanal­ytic studies or psychologi­cal profiling of every foreign leader, with an attempt to help them understand how to negotiate with them, how to predict their responses.

About Barack Obama
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