Psyche, Science, and Society

Insecurity, Bush decision-making processes, and the challenges facing us all

April 15th, 2007

In A Terrible Secret: The Psychology Behind George W. Bush’s Decision-Making, John P. Briggs and JP Briggs II, a psychoanalyst and a student of creative processes have analyzed President Bush’s decision-making processes in the light of his character.

When we feel inadequate about some aspect of our lives, we work to submerge those feelings with compensations and defenses. Evidence is that in the case of George W. Bush, deep feelings of inadequacy and powerful defensive behaviors employed to submerge them and cover them up cripple the decision-making process he needs for his duties as president.

The dynamics of the president’s cover-up involve a vicious psychological paradox: because he secretly anticipates the humiliating failure he has experienced all his life, he behaves in ways that ensure that he will fail. He makes hasty, risky, ill-informed decisions in which he relies on his defenses rather than judgment. When the decisions go bad, they reconfirm his inner feelings of incompetence and heighten his fear of being “found out.” The feedback loop forces him into an ever deeper “state of denial” about the decisions and an ever-renewed tendency to make more flawed decisions.

If this dynamic is close to correct, then keeping the secret of his feelings of inadequacy has become a matter of life and death for the president. The stakes for him are higher than we can imagine because, by becoming president, he raised his expectations for the success he has sought for so long (the final escape from this secret fear), and he has inflated his worst fear to its grandest scale. He is a man working with all his resources to keep his sense of himself afloat–and he is in danger of drowning.

By applying to George W. Bush’s well known history some basic principles of psychodynamics shared by different psychological and psychiatric schools, we can glimpse how incompetence came to be the central, driving issue for the 43rd President.

They have fascinating insights into many aspects of Bush, Jr.’s psychology, including his personal motivations for the Iraq war:

From early on, the son’s emulation contained its opposite–a resentment, a need not just to gain his father’s approval but a competing desire to rebel against him, beat him down, punish him—a resentment that came to the surface in the well known incident when, at age 26, drunk, he challenged his father to go “mano a mano right here.”

Over the years, the pattern continued. It showed up in his compulsion to re-fight his father’s war against Iraq, but this time to topple Saddam. Salon’s Laura Miller dramatizes the psychology of the situation when she imagines Bush thinking, “I don’t want to kill my father, he does, and to prove that I’m devoid of such bad impulses, I’ll take him out.” By re-fighting the war he could win a duel some thought his father failed to win with Saddam: so he could emulate his father, show his contempt for him, redeem him, and go “mano a mano” with him all at once….

The irony, of course, is that instead of proving himself better than his father, the son tragically failed and showed his father had been wise to avoid stepping into an Iraq quagmire.

One example, among the many that they give:

April 2004. A reporter asks the President GWB if he would accept any responsibility for either the intelligence failures before 9/11 or the flagging Iraq war. His response: “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.” ⁽²⁰⁾ Not wanting to sound like he’s made no mistakes, he reverses the double negative and actually says the opposite—he hopes that he does sound like he hasn’t made mistakes He also combines two clichés, being put “under the spotlight” and “on the spot.” Both give us the flavor of how he’s feeling inside.

In two sentences he presents himself as both a man who arrogantly thinks he doesn’t make mistakes, and a man who feels inadequate and “under the spot” because he’s not as quick as he should be about thinking of some. It’s a confession and a denial of what it confesses all at the same time. Bush is also betraying here the sophisticated defense of appearing to laugh at himself. People find charming his willingness to make selfdeprecating jokes about on his own verbal blunders and awkward moments. Here we can see, though, that there is both an aggressiveness and hopelessness in this defense.

And an example where they are provocative, but, perhaps, overreaching given the paucity of actual evidence on Bush’s inner processes. After all, cynically proposing policies that turned out to mean the exact opposite of their stated intent could be considered the Bush administration standard operating procedure. For a long while, they did it because it worked. The public was captured by the image and failed to pay attention to the contrary substance:

Some Bush scenes unfold over years. Early in his presidency, he pushes through his “No Child Left Behind” legislation. Cloaked in the language of helping students and schools improve, the program enacts a stringent testing regimen that soon forces teachers around the country to “teach for the test” and demotes the more subtle and individual aspects of education. Most educators believe the program is a disaster, particularly since the president’s budgets fail to fund it, forcing school systems to divert scarce resources into compliance. People appreciate the irony of a president who was a poor student himself insisting on testing standards that might have failed him outright had he been without his family connections and resources. But is it more than ironic? What does the apparent cynicism of his sabotaging the program by failing to fund it mean? Why is the punishing aspect of testing and “failure” so prominent in the language and thinking of the law? Is this program Bush’s attempt to help students learn where he failed to learn, or is he getting back at educators and education for his humiliating experience? Is he recreating for hundreds of thousands of students the despair he felt in front of the “tests” of his years as a student, being constantly forced “to measure up”? Consider the emotional overtones of the phrase “No Child Left Behind” as it might apply to the boy George Bush. Are enacting the program and then sabotaging the program gestures that express the sense of inadequacy and despair he felt as a student (so he identifies with these failing students and wants to lift them to success), his urge to become the tester who punishes others with standards as he must feel he was punished; or is it an attempt to disguise his own inadequacy with regard to education by showing, I’m not like them, I made it; even as an inferior student I was not a failure like they are? “Is our children learning,” the president famously asked.

On the other hand, the authors’ potential insight here is well worth pondering:

In the developmental stages recognized by psychologists, two normal periods of oppositional behavior stand out. The “terrible twos” and the teenage years. In the first, the child is learning to separate his own will by saying “no” to any parental request. In the second period of “adolescent rebellion,” the individual is moving to solidify a separate identity by “being different.” Some of George W. Bush’s responses (his 2007 “surge” plan for Iraq is the latest example, a response that is the diametric opposite of what his father’s colleagues advised) are a form of continued rebellion against his parents. Most people get through these oppositional stages and establish their own identity. If an individual is not at least relatively secure in his identity, however, such rebellious responses will continue.

Once you begin to notice the activity of opposites in George W. Bush, they seem to be everywhere.

Early in the president’s first term, Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords offered a list: the proclaimed uniter who was actually a divider; the compassionate conservative who favors “those who need help least and neglect[s] those who need help the most”; the president who proclaims his commitment to education, then refuses to fund it; the man committed to protecting the environment who abandons all protections of it. The list goes on.

Jeffords described the Bush oppositions with the phrase, “saying one thing, doing another.”

At the same time, the authors are clearly in danger of over-psychologizing:

In the Roman era and in the histories of English kings, wars fought because of filial psychology were common enough, but for an entire modern democratic nation to be driven to war on such psychodynamics is thought provoking, to say the least.

Thus, Bush undoubtedly had personal reasons for wanting the Iraq war, but that war had been the major policy goal of the neocons for many years, as witness the now-infamous Project for a New American Century. It is difficult for all of us to acknowledge the profound psychological forces that impel an individual, or a country, in a certain direction, while not denying the centrality of social tensions and forces. Thus, there really is a struggle for domination of the world’s economy. The United States, under many different leaders, has really committed itself to using its dominant military might to win that struggle. There really is a finite amount of oil in the world and Iraq happens to possess a not insignificant fraction of it. And the United States economy really is facing major challenges that, in the long run, threaten his dominance.

Bush, or any leader’s psychodynamics can contribute to pushing the country in a certain direction. But it is because that leader convinces others that the chosen direction will solve the country’s problems that the leader “succeeds.” Thus, a full analysis of the last six years requires an examination of G W Bush’s insecurities and self-delusions. But it also requires an examination of the self-delusions of the public as together we confront, or fail to confront, the challenges facing us.

There is much in this article. It is well worth reading in full. But we must also remember that great men, and great failures, do not, alone make history.

Entry Filed under: Bush administration, Culture, Iraq, Politics, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, War and Peace