I found an unofficial Bush family biography site and asked what the
President's little sister Robin died of, and Webster Tarpley thinks it was
leukemia. http://www.kmf.org/williams/bushbook/bushb.html#Table
----- Original Message -----
From: Chris Walsh
To: ConstellationTalk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Sunday, September 26, 2004 1:43 PM
Subject: Re: [ConstellationTalk] Fw: Bush on the Couch
What a pity we don't have the opportunity to do a constellation for George W.
We could give his sister a place of respect and acknowledgement and help George
bow with respect to his parents and their fates. Then maybe the world would be
a safer place.
What a pity!
By the way Diane, do you know how his younger sister died?
hasta la vista
Chris Walsh
An Australian Constellation Website:
www.constellationflow.com
----- Original Message -----
From: DIANE YANKELEVITZ
To: ConstellationTalk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Monday, 27 September 2004 4:26 AM
Subject: [ConstellationTalk] Fw: Bush on the Couch
You guys will love this one: especially the part where his little sister
died when he was 7 (the age when boys usually turn from their mother and bond
with their father) and his parents were emotionally unavailable - a disturbance
in the force.
September 16, 2004
Bush on the Couch
By Justin Frank
Dr. Frank is the author of Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the
President (2004). He is a Washington, D.C.–based psychoanalyst and professor of
psychiatry at George Washington University Medical School.
If one of my patients frequently said one thing and did another, I would
want to know why. If I found that he often used words that hid their true
meaning, and affected a persona that obscured the nature of his actions, I
would grow more concerned. If he presented an inflexible worldview
characterized by an oversimplified distinction between right and wrong, good
and evil, allies and enemies, I would question his ability to grasp reality.
And if his actions revealed an unacknowledged – even sadistic – indifference to
human suffering, wrapped in pious claims of compassion, I would worry about the
safety of the people whose lives he touched.
For the last three years, I have observed with increasing alarm the
inconsistencies and denials of such an individual. But he is not one of my
patients. He is our President. He wants to remain our President for four more
years, and he intends to do so on his own terms. On August 27, the eve of the
Republican Convention, Bush said to New York Times reporters Sanger and
Bumiller that “he would resist going ‘on the couch’ to rethink decisions.”
Since the Swift Boat controversy hit center stage in mid-August – both the
ads and Bush’s refusal to take responsibility for them – we again see his
reluctance to examine his conscience. Instead he remains mired in his
long-standing pattern of denial and blame. Responsibility is something this
president flees at all costs. It is a behavior pattern that began long before
Bush became president, governor, or even a college student. It even began
before Bush had become an alcoholic (he finally stopped drinking at age forty,
with the help of his religion), though his response to criticism is typical of
untreated alcoholics.
Bush was the first born child to a family that had long and moneyed
traditions on both sides. When he was three and a half his sister Robin was
born. It has been said that the nursery rhyme “Humpty Dumpty” was written with
the first-born child in mind. It seems to capture perfectly the irrevocable
trauma felt with the second child is born: Nothing can put the first-born back
together again. Of course, first-born offspring find different ways to manage
this insult. Some can be suspicious and overly competitive; others can be
overtly nice while covertly furious; still others always keep an eye on the
second child, making sure he doesn’t get too much. First-born children keep
careful track of how much food mother gives to their siblings.
But if the second-born dies, as Robin did when George was seven, then an
entirely new and complex dynamic is set in motion. The first-born often has to
disown his destructive fantasies and banish them into his unconscious. But such
fantasies threaten his mental equilibrium and he has to do something with them.
One solution is to project them outward, thereby experiencing people around him
as destructive or a source of danger.
By the time Robin died Bush already had a mother who was emotionally
elsewhere. Children resent it when the mother is absent, and Bush’s resentment
would have grown stronger in the face of his mother’s grief after Robin’s
death. If George’s feelings were never addressed – and it is clear from
numerous family accounts that the parents didn’t have a funeral and never
talked to George about the loss – his natural animosity toward his sister would
have remained unresolved; he would have been left with a host of forbidden
feelings that were too threatening to acknowledge, only furthering the process
of having to disavow these unwanted aspects of himself. He was deprived of the
opportunity to learn to mourn, to heal. In that deprivation lays the kernel of
what has by now become Bush’s knee-jerk reaction of denying responsibility for
anything that goes wrong. He can’t allow it to be his fault.
It is true that blame and denial are arguably as typical of politicians as
of alcoholics, though the latter are generally more likely to involve family
members in the process. But blame is also a reminder of one’s destructive
impulse; the individual who hasn’t resolved his anxieties surrounding that
impulse is particularly motivated to avoid confronting those anxieties, which
he can accomplish by shifting responsibility to someone else, or denying it
outright. Drinkers turn to alcohol to suppress anxiety.
The untreated alcoholic who has simply stopped drinking treats anxiety as
an enemy, and with good reason: He is often more challenged by anxiety because
he has lost his time-tested means of numbing its sting. He knows that anxiety
is a threat to his abstinence – he fears anything that might lead him back to
the bottle – but his years of drinking get in the way of learning other methods
to manage uncomfortable feelings. Bush manages his anxiety through his
inflexible daily routines – the famously short meetings, sacrosanct exercise
schedule, daily Bible readings, and limited office hours. All public
appearances are controlled and staged – even the ones that appear to be
spontaneous. They have to be.
But when routines fail, denial kicks in as the treatment of choice to
manage the potential development of internal chaos. The habit of placing blame
and denying responsibility is so prevalent in George W. Bush’s personal history
that it is apparently triggered by even the mildest threat; when Jay Leno, on
the eve of Bush’s DUI revelation (just a week before the 2000 election), asked
him if he’d ever done anything he was ashamed of, he replied, “I didn’t” – and
proceeded to tell a humiliating story of his brother Marvin urinating in the
family steam iron. Fast forward to the Swift Boat ads, taking a brief stop at
his denial that he knew Ken Lay (“Kenny who?”) of Enron who was in fact a
friend and major contributor to his campaigns; then to his blaming 9-11 for the
failing economy when the market actually began to crash after he announced his
tax cut plans; then to his inability to admit to any mistake he made after 9-11
(in the April 2004 press conference he couldn’t bring himself to accept even a
modicum of responsibility for either the intelligence failures before 9-11 or
for the war in Iraq), to his denial in May of knowing Iraqi information source
Chalabi despite having invited him to sit just behind the First Lady at his
2004 State of the Union Address. Putting it all together, we see a pattern that
I call the KWD – the Kenny Who Defense. He employs it whenever and wherever he
can, whenever he feels threatened.
All his disavowed destructiveness coalesces and requires management
whenever anybody challenges him. He becomes instantly wary: Questions mobilize
his anxiety and invite that exaggerated degree of rigidity he uses for
self-protection. It is not a matter of intelligence per se, but a matter of
paralysis when confronted with any question that requires thinking. When there
is nobody in particular to blame he stumbles anyway, as he did at the Unity
Conference on August 6 when asked to discuss the sovereignty of the Native
American tribes. Mark Trahant, of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, noted that
children study city, county, state and federal government but that Indian
government is not part of that structure. In noting Bush’s unique experience as
governor and president, he asked about Bush’s understanding of sovereignty and
how to think about tribal conflicts in the twenty-first century. Bush
hesitated, and then said, “Sovereignty means [pause] that you’re a sovereign –
that you’ve been given sovereignty and can be viewed as a sovereign entity.
Therefore the relationship between Government and tribes is one between
sovereign entities.”
His relationship to his father makes all the more sense in light of the
anxieties I have described. First, his father cast a giant shadow: he was a
good student, a fine athlete, a war hero, a successful businessman. One grows
up in awe of such a father – and given this particular son’s need already to
disown his own feelings of destructiveness, he imbues his father – partly by
projecting his own aggression onto the father – as a man of enormous power,
making him more of a threat. And young George W. had few of his father’s
qualities with which to defend himself. Being a cheerleader and a big
fraternity drinker are just not the same thing. This situation can make a son
feel rage, frustration, and shame.
One way Bush managed his feelings was through his humor, his sarcasm (not
unlike his mother), and his need to be in charge of any undertaking. At times,
being in charge meant mocking his father’s power (being stick-ball commissioner
while his father had been an All-American first baseman is a good example). One
particular power that George Sr. did not express, however, was the important
paternal responsibility to help a son separate from his mother. I doubt the
success of that endeavor with George Jr., as his father was absent for most of
Bush’s childhood. And when he was present, George Sr. was absently reading or
distant.
This particular son is driven by the need to retaliate – against his father
and against a world full of enemies. He does so in a variety of ways – though
the underlying motives are the same. He tells Bob Woodward that he needn’t
consult his father before invading Iraq because he consults a stronger higher
father; he regularly introduces Vice President Cheney as the greatest vice
president in history, without mentioning that his father was VP for eight
years; he dismantles international coalitions once valued by his father; he
practices what his father called “voodoo economics” by implementing massive tax
cuts for the rich, maintaining that deficit spending will revive the economy;
and at the Republican Convention in New York, he doesn’t make a place for his
own father – an actual ex-president – to speak. Each event taken on its face
value is but an incident. When they are linked together they reveal a distinct
pattern.
His drive to manage anxiety is paramount. That requires him to shift
responsibility whenever possible. He can consciously deny blaming his father
for having failed him in his time of greatest need as a child – in helping him
both stand up to his mother and to let go of his need to be her cheerleader
rescuing her from her unspoken grief. But unconsciously, the blame persists –
crippling his ability to think. He remains a cheerleader, not a leader. The
inability to take responsibility makes Bush genuinely unable to lead: he can
bully others and seem to act decisively, but he retreats from threatened
confrontation (he says “bring em on” only when embedded behind the Secret
Service thousands of miles away from the battle). His need to remain in control
makes him unable to think things through in order to lead from strength. His is
a stage-managed strength, something we saw all too clearly during the week of
the Republican Convention.
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