By Prudence L. Gourguechon on 12/2/2008 7:31 PM
I'm continuing on the theme of how come, if we're obsolete etc, sparks of psychoanalytic thinking crop up regularly in the most unexpected places?
Here's the background.
Item one, for those of you who don't know, Keith Olberman is a former football player, former sportscaster turned political opinion/news show host with a nightly hour on MSNBC. He is an unabashed liberal.
Item two, George Bush is giving a series of "exit interviews" with prominent members of the press. Today the pundits, like Keith O., were discussing Charlie Gibson's interview with Bush.
Item three, Gibson asks Bush about the economic problems we are facing, and Bush replies essentially that it's not his fault, that bad decisions were made on Wall Street at least 10 years before he arrived in office.
I'm not going to discuss the merits of his argument. What amazed me was Olberman's approach to the content. He had as his conversatonal foil esteemed Newsweek journalist Howard Fineman. He tagged the segment "Denial".
Olberman says to Fineman, "the math suggests over a decade. 1990, 1991, even 1989. Did George W Bush mean his father [was at fault]? Are we getting into Freudian territory?"
Fineman responds, "We don't have to get into Freudian territory. He was trying to blame Clinton [too]." Then Fineman gets going, with increasing (though controlled) passion: "[Bush is] fiercely opposed to introspection. A lack of reflection. It's a family tradition. It served him well only once [and otherwise was a great liability]. "
So, in short order, we have, on Olberman's the former sportscaster's part, a declaration of "denial" and a speedy jump to an oedipal interpretation when trying to explain it. Fineman is not so sure about the oedipal interpretation, despite the evidence of the "math", but launches immediately into a description of the President's lack of introspection, and the perils of such a stance.
A satisfying day for psychoanalysis in my book. Two intelligent and passionate people--on TV!-- comfortably using psychoanalytic concepts to attempt to explain an important phenomenon that troubled them. I think our theory is widely usable. |