Obama on the Couch by Justin A. Frank M.D

Author:Justin A. Frank, M.D.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2011-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

The Achiever

The tough mind is sharp and penetrating, breaking through the crust of legends and myths and sifting the true from the false. The tough-minded individual is astute and discerning. He has a strong austere quality that makes for firmness of purpose and solidness of commitment. Who doubts that this toughness is one of man’s greatest needs? Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.

—Martin Luther King, Strength to Love

Despite his various blind spots, Obama maintains a generally high level of mental health. In light of the challenges he has faced, his mental health can be considered among his finest and most significant accomplishments—the ultimate achievement, perhaps, of a very driven and successful achiever. We can see how certain elements of his mental health, sometimes developed in almost direct response to the challenges of his circumstances, can be linked directly to his success in other areas of his life, just as his success can be linked to the psychological functions that it sustains. Still, even his drive to achieve is not without its blind spots; indeed, his success and some of the attributes to which he owes it can be seen as holding back both his further psychological development and his presidency.

One of the limiting aspects of my profession is that there are far more definitions of mental illness—specific and agreed upon—than there are of mental health. One notable exception is the work of Dr. George Vaillant, who studied male psychological health by following the Harvard class of 1946 longitudinally —at five-year intervals from college age into their seventies—and concluded that its hallmarks are best measured by the levels of defenses used in times of crisis, such as humor, intellectualization, and self-reflection. Health is described not just as the absence of disorders but as the presence of key capacities, such as the ability to form long-term lasting relationships, work and be productive, love and be loved, and take care of oneself physically as well as emotionally. Vaillant believed that the healthier the defenses used in earlier life, the healthier the long-range lives were.

We’ve seen all of these traits in abundant supply in our young president. Most impressive to me as a psychoanalyst has been his capacity to bear psychic pain and to think in the face of anxiety. His intelligence functions as a regulator of his reactions, enabling him to think about things and modify his anxiety, using it as a source of information—recognizing it as a signal that there is something more he has to think about rather than something to run away from. We saw this in his response to the Fort Hood shootings in 2009, when he used his and the nation’s anxiety over the tragedy and threat of terrorism forces dividing it to fuel his call for unity, just one of countless examples from his life and presidency: “In an era of divisions [the fallen soldiers] call upon us to come together.

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