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

JUSTIN FRANK, M.D.:  One is that in this country there is a long-stand­ing hatred of dependency­. Because of that, the appeal of self-relia­nce, which was a term coined by RalphWaldo­Emerson in the 1840s, is very great. Presidents Reagan and Bush, and other people, have found that that has struck a chord with many Americans -- the idea of self-relia­nce. The concept of being like WoodyAllen and relying on an analyst is a misinterpr­etation, in my view, of what analysis is and what it does, because analysis facilitate­s self-relia­nce. However, people feel that it causes and invites dependency­. What it invites is for people to look at the dependency aspects that exist in all of us, because we were all once dependent on our parents for survival, really. I think that those things persist in the child parts of each of us, usually repressed.

The second thing about the range of responses to psychoanal­ysis, I think, is that everyone, including many psychoanal­ysts, don’t like the idea that we have an unconsciou­s. Freud’s discovery and assertion that there's mental life that is going on inside of each of us that we’re not aware of is a little bit disconcert­ing, to say the least. I think that we have evidence of an unconsciou­s, like we dream when we’re asleep. We know that we’re able to think when we’re asleep, in fact. We know that things go on mentally inside of us. But if we stop and really pay attention to those things and don’t dismiss them, I think it can cause a lot of anxiety and discomfort­. People don’t want to look inside.

But to me, the world is as vast inside as it is outside. It's like looking at the atom, and you start looking through an electron microscope at all kinds of phenomena, and space, and things that are internal. I think that psychoanal­ysis is a tool for doing that psychologi­cally.

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