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Trump on the Couch
[quote]About Trump on the Couch
“A great public service–critical for our time.”
–Bandy X. Lee, M.D., M.Div., Yale psychiatrist, expert on violence, and editor of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump

The New York Times-bestselling author of Bush on the Couch shows that Donald Trump is mentally and emotionally unfit to execute the duties of President.

No president in the history of the United States has inspired more alarm and confusion than Donald Trump. As questions and concerns about his decisions, behavior, and qualifications for office have multiplied, they point to one primary question: Does he pose a genuine threat to our country? The American Psychiatric Association’s Goldwater Rule constrains psychiatrists from offering diagnoses on public figures who are not patients and who have not endorsed such statements. But in Trump on the Couch Clinical Professor of Psychiatry Justin A Frank invokes the moral responsibility that compels him to speak out and present a full portrait of a man who presents us with a clear and present danger.

Using observations gained from a close study of Trump’s patterns of thought, action, and communication, Dr. Frank uncovers a personality riddled with mental health issues. His analysis is filled with important revelations about our nation’s leader, including disturbing insights into his childhood, his family, his business dealings, and his unusual relationship with alternative facts, including how

* The absence of a strong maternal force during childhood has led to Trump’s remarkable lack of empathy and disregard for women’s boundaries;
* His compulsion to polarize America has grown out of the way he perceives the world as full of deceitful and destructive persecutors;
* His inability to tolerate the pain of frustration has triggered his belief that omnipotence will finally remove it;
* His idiosyncratic use of language points to larger issues than even his tweets might suggest.

With our country itself at stake, Dr. Frank calls attention to the underlying narcissism, misogyny, deception, and racism that drive the President who endangers it. A penetrating examination of how we as a nation got here and, more important, where we are going, Trump on the Couch sounds a call to action that we cannot ignore.

I just keep thinking about a guy who was raised by a criminal father, never having to take any responsibility and knowing full well that any time he screwed up, daddy would bail him out. And “F” up, he did.

It's got to make you into a psychopath to constantly lie and screw up and never pay a price. I can't think of a shorter path to narcissism.

It's really sort of sad, isn't it? What could he have become had he had a more normal upbringing in which he was taught to take responsibility for his actions, whether good or bad, and to have real empathy and consideration for others, including those not of his immediate family. On some level, I can't help feeling sorry for him. According to the author, his upbringing led him to feel by default that everyone was out to get him. Consequently he seems incapable of considering the possibility of a win/win situation. It is not enough for him that he win--it is at least as important to him that his opponent must be humiliated and made to lose.

This is going to seem off topic, but really, it's not. It has something to do with the danger of Trump and in particular his decimation of the EPA. Believe it or not, Gunnar, in the last hour or so, I've been listening to lectures by our mutual friend. Here is one that is just over 6 minutes, a presentation, regarding the fact that our wastewater treatment plants are nearing the end of their life cycle and will need to be replaced.

I really don't know what the current status is of these projects that Craig is working on or what the stripping of EPA regulations has done or will do to these developments. According to what he states in this presentation, the apparent drop dead date for the end of the life cycle of these old plants is 2020.

It's now 2019.

This makes me so damn mad, I don't have words express it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJalbf6vZf8

Thanks for that, Jersey Girl, I have seen several videos of Craig Criddle's work, but not that one yet. This work with waste water reclamation and sewage treatment plants is one of the most admirable of the many admirable projects with which he is involved. Dismissing and ignoring valuable and essential work like this is positively insane! Trump and his old guard Republican supporters couldn't care less about this kind of thing because they know that they will be safely lain to rest in their graves before the worst consequences of ignoring humankind's failure to address the very real dangers of man caused climate change occur.

Gunnar wrote:It's really sort of sad, isn't it? What could he have become had he had a more normal upbringing in which he was taught to take responsibility for his actions, whether good or bad, and to have real empathy and consideration for others, including those not of his immediate family. On some level, I can't help feeling sorry for him. According to the author, his upbringing led him to feel by default that everyone was out to get him. Consequently he seems incapable of considering the possibility of a win/win situation. It is not enough for him that he win--it is at least as important to him that his opponent must be humiliated and made to lose.

I'm very interested in reading this book, Gunnar. I'm curious how the author knows this:

* The absence of a strong maternal force during childhood has led to Trump’s remarkable lack of empathy and disregard for women’s boundaries;

Since I know virtually nothing about Trump's childhood though I could speculate based on what I know to be true about healthy development and what Trump shows us via his public persona.

Empathy develops in early childhood. Adults encourage the development of empathy by identifying, acknowledging, and validating a child's feelings, helping them learn to express their feelings in prosocial ways, and demonstrating empathy through our own interactions with them and in our responses to them.

Children who have been the recipient of these interactions, learn to understand the feelings and perspectives of others, how our actions impact others and extend empathy to them.

In my estimation, I taught upwards of a thousand young children. Three observations come immediately to mind:

A child is feeling sad at school because no one wants to play with him. He curls up on an outside bench. Another child responds by sitting beside him and patting his back.

A child has fallen and skinned her knee. She is crying. Another child responds by fetching her special blanket from her cubbie. "She needs her blanket".

One day I slammed my own finger in a heavy metal door on the way to playground. Once I ensured that the children were with my aid on playground, I went back inside with two children who knew I was hurt and didn't want to leave me. It was the first time I ever openly cried in front of children except for shedding tears with a children who were grieving. One girl brought me a cold paper towel to put on my hand. Another girl brought me a tissue "For you tears, Miss Jersey". They did the same things for me that I had done for them. The one girl would have brought me a cold pack if only she could have reached the freezer in the kitchen and thought she could leave the room without an adult. :-) That happened nearly 30 years ago, I'll never forget it.

That's empathy in early childhood.

Narcissists are born of chronic emotional neglect and/or abuse. They have to separate from their inner selves in order to survive it. Yes, it's very sad.

Somewhere in his childhood, I'm guessing that Trump's feelings were ignored or he was embarrassed and humiliated for his feelings. Maybe someone told him to "be a big boy" or "be a man" when he was too small and vulnerable to manage it and when no one should have expected it of him.

If I had to throw a dart and aim at something, I would assume that Fred Trump was the authoritarian type of old school parent for which we probably have examples in our own childhood experiences. I don't know anything about his mother. I'd have to guess that she deferred to her husband and failed to comfort her own child.

Trump postures and attacks in order to avoid narcissistic injury. In the Mueller Report, I believe, around 10 people ignored his demands. In response he says that no one disobeys his orders. When he makes those claims in spite of documented evidence, he puts on his game face and deflects and denies, because the emotions that matter to him are feeling embarrassed, humiliated or shamed, because that's what really hurts him. I see him as a defensive little boy hiding out in what is otherwise an empty shell.

We can pity him and wonder what he might have been had he not been abused or neglected as a child. But at the same time he must be held accountable for his actions as a man even if we have to rely on others to hold him accountable on behalf of our nation.

Gunnar wrote:Thanks for that, Jersey Girl, I have seen several videos of Craig Criddle's work, but not that one yet. This work with waste water reclamation and sewage treatment plants is one of the most admirable of the many admirable projects with which he is involved. Dismissing and ignoring valuable and essential work like this is positively insane! Trump and his old guard Republican supporters couldn't care less about this kind of thing because they know that they will be safely lain to rest in their graves before the worst consequences of ignoring humankind's failure to address the very real dangers of man caused climate change occur.

I don't know what led me to even start watching them, Gunnar. I just did. It might have been some hop from researching a landfill in Jersey that is harming my relatives due to release of hydrogen sulfide. I don't honestly know how I ended up watching them. Craig is brilliant, Gunnar. He has solutions to critical problems. In one lecture he discusses that this type of smart treatment plant is already (in 2015?) underway in Singapore, I believe it was. I assume that means we are behind.

If I understand this correctly, our treatment plants are due for replacement NOW. How on earth are these kinds of innovations are going to be put into practice when Trump is destroying the EPA. How are we going to replace them in ANY way? This need is nationwide, Gunnar!

I guess I'll ask him what the current status of this work is.

You'll have to excuse my late night rambling, Gunnar. I'm processing a long day here. :-)

Jersey Girl wrote:I don't know what led me to even start watching them, Gunnar. I just did. It might have been some hop from researching a landfill in Jersey that is harming my relatives due to release of hydrogen sulfide. I don't honestly know how I ended up watching them. Craig is brilliant, Gunnar. He has solutions to critical problems. In one lecture he discusses that this type of smart treatment plant is already (in 2015?) underway in Singapore, I believe it was. I assume that means we are behind.

Yes! This is one of the greatest harms being done to our nation by Trump and his strongly anti-science and scientifically illiterate cronies. We are in great danger of losing our once vaunted scientific leadership and becoming a science and technology and economic backwater, especially in renewable energy technology and systems, because of their insanely ignorant attitudes towards basic scientific research and development (unless it is military weapons related).

Gunnar wrote:

Jersey Girl wrote:I don't know what led me to even start watching them, Gunnar. I just did. It might have been some hop from researching a landfill in Jersey that is harming my relatives due to release of hydrogen sulfide. I don't honestly know how I ended up watching them. Craig is brilliant, Gunnar. He has solutions to critical problems. In one lecture he discusses that this type of smart treatment plant is already (in 2015?) underway in Singapore, I believe it was. I assume that means we are behind.

Yes! This is one of the greatest harms being done to our nation by Trump and his strongly anti-science and scientifically illiterate cronies. We are in great danger of losing our once vaunted scientific leadership and becoming a science and technology and economic backwater, especially in renewable energy technology and systems, because of their insanely ignorant attitudes towards basic scientific research and development (unless it is military weapons related).

I know I've said something like this on this forum previously. If someone were to pitch it to him in just the right way, basically...listen man, you'd go down in history as the man who saved the planet and win the global heroes cape for leading the world in environmental innovation, renewable energy sources, clean water...I think he'd buy it.

But then he'd have to break away from the fossil fuel industry in order to win the cape so I'm not entirely certain that he'd buy into the pitch.

If I have it right, turning waste water into potable drinking water is part of Craig's project work. Just imagine that in drought ridden areas of the US. Just imagine that!

So who can we get to talk to Trump? ;-)