Behavior: Kicking Nixon Around the Couch

At last—the real truth about Watergate! Richard Nixon had this unconscious "need to fail," you see, which stemmed from guilt over his boyhood "sexual yearning for his mother." The forbidden Oedipal urge required punishment, and with a man as competitive as Nixon, failure was the worst possible penalty. So Nixon punished himself by "arranging his own failures" and became "his own executioner."

Or so concludes Manhattan Psychoanalyst David Abrahamsen in Nixon vs. Nixon: An Emotional Tragedy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $10.95), the latest entry in the burgeoning field known as "psychobiography.'' Psychobiographers seek to explain the lives of famous people by theorizing about their inner psyches. The best-known and most respected practitioner, Erik Erikson, subjected Luther and Gandhi to the treatment. Sigmund Freud once collaborated (with William Bullitt) on a job on Woodrow Wilson. By now psychobiography has become such a fad that last year an American Psychiatric Association task force recommended that psychiatrists avoid such projects unless the subjects are dead or give their permission.

In Search. But some personalities are evidently too tantalizing to be resisted. Abrahamsen's book follows others on the former President: M.I.T. Historian Bruce Mazlish's In Search of Nixon and Duke Political Scientist James David Barber's The Presidential Character. Abrahamsen, 73, who was born in Norway and immigrated to the U.S. in 1940, is an acknowledged expert on criminal behavior. He has also written two other psychobiographies, on a turn-of-the-century Viennese anti-Semite and on Lee Harvey Oswald. In preparing his Nixonalysis, Abrahamsen interviewed dozens of people, including several Nixon relatives (but no members of his immediate family), onetime Colleagues Robert Finch and Roy Cohn, Watergate Prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste, and Alger Hiss.

Abrahamsen, however, has never met Richard Nixon, much less put him on the couch. That has not deterred him from making some sweeping generalizations in diagnosing Nixon's alleged "emotional illness." For much of his life, Abrahamsen argues, Nixon has been "totally lacking in joy," "unable to form a healthy relationship with anyone" and "incapable of making a firm commitment based on personal conviction." (The latter is fortunate, Abrahamsen says; if the man had any strongly held ideals, he would have been much more dangerous.) Abrahamsen fairly raids the professional lexicon of disorder in describing Nixon: he is variously tagged as obsessive-compulsive, self-hating, hysterical, masochistic, doubting of his masculinity and even psychopathic.

Some episodes of Nixon's public career might support those descriptions, but Abrahamsen makes his mountains of childhood molehills. When Nixon was a boy, he would lie awake at night, listening to whistles of passing trains and fantasizing about faraway places. This wanderlust, which continued in adulthood, was an outlet for "frustrated sexual desires." Young Nixon was also adept at mashing potatoes without leaving any lumps; Abrahamsen writes that he "chose to release his energy" in this "unusual" way to win his mother's love. The "extent and intensity" of the mashing suggests "aggression" against the potatoes, "a substitute for people."