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Trump on the Couch

Inside the Mind of the President

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
"A great public service—critical for our time."
—Bandy X. Lee, M.D., M.Div., Yale psychiatrist, expert on violence, and editor of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump
The New York Times-bestselling author of Bush on the Couch shows that Donald Trump is mentally and emotionally unfit to execute the duties of President.
No president in the history of the United States has inspired more alarm and confusion than Donald Trump. As questions and concerns about his decisions, behavior, and qualifications for office have multiplied, they point to one primary question: Does he pose a genuine threat to our country? The American Psychiatric Association's Goldwater Rule constrains psychiatrists from offering diagnoses on public figures who are not patients and who have not endorsed such statements. But in Trump on the Couch Clinical Professor of Psychiatry Justin A Frank invokes the moral responsibility that compels him to speak out and present a full portrait of a man who presents us with a clear and present danger.
Using observations gained from a close study of Trump's patterns of thought, action, and communication, Dr. Frank uncovers a personality riddled with mental health issues. His analysis is filled with important revelations about our nation's leader, including disturbing insights into his childhood, his family, his business dealings, and his unusual relationship with alternative facts, including how
  • The absence of a strong maternal force during childhood has led to Trump's remarkable lack of empathy and disregard for women's boundaries;
  • His compulsion to polarize America has grown out of the way he perceives the world as full of deceitful and destructive persecutors;
  • His inability to tolerate the pain of frustration has triggered his belief that omnipotence will finally remove it;
  • His idiosyncratic use of language points to larger issues than even his tweets might suggest.

  • With our country itself at stake, Dr. Frank calls attention to the underlying narcissism, misogyny, deception, and racism that drive the President who endangers it. A penetrating examination of how we as a nation got here and, more important, where we are going, Trump on the Couch sounds a call to action that we cannot ignore.
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      • Kirkus

        Narcissism, racism, sexism, and destructiveness are among Donald Trump's numerous pathologies.Drawing on Trump's tweets, interviews, speeches, The Art of the Deal, and many books and articles expounding on the president's personality, Frank (Psychiatry/George Washington Univ. Medical Center; Obama on the Couch, 2011, etc.) concludes that Trump "is a menace to himself and his people," completely unfit for office. The author has never met Trump, so he relies on "applied psychoanalysis," a method, he speculates (without evidence), that has been used by Russian intelligence, revealing to them "a person who was uniquely positioned to be co-opted...by an authoritarian Putin regime." A Klein-ian psychoanalyst, Frank blames Trump's many psychological problems on his distant and unloving mother and his demanding father, who told Trump "that he must grow up to be a killer and a king." Both despaired at controlling their hyperactive son, whom teachers described as "headstrong" and "surly." A bully even at the age of 5, he threw rocks at a neighboring toddler in his playpen. Sent to the New York Military Academy after seventh grade, Trump felt banished. Frank asserts that because he was "deprived of paternal empathy as a child, Trump still yearns for a father," which accounts for his attraction to men such as Steve Bannon and political dictators. His mother's lack of love and attention generated feelings of humiliation and betrayal, which the author thinks are shared by his base, who feel betrayed by Washington politicians, "as they may have originally felt disappointed by their own parents years earlier. Trump instinctively recognizes their narcissistic wounds" and encourages them "to vent their rage." As protection from the outside world, which threatens his fragile self-esteem, Trump has constructed "an internal psychological wall" within which he hones fantasies of power and paranoia. Examining Trump's language, Frank diagnoses "a subtype of dyslexia" that leads to his difficulty understanding complexity and "simply reacting while avoiding the work of thinking."A highly damning portrayal unlikely to surprise any non-Trumpist reader.

        COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. (Online Review)

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    • English

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