I’m not a Michael Savage fan. The few times I’ve listened to his radio show, I found myself screaming at the radio, hoping he’d here me trying to educate him. My angry shaking precluded dialing the cell phone–it was all I could do to keep the car on the road.
Tonight I turned on my shower radio while flossing my teeth for the first time in a week to hear Savage stumble into interesting ground. (The pain will start in 30 minutes to the delight of the 80+ liberals who desecrated my obligatory “lipstick on a pig” post yesterday.)
Savage theorizes that Obama’s problem with women is deep-rooted in Freudian psychology.
What appears to have happened to Obama as a result is he developed symptoms of what psychologists refer to as an Oedipal Complex. In an Oedipal Complex, a male child is fixated on his mother and competes with his father for maternal attention. In such cases, a critical point of awakening occurs where the child realizes that the mother has affections for others besides himself. In this case, Obama had to compete with multiple paternal stand-ins and was never fully able to bond with his mother. The result seems to have been a resentment towards women that he has never been able to get beyond.
It seems far fetched at first (and alliterative). Except for one thing: when I watched CNN’s introduction to Barack Obama Sunday night, I had thoughts that paralleled Savages. (Please refrain from “great minds think alike” sophistries.) Two things stick with me about that program.
First, Obama mentioned several times that he never felt like he was part of a community. He felt like an outsider in grandparents' home, his mother’s homes, Indonesia, Kansas, New York, Boston–everywhere. He was alone.
Second, when speaking about his own feelings, he loses the stammer, stutter, and filler sounds so prevalent in his unscripted political speech. It’s a transformation. Introspection seems his domain–the outer world a mystery.
Savage goes on:
Furthermore, excessive separation within an Oedipal Complex leads to a sense of helplessness that can in turn lead to patterns of idealized control and self-sufficiency (which shines through in his often arrogant smile.)
Bingo, Michael. You might well have diagnosed him. And scared the begeezes out of every thinking person in the United States. In “Richard Nixon: A Psychobiography (Columbia University Press, 1997), Volkan, Itzkowitz, and Dod ascribe to Richard Nixon similar issues:
Persons with such mental developments split the images of themselves into a “good/idealized” unit technically a grandiose self and devalued hungry self. During daily life he tried to hold on to his grandiose side while attempting to hide his devalued side. The narcissist “splits” other as well, placing them in one of two categories: either idealized beings whose task it is to love and adore the grandiosity of the narcissistic individual and/or reflect the individual’s self sufficiency like a mirror; or devalued entities who can be reduced to nothingness. The latter, even though devalued, still inspire fear, for they are psychic reservoirs for the individual’s hungry self, which the individual tries to deny. This combination of devaluing and fearing leads to the kind of “enemy-making” prejudice and suspiciousness that we think infant Richard found difficult to manage at nine months of age, and this way of being gained ascendancy in his developing personality as he grew older.
While Nixon’s particulars differ from Obama’s (Nixon’s father was there, but violent and repressive), the Oedipal complex, if present in Nixon, seems equally present in Obama.
The idea of “idealized control” fits well with the reality of Obama that his media and handlers don’t want us to see: brutalizing conservative writers and talk show hosts, vilifying a national hero, consorting with terrorists, racists, and white-collar criminals like Rezko and Franklin Raines. The devalued Obama can’t help but compare Sarah Palin to a pig and John McCain to an old, rotting fish.
As pressure increases–the election draws closer, the polls turning strongly toward McCain–the idealized self has a harder time suppressing the devalued self. The boy who pleased his grandparents is displaced by the boy unworthy of his mother.
Responsible voters, even those who’ve “made up their minds,” owe themselves and their country a long, hard look at the Nixon book. See if you find parallels between Nixon and Obama. If you don’t, vote away. If you do, you better think twice.
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