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But Who Voted for Him?
Richard Nixon: A Psychobiography, Vamik Volkan, Norman Itzkowitz, Andrew Dod. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997, 190 pp. $27.50 (cloth)

robert godwin
The Journal of Psychohistory V. 25, N. 4, Spring 1998

A central premise of this new psychobiography of Nixon is that "the politics of a nation is subject to the unconscious needs, fears and fantasies of its leaders." Fair enough. A second, less psychohistorically sound, premise is that "America did not understand what motivated this ambitious, yet ultimately self-destructive, man." But after thirty years in the national political arena, how could America not have known at least on some level just how disturbed, conflicted and emotionally impoverished this man was?

If modern "two person" psychoanalysis emphasizes one thing, it is that projection can no longer be conceptualized as a one-way street in which the patient projects onto the therapist (or baby into mother). But the theoretical model employed by these authors seems to be derived from just such an obsolete "one person" drive theory, where Nixon is likened to the patient acting out his transference in a vacuum, on the blank slate of history. If he was an effective public speaker, this was only a transformation of frustrated orality due to competition for his mother's breast. The fact that he stockpiled those oval office tapes meant that he must have unconsciously regarded them as "anal gems." And all those expletives on the tapes? That was just the elimination of all the bad feces he obsessionally kept inside for too long. Oh, and that split-off "butcher" father in him made him able to bomb innocent Cambodia back to the Stone Age, while the good father image made it difficult for him to even fire anyone face-to-face.

Reducing history to this extent reminds me of the tailor who visited the Vatican. Asked what the Pope was like, he replied, "Oh, about a 38 regular." Thus, when psychoanalysts of a certain ilk pay a visit to the Nixon White House, we should not be surprised that what they perceive is determined by their limited perspective: a mean-spirited father and an emotionally absent mother meant that a couple million Americans and Indochinese had to die in order to buck up Nixon's low self esteem.

In a previous article I likened the study of psychohistory to a sort of four-dimensional chess game, in which each of the four dimensions, or perspectives, must be employed to fully understand any historical event.1 These four dimensions are the 1) Group Exterior 2) Individual Exterior 3) Individual Interior, and 4) Group Interior.2 But the type of psychobiography employed by the authors of Nixon essentially consists of an analysis of the Individual Interior (Nixon's subjective, largely unconscious life) in relationship to the Group Exterior (large-scale events as viewed from the outside only, such as the Vietnam War, Watergate, or the rapprochement with China). The exercise is carried out as if Nixon were the "dreamer" of history (at least from 1969 to 1974), and the citizens of the U.S. (not to mention Indochina) little more than his "psychic furniture." It assumes a sort of unlimited ability on Nixon's part to act out his pathological drama on the world stage, much the same as the sleeping H.C.E. of Joyce's Finnegans Wake dreams all of human history in a single night.

The problem, however, is that this method can only succeed if we assume that no one but Nixon has a subjective, unconscious, "interior" life. And it certainly comes up short if we understand that the group too, just like the individual, is constantly subject to various irrational wishes and urges exerting their influenceÑurges that put a leader in power to begin with. For example, let us consider an event such as the Cuban Missile Crisis. Now most conventional historians approach this from the perspective of the Exterior Individual (Kennedy vs. Kruschev, President vs. Premier) or Exterior Group (U.S. vs. Soviet Union, Capitalism vs. Communism). A psychobiographer of Kennedy, working in the Volkan-Itzkowitz-Dod vein, might properly conclude that Kennedy was a deeply insecure phallic narcissist who was personally threatened by the presence of competing phallic missiles (despite their dubious military value) aimed at his backside. This is all well and good, and certainly a proper domain of psychohistory.

But what about Kruschev? What was his unconscious motivation, and just what kind of intersubjective field was created between him and Kennedy? And what was the group-fantasy context (the Group Interior) for the entire fiasco, not just in the U.S. but in the USSR? As you might well imagine, it is far easier to ignore these complications and to hone in on only one or two of the dimensions. But what then occurs is that the single dimension is taken to be the whole of reality, so that the richness and complexity of psychohistorical reality is lost in the effort to make it more digestible. The fact of the matter is that a single perspective cannot disclose the essence of reality, and that reality can only be grasped through an exhaustive overlay of differing, sometimes even contradictory, perspectives. History is more than an external biography of great men; it is also more than an interior psychobiography of great men. It is both of these things, and more.

Let's look at the recent candidacy of Pat Buchanan, a convenient example, since he happened to be one of Nixon's most loyal lieutenants during his presidency. Let's suppose Buchanan got himself elected in 1996 and succeeded in declaring war on Cuba, instituting the death penalty for drug dealers, outlawing abortion, closing the borders, criminalizing homosexuality, etc. Of course it would be a snap for any astute analyst to trace his aggressiveness to an abusive childhood at the hands of an obnoxious, tyrannical father. But wouldn't the mere fact of his presidency - even his prior celebrity - tell us something awfully important about the citizens with whom his message resonated, the very citizens who placed him in office? It may be a truism, but if cannibals could vote, they'd elect a cannibal king. So psychoanalyzing the displaced orality of the cannibal king would undoubtedly be a rather easy thing to do, but what on earth is happening in a society that openly embraces cannibalism in the first place?

The point here is that if you believe the psyche consists of drives, that is what you will find; if you believe it consists of Jungian archetypes, object relations, neural networks, or demons, that is what you will discover. Likewise, if you believe history consists of a battle between capital and labor, you will have no difficulty finding that. Nor will you have any trouble locating the movement of spirit across the face of history, the evolution of childrearing, or a blind and mechanical process leading nowhere. But the mere phenomenon of what we call history negates and transcends all of the academic boundaries that divide our attempts to comprehend it, so a thoroughgoing psychohistory must be psycho-bio-anthropo-socio-religio-politico-economic history (at least).

Dr. Godwin, a clinical psychologist and frequent contributor to this journal, may be reached at P.O. Box 8962, Calabasas, CA 91302.

1. R. Godwin, "The Interior of History: Whose Nightmare is it, Anyway," Journal of Psychohistory, Winter 1997, pp. 273-286.

2. Although he does not apply these directly to the study of psychohistory, the "four dimensions" model is from K. Wilber, "Sex, Ecology and Spirituality," Boston: Shambhala, 1995. Wilber makes a convincing case that one must employ this model in order to comprehensively understand any phenomenon, from the micro to macro, biosphere to psychosphere. .

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