The inner W.

How much do these personality traits affect Bush's performance as president? As unsavory as they are, they aren't necessarily guarantors of a disastrous presidency. As Rebenzer and Faschingbauer point out in "Personality, Character and Leadership in the White House," several presidents rated by biographers and historians as vindictive and domineering are also considered effective leaders, Lyndon B. Johnson being one prime example. The president whose personality assessment most closely matches George W. Bush's is Andrew Jackson, a controversial but undeniably accomplished man, rated as "near-great" by most of the historians polled. (Native Americans, of course, would strenuously disagree.)

Jackson, however, was also rated as a particularly creative leader by the same respondents, and creativity is not a quality anyone, not even his supporters, would attribute to Bush. He's just not that flexible or adventurous. Frank, who considers Bush to be "an intelligent person whose access to his intelligence [is] hampered by his disabilities" (he suspects attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and dyslexia), comes up with several reasons for this and other behaviors that cause many to dismiss Bush as stupid. Above all, he points to the president's rigidity. In some of the most insightful passages of "Bush on the Couch," he suggests that Bush's semiparalytic manner when speaking publicly, his insistence on rigorously scripting such appearances and the obviously enormous effort he puts into maintaining his focus during official occasions point to a horror of spontaneity, even if it comes in the form of a rudimentary dialogue.

While the conventional wisdom might suggest that Bush fears being unmasked as a dolt, Frank believes that Bush's rigidity -- also manifest in his ironclad daily routine -- protects him from inadvertently revealing the darker emotions he's never come to terms with. In addition to the fear of not living up to his father's example, there's the anger at being expected to, and the fear of the destructive power of that anger should it ever be unleashed. The primitive moral vision Bush subscribes to -- in which the world is divided into the good, "freedom-loving" people of America and "evildoers" like Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein -- is another inflexible schema that imposes order on the internal chaos that's always threatening to rise up and swamp him. Maintaining such control takes a considerable amount of energy, according to Frank, which may be one reason why Bush needs so much sleep and finds it so hard to concentrate.

Bush's born-again Christianity, an anomaly in his patrician East Coast clan, serves a similar function. For Bush, faith is less about the joyful worship of God in a community of believers (as Frank points out, he seldom attends church) than it is about forcing a structure on both the world and his own life without the risks inherent in a genuine attempt to understand either one. As Frank shrewdly observes, unlike your garden variety AA member, the born-again Christian need not ever examine his pre-conversion past; it can be partitioned off and dispensed with as irrelevant, which is just what Bush has done. The rowdy George W. who drank too much and, when soused, actually owned up to his wrath at his father and his own lot in life, now no longer exists.

Unfortunately, not all of Frank's insights are so welcome. If political commentators often resort to overly simplistic notions of character, psychoanalysts tend to overly personalize politics. Frank regards every act of the Bush administration as a direct emanation from the psyche of George W. himself. He seems unaware that a presidency is a collaboration, or that sincerity is not always a viable political option. What can you say about a book that deplores the vindictive dirty tricks the administration uses on its critics yet never once mentions the name of Karl Rove? Likewise, when a politician reneges on a campaign promise to supply funds to one downtrodden constituency or another, the motivation is much more likely to be expedience than a sadistic delight in seeing the needy disappointed. It's unlikely that Bush personally decided to release photographs of the bodies of Saddam Hussein's sons, and in any case, the more plausible motive was the stated one, to forestall Iraqi rumors of a hoax, not to crow over the victory and gross out the world. A lot of what the administration does is driven by simple greed and political calculation, not complicated unconscious desires.

Psychoanalysts also have an annoying propensity to interpret every behavior that they don't approve of as a manifestation of pathology, teeming with hidden meanings. As a result, Frank, your basic liberal, never honestly engages with the conservative ideology that Bush espouses and all the counterarguments it makes to liberal ideals of good government. The underlying premise of "Bush on the Couch" is that because Bush is a conservative, he must be suffering from "an array of multiple, serious and untreated symptoms." Bush may indeed be gravely troubled emotionally, but that conclusion doesn't automatically follow from his conservatism and it's neither respectful nor adult to act as if it does.

That's why Peter Singer's "The President of Good and Evil" is a necessary companion to "Bush on the Couch." Singer, a professor of bioethics at Princeton, subjects the various moral and policy pronouncements of the president to rigorous but fair scrutiny, unveiling them as a mass of contradictions and inconsistencies. "The President of Good and Evil" is no semihysterical denunciation, and it's more credible for that. Yet, interestingly enough, this stringently impersonal survey of Bush's ethics conveys a sense of how Bush thinks that jibes well with "Bush on the Couch" in many areas.

Of course, there's something slightly absurd about applying the reasoning of a philosopher to what's essentially an instinct-based moral code. "I'm not a textbook player," Bush told Bob Woodward, "I'm a gut player." Still, at every point where Bush's stated values come into conflict with his actions or other stated values, a little flash of light goes off, and what's illuminated is a vision of life rooted in fury and terror and a need to dominate the self and others as a way of containing both. Maybe that's one reason why George W. Bush is always talking about freedom. He'd probably like to know what it feels like.

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