The Coterie

The Coterie Fireside, on November 20, 2011, had two headliners.  The Coterie live-tweeted that psychiatrist “Justy Frank will be serving up #fatherhunger at our Fireside this Sunday, and bartender Jared Boller exclaimed that he would be “triggering memories of childhood”. And so they did.  Despite Jared's admonition about behind-the-bar etiquette, "Don't talk politics,” I started out by saying that psychoanalysis is much like trying one of Jared’s new cocktails – you take a sip and try to figure out the ingredients. And that’s what happened.

I first explained that applied psychoanalysis is the discipline of using psychoanalytic principles to study people who – because they are public or historical figures – never come into my consulting room.  It was started by Freud and involves reading everything about a historical figure, relating their own writings to patterns from their childhood that get played out in public life.  The CIA employs psychiatrists and psychoanalysts to study foreign leaders in order to better understand their behavior and predict how they might respond to ours.  Studying President Obama was made easier by his having written two autobiographies – one about his coming of age and the second about his early experiences working in Washington as a US Senator. 

In normal development, young children try to make sense of their numerous experiences – internal ones (hunger, warmth, fear, frustration) and external ones (sights and sounds, comings and goings of parents and siblings) – by ordering their perceptions into the simple categories of good and bad, positive and negative.  This process is called “splitting” and helps keep good and bad feelings separate so they can be better understood.  A second kind of splitting is called projection, a process where bad feelings get attributed to the outside world while the good remains inside.  We see the roots of this process in stranger anxiety, fears the infant has of new people coming into his life.

Young Obama grew up in a world that was already split – he was biracial, having a white teen-age mother and a black father.  He was the product of two broken homes as well, broken by the time he was ten.  His Kenyan father left the family when Barry was a baby; his mother broke up the step family by bringing her son back to Hawaii from Jakarta where they lived with his step-rather Lolo.  These losses, and the absence of a father, led to what we call “father hunger”.  They also are the source of his deeply felt drive to heal, to bring disparate people together – so much so that as President, he ends up negotiating with himself before the opposition.  He suffers from what I called “bipartisan disorder.” 

There were numerous questions and a lively discussion that followed the presentation, and one of the first questions concerned Obama’s not commenting on the disturbing pepper spray incident at UC Davis when campus police sprayed a small group of students who were part of the occupy movement. 

I said that Obama learned early on not to confront people directly.  He had a deep fear of abandonment, as his mother also abandoned him for long stretches of time to pursue her anthropological studies.  He feared losing alliances more than anything else and therefore eschewed direct confrontation when at all possible.  He wrote about an incident that occurred when he was nine years old, reading a magazine article about a black people dying their skin white.  He was horrified and frightened but chose not to tell his mother about the article – preferring instead to bottle up his feelings and put a smile on his face.  We see the same behavior today. 

One more question stands out from that evening – several people wanted to know where were the passion and ideals they saw in 2008, and that people who knew him in Chicago said he’s really not passionate.  Was all that inauthentic? I said that Obama is passionate, but about what he said in 2004 – that he doesn’t see red and blue states, but the United States. His passion is not for change but for reconciliation. 

This led to someone saying that they voted for Obama just because he was bipartisan, so why is that a disorder?  I think it’s a disorder when he refuses to see that many Republicans don’t want to negotiate, but he persists in accommodating them.  I went so far as to say about Obama’s golf outing with Boehner that “You can’t reason with orange people.”

The evening was lively, and led to lots of discussion among participants – as well as enjoying creative cocktails and fine hors d’oeuvres.  There was lots of food for thought about the upcoming election season.