Kicking Nixon Around the Couch

(2 of 2)

Nixon screamed a lot in his first year of life, and his "oral fixation" later produced enthusiasm for debating and a compulsion to talk on dates. The President-to-be suffered an "anal fixation" too. The evidence cited for this—e.g., his scatological remarks—would doom every G.I. and fraternity man. With both fixations at work, Abrahamsen solemnly concludes, "there could be tittle or no emotional growth."

For a Freudian the early years are all-important, and the pivotal personality in Nixon vs. Nixon is his mother. Hannah, whom the President described as a saint in his tearful televised farewell to the White House. As is well known, she had to leave her family to nurse her dying son Harold in Arizona, and spent long hours tending the family's California grocery store. It is fair enough to speculate about how hard that might have been on Richard.

But Abrahamsen leaps from the known facts to argue that Hannah's home was "joyless," that she perhaps cared for Richard "as much out of duty as out of real love," was "repressed," "anger-filled" and "castrating." Abrahamsen offers scant evidence for these judgments, relying heavily upon a single, pathetic letter from Richard as a lonely ten-year-old. The ex-President's cousin. Novelist Jessamyn West, says she tried to talk Abrahamsen out of his opinion of Hannah, and his depiction of the father, Frank Nixon, as "brutal."

Nixon vs. Nixon has won praise, particularly from those involved in similar work. It is "a good, sound portrait," says Lloyd deMause, editor of the four-year-old Journal of Psychohistory. Duke's Barber thinks that Abrahamsen has shown "how far psychoanalytic interpretations can help in understanding" Nixon.

Abrahamsen himself has no qualms about treating a living subject without permission. Says he: "It would be more irresponsible if we didn't make people aware of who Nixon was and what he is." Abrahamsen wrote the book to warn Americans about politicians' psychology and also in fear that Nixon will return to public life. Given Abrahamsen's thinly supported theories, however, even confirmed Nixon-haters might be tempted to think that the poor man deserves a better job of analysis.