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."

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.

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