ACADEMY FORUM - The American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic ...

minimal actual time your father spent with you, and the separations,
abandonments, neglect, and loss you experienced as a
result of his behavior.
Sally Jacob’s carefully documented book, The Other Barack:
The Bold and Reckless,” helpfully provides further information
about your father… Barak Obama, Sr.
Question #1 - How do you understand your identification
with your father and the implications this has for the stability
of your narcissism and self-confidence What are the implications
of this question for your leadership and ability to govern
We all have internal representation of our parents’ personalities,
their authority, and their love of us… or lack of it. For better
or worse, we embrace or rebel against our inner parents. Denial
of our parents’ influence, or, blind idealizing or devaluing of
them, has profoundly negative consequences for our emotional
life and the trajectory of our maturation. You sometimes scold
congress like a testy parent.
Mr. Obama, your book Dreams From My Father, has a lyrical,
searching style. Your writing is bold and courageous in its
self-disclosure and creative curiosity. You and your Kenyan
relatives frequently call your father “The Old Man.” The candor
and eloquence of your memoir seems to reflect an intertwining
of your genuine search for your father, and simultaneously for
your true self. Your poignant words about the “island of your
grandfather Onyango’s shame,” and Barak Obama, Sr.’s quest
for power and recognition, leap from the pages of your memoir
when you say:
“He (Barak Sr.) had almost succeeded, in a way his own
father (Onyango) could never have hoped for. And then,
after seeming to travel so far, to discover that he had not
escaped at all! To discover that he remained trapped on
his father’s island, with its fissures of anger and doubt and
defeat, the emotions still visible beneath the surface, hot
and molten and alive, like a wicked, yawning mouth, and
his mother gone, gone, away…” (pp 428-429).
Your vivid “yawning mouth” metaphor resounds with implications
of what we psychoanalysts understand about the concepts
of psychological introjection and incorporation… and the notion
of oral aggression.
Mr. Obama, your island metaphor seems to accurately fit Onyango,
Barak Sr., and yourself… and all three of your maternal/
parental introjects. (Many islands here…Hawaii… a huge one,
Kenya a metaphorical one, and the haunting inner “island of
silence” that best be overcome… because as you aptly imply…
no Obama man ultimately is an island.) After describing your
inner thoughts and emotions you seek further closure with these
powerful words:
“For a long time I sat between the two graves and wept.
When my tears were spent, I felt a calmness wash over me.
I felt the circle finally close. I realized that who I was, what
I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or
obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw that my
life in America - the black life, the white life, the sense of
abandonment I’d felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I’d
witnessed in Chicago - all of it was connected with this
small plot of earth an ocean away, connected by more than
the accident of a name or the color of my skin. The pain I
felt was my father’s pain. My questions were my brothers’
questions. Their struggle, my birthright.” (pp. 429-430).
This scene you describe is intense and poignant. The narrative
that emerges from your remarkable dialogue with your relatives
and your own intensely personal peregrinations, reminds me of
the narrative that emerges during my work as a psychotherapist
with highly intelligent and well-motivated patients. A key difference
between your search for your father-yourself via your
process of memoir writing and a depth psychotherapy experience,
however, is the absence of a therapist. A therapist would
confront you with your psychological blind-spots and support
you in applying and extending your insights about your father/
yourself. Such consolidating psychotherapeutic help would reduce
the propensity for grandiosity or excessive chameleon-like
trends in your personality.
Your father was clearly a highly intelligent man but had a
difficult and conflicted relationship with his own father, your
grandfather, Hussein Onyango. Your Granny told you:
“Even from the time he (Onyango) was a boy, your grandfather
was strange. It is said of him that he had ants up
his anus, because he could not sit still”. Granny goes on,
“He was very serious always—he never laughed or played
games with the other children, and never made jokes.”
(“Dreams From My Father” p 379).
You Mr. Obama, like your vice president, seem to have a
lively, aggressive sense of humor. You enjoy jokes, playing golf,
and being playful with your children. This indicates strength and
a transcendence of your father’s trait. In addition, Onyango, like
you and your father Barak Sr., seems to have a keen sense of
curiosity and eagerness to learn… even from “the white man.”
Question #2 - In your moving memoir you are candid about
the white vs. black struggle within yourself. You seem to entwine
this issue with your search for your roots of identity in
Kenya. You also show great empathy for blacks and minorities
who have been abused by white slave traders, white colonialists,
and white oppressors…even some within the American
political system.
However, are you able to accurately perceive, collaborate
with, and compromise with older, white, but not racist, Republican
politicians With colleagues who challenge and vigorously
oppose your policies and philosophy I think such white men
stir “transferences” within your mind. Your unresolved transferences
likely create unconscious re-enactments of your father and
grandfather/yourself, which in turn can result in blind spots.
When unconscious identifications, introjections and transferences
gain ascendancy in situations of strong emotion, then
destructive acting-out or rigidity is possible. Or inaction! During
crucial political decision-making and compromise, the greatest
freedom from unconscious conflict is the ideal. However, it is
easier said than done… as you well know. You seem to have
a healthy rapport with Joe Biden (positive transference) who
even shares your father’s trait of verbal aggressiveness, although
sometimes I find Biden to be inappropriate. It obviously could
be more difficult with white Republicans such as Graham,
O’Connell, Kyle, Ryan, Cantor or McCain. You often seem
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