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Marv
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>Bush and the Psychology of Incompetent Decisions
>By John P. Briggs, MD, and J.P. Briggs II, PhD
>t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributors
>Thursday 18 January 2007
>
>President George W. Bush prides himself on "making tough decisions."
>But many are sensing something seriously troubling, even psychologically
>unbalanced, about the president as a decision-maker. They are right.
>
>Because of a psychological dynamic swirling around deeply hidden
>feelings of inadequacy, the president has been driven to make increasingly
>incompetent and risky decisions. This dynamic makes the psychological stakes
>for him now unimaginably high. The words "success" and "failure"
have seized
>his rhetoric like metaphors for his psyche's survival.
>
>The president's swirling dynamic lies "hidden in plain sight"
in his
>personal history. From the time he was a boy until his religious awakening
>in his early 40s, Bush had every reason to feel he was a failure. His
>continued, almost obsessive, attempts through the years to emulate his
>father, obtain his approval, and escape from his influence are extensively
>recorded.
>
>His biography is peppered with remarks and behavior that allude to
>this inner struggle. In an exuberant moment during his second campaign for
>Texas governor, Bush told a reporter, "It's hard to believe, but ...
I don't
>have time to worry about being George Bush's son. Maybe it's a result
of
>being confident. I'm not sure how the psychoanalysts will analyze it, but
>I'm not worried about it. I'm really not. I'm a free guy."
>
>A psychoanalyst would note that he is revealing here that he has been
>worrying about being his father's son quite a lot.
>
>Resentment naturally contaminated Bush's efforts to prove himself to
>his father and receive his father's approval. The contradictory mix showed
>up in his compulsion to re-fight his father's war against Iraq, but this
>time winning the duel some thought his father failed to win with Saddam. He
>could at once emulate his father, show his contempt for him, and redeem him.
>But beneath this son-father struggle lies a far more significant issue for
>Bush - a question about his own competence, adequacy and autonomy as a human
>being.
>
>We have seen this inner question surface repeatedly, and we have
>largely conspired with him to deny it.
>
>On September 11, 2001, we saw (and suppressed) the image of him
>sitting stunned for seven minutes in a crowd of school children after
>learning that the second plane had hit the Twin Towers, and then the lack of
>image of him when he vanished from public view for the rest of the day.
>Instead, we bought the cover-up image, three days after the attack, of the
>strong leader, grabbing the bullhorn in New York City and issuing bellicose
>statements.
>
>In 2004, we saw and denied the insecurity displayed when the
>president refused to face the 9/11 Commission alone and needed Vice
>President Cheney to go with him.
>
>In 2003, we saw and suppressed the dark side of the "Mission
>Accomplished" aircraft carrier landing, in which a man who had ducked out
on
>his generation's war and dribbled away his service in the Texas Air National
>Guard dressed up like Top Gun and pretended that he was a combat pilot like
>his father.
>
>Asked by a reporter if he would accept responsibility for any
>mistakes, Bush answered, "I hope I don't want to sound like I've
made no
>mistakes. I'm confident I have. I just haven't - you just put me under
the
>spot here, and maybe I'm not quick - as quick on my feet as I should be
in
>coming up with one." What we heard, and yet didn't hear, was a confession
of
>his feelings of inadequacy and an arrogant denial those feelings all at
>once.
>
>In early 2006, when his father moved behind the scenes to replace
>Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the son responded, "I'm the
decider
>and I decide what's best" - and when he clenched his fist at a question
>about his father's influence, proclaiming, "I'm the Commander in
Chief" - we
>glimpsed what was going on.
>To cover up and defend himself against his feelings of his inadequacy
>and incompetence, Bush developed a number of psychological defenses. In his
>school years he played the clown. (His ability to joke about his verbal
>slip-ups is an endearing adult application of this defense to public life.)
>His heavy drinking was a classic way to anesthetize feelings of inadequacy.
>Indeed, drinking typically makes the alcoholic grandiose, which has led some
>commentators to argue that Bush has the "dry drunk" syndrome, where
the
>individual has stopped drinking but retains the brittle psychology of the
>alcoholic. Other defenses now play especially powerful roles to protect the
>president against his internal feelings of insufficiency.
>
>The Christian Defense
>
>Bush has carefully let it be known that he believes the decisions he
>makes in office are directed by God. His famous claim to make decisions by
>"gut" ("I'm a gut player," he told Bob Woodward) equates
with his claim of
>the spiritual inspiration he receives through prayer, his own and the
>prayers of others. Whatever else it is, this equation of his own choices
>with God's will has unparalleled advantages. It creates the perfect defense
>against any doubts he or anyone else might have that he can't make the right
>decision. The need to engage in analysis and explore alternatives to get
>there comes off the table. Instead, he has his gut; he has his God.
>
>Being "born again" also allows the president to present himself as
>having relegated to the past all those previously inadequate behaviors of
>his younger days: the poor academic performance, the drinking, the failed
>businesses. He's a new man, no longer incompetent but now supremely
>competent as a result of his faith.
>
>When Woodward asked Bush if he had consulted his father before
>invading Iraq, he replied, "He is the wrong father to appeal to in terms
of
>strength. There is a higher father that I appeal to." How wonderfully that
>appeal must seem to resolve the internal conflict about adequacy we have
>described above.
>
>The Bully Defense
>
>Bush's mother, Barbara (sarcastic, mean, disciplinarian, always with
>an acid-tongued retort), is probably the model for another major defense
>Bush deploys to defend himself against feelings of inadequacy. A friend at
>the time described her as "sort of the leader bully."
>
>That bullies are insecure people is well known and fairly obvious. A
>bully covers insecurity with bluster and intimidation so that others won't
>find an opening to see how weak he feels.
>
>Much of the world outside the US considers Bush a bully. "You're
>either with us or against us" is a bully's threat that anyone can recognize.
>The Bush doctrine of pre-emptive strikes is a bully's doctrine.
>
>For his intimates and those closer to home, Bush appears to be what is
>called an emotional bully. An emotional bully gains control using sarcasm,
>teasing, mocking, name calling, threatening, ignoring, lying, or angering
>the other and forcing him to back down. Bush administration insider accounts
>describe this sort of behavior from the president. He's well known for his
>dismissive remarks. His penchant for giving nicknames to everyone has its
>dark, bully's side. Naming people is a way to control them.
>
>In report by Gail Sheehy in 2000, recalled recently by New York Times
>columnist Maureen Dowd, we get a glimpse of how Bush's pervasive fear of
>failure (his absolute refusal to consider "failure as an option")
and his
>bully defense go together. Sheehy interviewed friends from his teenage years
>and college years. In basketball or tennis games he would insist points be
>played over because he wasn't ready; he would force opponents who had beaten
>him to continue playing until he beat them. At Yale he would interrupt his
>fellow students' studying for exams (helping them fail) to compete in a
>popular board game, "The Game of Global Domination," at which he was
the
>player noted for taking the most risks, being the most aggressive.
>
>It's likely that speculations about Vice President Cheney, Donald
>Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice functioning as Bush's puppet-masters are 180
>(or at least 160) degrees off. Bush is the president; he gets his way, and
>they know it. Chances are they have learned to channel his "gut" and
give
>him policy advice that matches it. They may even imagine they are steering
>him, not clear about the ways that he has bullied them, elicited in them
>"The Stockholm Syndrome," in which hostages come to identify with
and even
>defend the very person who is threatening them. This is the same dynamic
>evident in the behavior of battered spouses and members of gangs.
>
>Ron Suskind described the small group around the president: "A disdain
>for contemplation or deliberation, an embrace of decisiveness - a sometimes
>bullying impatience with doubters and even friendly questioners."
>
>Â Biographical reports tell us that Bush's parents taught him to keep
>his inner feelings to himself. As psychiatrist Justin A. Frank noted in Bush
>on the Couch,this results in a "self-protective indifference to the pain
of
>others." This is another aspect of his bully defense, projecting his inner
>pain onto others. Bush's remarkable drive for the power to torture terrorist
>suspects and his reported glorying in Texas executions during his terms as
>governor testify to his lack of compassion, despite his recent statement of
>qualms about seeing Saddam Hussein drop through the trap.
>
>The Man of Splits and Oppositions
>
>Being in the world, for all of us, involves the challenge to somehow
>integrate the opposites of our nature and to select our way through the many
>opposing choices presented us in life. The bully polarizes the natural
>ambivalence (the internal opposition) anyone feels about whether he is
>strong or weak, safe or vulnerable. A person who needs to feel invulnerable
>and completely adequate all the time, or who always feels helpless and
>inadequate, has polarized these emotions and leads a deformed life. The
>degree of internal polarization in President Bush appears to be serious -
>and widespread. Commentators have made lists of the president's polarities:
>the proclaimed uniter who is a relentless divider, the habit of "saying
one
>thing and doing another," as Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords put it. The list
>is long and growing. It should include the oppositions that show up in his
>famous Bushisms, such as:
>
>"There is no doubt in my mind that we should allow the world worst
>leaders to hold America hostage, to threaten our peace, to threaten our
>friends and allies with the world's worst weapons."
>
>"They [the terrorists] never stop thinking of ways to harm our
>country and our people - and neither do we."
>
>To a psychiatrist, these are not mere malapropisms and mistakes in
>speech. They suggest ambivalence oscillating violently between poles. They
>suggest a desperate uncertainty about everything that the president
>reflexively seeks to hide by taking absolutist, rigid positions about
>"victory," "success," "mission accomplished,"
"stay the course,"
>"compassion," "tax cuts," "no child left behind,"
and a host of other
>issues.
>
>The Presidential Defense
>
>Once Bush took the bullhorn at ground zero, he found perhaps the
>ultimate defense for his secret fears of inadequacy. As he told Bob
>Woodward, in Bush at War, "I'm the commander - see, I don't need
to
>explain - I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting
>thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why
>they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation."
As
>commander in chief, as a war president, he could assemble his other
>psychological defenses around him. He could split the world into good and
>evil and the country would follow. His internal oppositions could be
>projected without much resistance from the populace or his adversaries. He
>could be the gut-led, divinely inspired "Decider," to save the country.
He
>could project own internal fears of being "discovered as a fraud"
into a
>threat "out there" waiting to happen. He could surround himself with
>loyalists whom he could emotionally bully, creating a new family that would
>admire him and that he could control. Meanwhile the ambiguities of political
>decisions that can always be rationalized offer a safe haven. Until history
>judges me (and that's a long way off, maybe never) I can't be definitively
>seen as incompetent.
>
>But as much as the presidency is a perfect defense for disguising
>incompetence, it's also the perfect trap. It accelerates the positive
>feedback loop that was set in motion when he "changed his heart" around
age
>40 (committing himself to God) and presumably put his failures, and his
>feelings of failure behind him.
>
>In recent weeks, anyone following the news must have intuitively
>sensed from watching and hearing the president that he would reject the Iraq
>Study Group's report, co-authored by a person he must have felt was the
>emissary of his father come to tell him that he had failed again. He chose
>escalation, the one solution most knowledgeable people agree cannot succeed,
>in order to keep alive the fiction that success still lies in the future.
>
>The dynamic is becoming obvious to almost everybody.
>
>But how much is Bush aware of this psychological dynamic and of the
>secret he's keeping? Not aware enough. That's the problem. Psychotherapists
>use the term "unconscious," but it isn't quite an accurate descriptor.
We
>are aware of feelings, sensations and scripts that occur when one of our
>unseen psychic mechanisms is triggered. So, when an interviewer asked about
>the generals who demanded Rumsfeld be removed, and the president knew his
>father had been working behind the scenes to replace Rumsfeld, the question
>would not have triggered the conscious thought: there goes dad again trying
>to make me feel incompetent. Instead, the president may have felt a hollow
>sensation or a flush of anger, an urge to form a clownish grin to cover his
>watery feelings, and a script that would come out of his mouth as "I'm
the
>decider." Beneath that would be the inadequacy and cover-up dynamic outlined
>here.
>
>A president's psychology and his inner secrets are his or her own
>business, except in one important area. That is area covered by the
>question, "Does the psychology of this individual interfere with his or
her
>ability to make sound decisions in the best interest of the nation?" Recent
>history has certainly been witness to presidents with psychodynamics that
>have damaged their historical legacies. Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon come
>to mind. But in neither case was the very ability to make sound decisions
>compromised to the extent we believe it is with this president.
>
>A Failed Process
>
> Many accounts of the president suggest that his decision-making
>process is a failed one; in an important sense, it is no process at all.
>
>Ambivalent feelings are normal at certain stages of decision-making,
>and the ability to tolerate ambivalence has been shown to be the hallmark of
>creative thinkers. The inability to tolerate uncertainty because you think
>that may imply incapacity brings decision-making to an end.
>
>Thus, instead of focusing on the process needed to arrive at a
>decision, Bush marshals his defenses in order not to feel incompetent. That
>doesn't leave much room for exploring the alternatives required of competent
>decision-making. Not interested in discussion or detail (where the devil
>often lies), he seeks something minimal, just enough so he can let the
>decision come to him; it's his "gut" (read "God") that
will provide the
>answer. But these gut feelings are the very feelings associated with his
>deep sense of inadequacy and his defenses against those feelings. So while
>he brags that he makes the "tough decisions," psychologically, he's
>defending himself against the very feelings of uncertainty that are the
>necessary concomitant to making tough decisions. His tough decision-making
>is a sham.
>
>In the recent maneuvering toward the "new strategy" in Iraq, we have
>witnessed a great pretense of normal decision-making. But the president
>clearly made up his mind almost as soon as the "surge" alternative
appeared,
>and apparently moved to cow others, including his new secretary of defense
>Robert Gates (his father's man) in the process. "Success" is the
only
>alternative for him. "Failure" and disintegration of Iraq is unthinkable
>because it would be synonymous with his own internal disintegration.
>
>As his decisions go awry, he exudes a troubling, uncanny aura of
>certitude (though some find it reassuring). He seems to expect to feel
>despised and alone (and probably has always felt that), as he has always
>secretly expected to fail. That expectation of failure leads to sloppy,
>risky, incompetent decisions, which in turn compel him to swerve from his
>fears of incompetence.
>
>At this point, the president seems to have entered a place in his
>psyche where he is discounting all external criticism and unpopularity, and
>fixing stubbornly on his illusion of vindication, because he's still "The
>Decider," who can just keep deciding until he gets to success. It's
hard not
>to feel something heroic in this position - but it's a recipe for bad, if
>not catastrophic, decisions.
>
>Psychologically, President Bush has received support for so long
>because many have thought of him as "one of us." Most of us feel inadequate
>in some way, and watching him we can feel his inadequacies and sense his
>uncertainties, so we admire him for "pulling it off." His model tells
us,
>"If you act like you're confident and competent, then you are."
We are the
>culture that values the power of positive thinking and seeks assertiveness
>training. We believe that the right attitude can sometimes be more important
>than brains or hard work. He's bullied us, too. We don't dare to really
>confront the scale of his incompetent behavior, because then we would have
>to face what it means to have such an incompetent and psychologically
>disabled decision-maker as our president. It raises everyone's uncertainty.
>And that is, in fact, happening now.
>
>----------
>
>John P. Briggs, MD, is retired from over 40 years of private practice
>in psychotherapy in Westchester County, New York. He was on the faculty in
>psychiatry at the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City for
>23 years and was a long-time member of the American Academy of
>Psychoanalysis. He trained at the William Alanson White Institute in New
>York. J.P. Briggs II, PhD, is a Distinguished CSU professor at Western
>Connecticut State University and is the senior editor of the intellectual
>journal The Connecticut Review. He is author and co-author of books on
>creativity and chaos, including Fire in the Crucible(St. Martin's Press);
>Fractals, the Patterns of Chaos (Simon and Schuster); and Seven Life Lessons
>of Chaos (HarperCollins), among others. He is currently at work with
>Philadelphia psychologist John Amoroso on a book about the power of
>ambivalence in the creative process.
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3/7/2007 6:43 AM
