Obama Builds on His Mojo
The President continues to discover that confronting aggression doesn't destroy his drive to be bipartisan — it strengthens it
By Justin Frank, M.D.
TIME
When President Obama took a stand last week and appointed Richard Cordray to chair the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in defiance of a Congress incapacitated by being in recess, he stirred up more than controversy — he also stirred up parts of his own internal world that had been dominated by an almost pathological need to do everything in a bipartisan way. This is the beginning of a fundamental shift in which he has begun to confront his long-standing fears of provoking the opposition.
After I suggested in my most recent column that Obama’s successful extension of the payroll tax cut right before Christmas showed he was beginning to set limits on unruly naysayers, readers wrote that I was making too much of a compromised extension that lasts only two months. But his bold appointment of Cordray shows that he is continuing to heal internal “splits” — a developmental process common to all of us that is important to our psychological growth, particularly involving how we face fear and handle aggression as adults.
To understand this we must return to early infancy when we all attempt to order chaos by splitting our internal worlds into good and bad. These splits initially help the infant organize his mind — to connect the frustration of hunger with an image of a bad mother, for example, and the satisfaction of feeding with an image of a loving mother — but they must heal for the child to mature. Ultimately he realizes that the good and bad caregivers are one and the same, and that the person he needs and loves is also the person he fears and hates. President Obama endured more than his share of splits necessary to survive childhood — most pointedly the biracial split and the two broken families he had to deal with. Both parents abandoned him at different times, making aggressive feelings toward them more intolerable since they threatened his internal need to see them as loving.
Read more: http://ideas.time.com/2012/01/11/obama-builds-on-his-mojo/
By Justin Frank, M.D.
TIME
When President Obama took a stand last week and appointed Richard Cordray to chair the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in defiance of a Congress incapacitated by being in recess, he stirred up more than controversy — he also stirred up parts of his own internal world that had been dominated by an almost pathological need to do everything in a bipartisan way. This is the beginning of a fundamental shift in which he has begun to confront his long-standing fears of provoking the opposition.
After I suggested in my most recent column that Obama’s successful extension of the payroll tax cut right before Christmas showed he was beginning to set limits on unruly naysayers, readers wrote that I was making too much of a compromised extension that lasts only two months. But his bold appointment of Cordray shows that he is continuing to heal internal “splits” — a developmental process common to all of us that is important to our psychological growth, particularly involving how we face fear and handle aggression as adults.
To understand this we must return to early infancy when we all attempt to order chaos by splitting our internal worlds into good and bad. These splits initially help the infant organize his mind — to connect the frustration of hunger with an image of a bad mother, for example, and the satisfaction of feeding with an image of a loving mother — but they must heal for the child to mature. Ultimately he realizes that the good and bad caregivers are one and the same, and that the person he needs and loves is also the person he fears and hates. President Obama endured more than his share of splits necessary to survive childhood — most pointedly the biracial split and the two broken families he had to deal with. Both parents abandoned him at different times, making aggressive feelings toward them more intolerable since they threatened his internal need to see them as loving.
Read more: http://ideas.time.com/2012/01/11/obama-builds-on-his-mojo/
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