RR Phantom
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 |  Subject: Damaged goods: Political sons who stand in for fathers  Fri Aug 24, 2012 10:37 pm | |
| AMERICANS have heard a lot about the death of Paul Ryan's father: he had a heart attack when the future Republican vice-presidential candidate was only 16. Biographical sketches cite the event as a formative early trauma that helped turn Ryan into a ''man in a hurry''.
The strange thing is that Ryan is hardly alone - American politics is overflowing with stories of absent fathers, alcoholic fathers, neglectful fathers and untimely deceased ones.
The list is surprisingly long. Take Ronald Reagan, who was haunted by a moment when he discovered his alcoholic father on the front porch ''drunk, dead to the world'', his hair filled with snow. The 11-year-old Reagan had to drag him indoors.
Or Bill Clinton, whose biological father drowned in a car crash, and who remembered standing up to his alcoholic stepfather and demanding that he never beat Clinton's mother again.
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Gerald Ford's father, an alcoholic, was found guilty of extreme cruelty to his family, and refused to pay child support when Ford's mother left him.
George Bush jnr's relationship with his father was less lurid, but infamously resentful. He spent his life, including his presidency, careening between attempts to live up to his father's impossible expectations and efforts to garishly repudiate them.
And it hardly bears recounting that Barack Obama built his political persona around a search for his absent dad.
This isn't just cherry-picking. It's a representative window into the emotional make-up of America's political class. There are few academic studies on political daddy issues, but the ones that exist suggest an outsized percentage of prominent politicians have absent or dysfunctional fathers.
The most methodologically credible of these is a British study called The Fiery Chariot: A study of British prime ministers and the search for love, which found that about half of all British prime ministers had suffered bereavement. That was much higher than the estimated rate for the population as a whole.
What could be going on here? Is there some reason so many people with father issues make it to the upper reaches of public office?
One possibility is that children who are immersed in traumatic personal environments early in life become hypersensitive to the feelings of those around them and develop coping mechanisms that also make them better politicians.
The best biography of Reagan notes that children of alcoholics become perceptive enough that they can ''walk into a room and, without even consciously realising it, figure out just what the level of tension is, who is fighting with whom, and whether it is safe or dangerous''.
The same instinct may have fed Reagan's desire to comfort the nation on the model of Roosevelt's fireside chats.
Bush on the Couch, a psychoanalysis of George jnr traces his folksy jester behaviour to the period just after his sister Robin died, when he felt it was his responsibility to keep his family cheerful.
Another explanation may be that dysfunctional fatherhood forces children to take on an early leadership role. Clinton was characteristically explicit about this dynamic, musing that in the process of standing up to Roger Clinton, their roles seemed to reverse and ''I was the father''.
David Maraniss's biography of Clinton notes that the children of alcoholics often take on adult responsibilities and become ''a vessel of ambition and the repository of hope'' for the family by excelling in the outside world.
Moreover, one academic study suggests, ''a boy whose father has died forms a grandiose idea of him; and he calls strongly upon himself to replace the parent who has been thus idealised.'' Obama openly discusses this type of motivation in his book Dreams From My Father.
Of course, there is the hunger for attention and the gaping psychological need to be loved. It has often been observed that electoral politics is so demanding and unpleasant that no normal person would endure its indignities. Many of the people willing to keep going must be, in some sense, broken inside and driven to salve their emotional pain by courting the adulation of voters.
What does this tell us about Ryan? Justin Frank, the psychiatrist who wrote the Bush and Obama On the Couch books, says the death seems to have prodded him to become more determined, self-reliant and industrious.
''When there's a sudden death like that, [children] can become extremely, very responsible. They step up to the plate,'' Frank says.
Ryan also exhibits an ''anti-gratitude'' very common in some of these children, Frank says.
''The anti-gratitude has to do with an unconscious hatred of the part of the self that needs other people. Somehow you degrade unconsciously the part of you that needs help, and then you project that onto other people and say they don't need help.''
While Ryan benefited from his large family and government support, Frank says Ryan's reaction recalls Bush's feeling that no one helped him get through the death of his sister. Compared with the violent traumas experienced by many presidents, the death of Ryan's father was relatively peaceful, and probably left fewer psychological scars than the toxic childhoods of Clinton or Ford.
Indeed, Ryan's daddy issues seem to play a comparatively smaller role in his biography than those of many presidents. Given the destructive power with which some psychodramas may have played out in the White House, that is probably a good thing.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/the-political-oddity--sons-who-stand-in-for-fathers-20120824-24rv5.html#ixzz24WOxm1fC
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