"The Psychology Behind George W. Bush's Decision-Making"

By John P. Briggs, M.D. and JP Briggs II, Ph.D. / posted on Scoop

When we feel inadequate about some aspect of our lives, we work to submerge those feelings with compensations and defenses. Evidence is that in the case of George W. Bush, deep feelings of inadequacy and powerful defensive behaviors employed to submerge them and cover them up cripple the decision-making process he needs for his duties as president.

The dynamics of the president's cover-up involve a vicious psychological paradox: because he secretly anticipates the humiliating failure he has experienced all his life, he behaves in ways that ensure that he will fail. He makes hasty, risky, ill-informed decisions in which he relies on his defenses rather than judgment. When the decisions go bad, they reconfirm his inner feelings of incompetence and heighten his fear of being "found out." The feedback loop forces him into an ever deeper "state of denial" about the decisions and an ever-renewed tendency to make more flawed decisions.

If this dynamic is close to correct, then keeping the secret of his feelings of inadequacy has become a matter of life and death for the president. The stakes for him are higher than we can imagine because, by becoming president, he raised his expectations for the success he has sought for so long (the final escape from this secret fear), and he has inflated his worst fear to its grandest scale. He is a man working with all his resources to keep his sense of himself afloat--and he is in danger of drowning... (big snip)

Here, however, we offer no diagnosis, and these are the reasons. Persons sometimes feel reassured by a diagnosis because it lets them feel they have a condition that can be dealt with. When mental health professionals try to diagnose celebrities, however, the effort can seem like name calling. In practice, diagnoses help the professional formulate a treatment plan. In this case, of course, no treatment is plausible. We believe that to a large extent, a president's psychology and his inner secrets are his or her own business, except in one important area. That is area covered by the question, "Does the psychology of this individual interfere with his or her ability to make sound decisions in the best interest of the nation?" Recent history has certainly been witness to presidents with psychologies that have damaged their historical legacies. Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon come to mind. But in neither case was the very ability to make sound decisions compromised to the extent we believe it is with this president.

From many accounts one can conclude that Bush's decision-making process is a failed process; in an important sense, it is no process at all...

How does his incompetence arise? It arises out of decisions made with sketchy information. It arises out of decisions made in angry rebellion because he is trying to show decisiveness to mask his ambivalence. His incompetence comes from feeling so much anxiety about his ability to grasp the alternatives on which a decision must be based that he doesn't even consider alternatives. His incompetence comes from polarized behavior. (Though he worried that the country might face another terrorist attack, he first resisted the creation of Homeland Security and then under funded it and staffed it with political hacks; so when Katrina and Rita hit, the nation was unprepared.) His incompetence comes from the intellectual laziness and slackness that developed because he always had a safety net that protected him from the consequences of any seriously inadequate behavior and decisions. His incompetence comes from the willingness of his "gut" to favor the drama of the most reckless and grandiose options in order to beat back feelings of failure...