The Riddle of Avner Falk’s Obama

Review essay of Avner Falk, The Riddle of Barack Obama: A Psychobiography (Santa Barbara: CA: ABC-CLIO Imprint of Praeger, 2010), ISBN 978-0-313-38587-2, i-xx, 335 pages, Hardcover (also available as an eBook), $54.95.

Upon receipt of this volume I made a point of not looking past the title page; instead, I decided to record what I expected to find between the covers. First and foremost, I anticipated that there would be a great emphasis on the role of the mother and issues of individuation, or lack thereof. This is based upon finding the maternal role to be a central concern in this prolific Israeli clinical psychologist and psychohistorian’s books on Herzl (1993), Jewish history (1996), and Napoleon (2007). The riddle of Falk’s Obama

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would be how he would work in his usual maternal theme, especially since the President had important separations from the mother who birthed him in her teens.

Repetition is the second characteristic I predicted. I was sure that the book would be repetitious since that is very much the pattern of the author, who once responded to my statement that his work would be received far more widely if he edited it down much more carefully, “I am constitutionally incapable of editing my own work.” My third prediction was that Falk would incline to be heavy-handed in his use of psychological terminology. Upon reading the volume I found that all three of my prognostications were on target. This is unfortunate, since a first rate psychobiography of Obama would be of great value.

Out of fairness to the best-known Israeli psychobiographer, I will start with the book’s strengths. Falk utilizes his considerable knowledge of psychoanalysis, psychobiography, and psychohistory to probe our 44^th President, providing a chronology of Obama’s life. Here, he delves into the lives and personalities of his ancestors, grandparents, and parents, striving to give the reader a complete picture while probing the conscious and unconscious motives of our President. The author writes about Obama’s early feelings of helplessness and sense of abandonment, dreams, identity struggles, his “fierce ambition,” and much more. Falk’s study puts forth many possibilities, some connecting Obama’s personal psychodynamics and his interaction with the country. To his credit, he acknowledges his own transference to Obama: liking, empathy for, and identify with his subject (p. viii).

Unfortunately, the weaknesses of this volume outweigh its strengths. The author claims that his “book is the fruit of rigorous scholarship” (p. ix) and that he “uses all the available primary sources” (p. xvii), but I find the scholarship to be rather ordinary at best and to have significant omissions, partly because Falk relies too heavily on online sources. For example, he misses the valuable articles by Bulkeley, Fuchsman, Strozier, and me in Clio’s Psyche on Obama, as well as others in different publications. There are primary sources I have come across that are not utilized, despite his claim to have used “all available primary sources.”

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Falk draws his materials overwhelmingly from Obama’s writings, especially the autobiographical Dreams from My Father (1995), in which the young lawyer showed considerable self-awareness and some psychological acumen. He goes through the many well-known people in Obama’s life and never fails to come up with some psychological explanation for their behavior, no matter how thin the evidence. The margins of my copy are littered with the word “Evidence?” Sometimes he is right in his suppositions but other times he goes well beyond his evidence.

The senior Barack Obama is correctly described as having “a narcissistic, arrogant, and self-destructive personality” (20). Stanley Ann Dunham is presented as “defiant,” “empathetic,” “idealistic,” “immature,” and much more. Stanley Armour Dunham, Obama’s beloved “Gramps,” is repeatedly declared to be boisterous, hypomanic, quick to anger, restless, and violent; Madeline Lee Payne, the boy’s always devoted and loving grandmother who he called “Toots” or “Tutu” is derided as “a rigid, strict, and pedantic woman” (p. 11) and given far less attention than she deserves. A strong case can be made for her being both the cornerstone of the family and a model of realism to her grandson. Falk attempts to cover himself with an endless string of “may, may, may,” a fair number of “could, could, could,” and, somewhat more understandably, quite a number of rhetorical questions.

He gets carried away with providing psychological labels and cannot resist generalizing beyond the evidence. As an advocate of the psychohistorical minimalist school when it comes to labeling, I continually found myself frustrated by his heavy-handed psychologizing. Falk goes to extremes in describing positive assessments of Obama, finding him to have “an incredibly mature insight for a 17 year-old” (p. 64), to have “incredible emotional control” (p. 70), to have “supreme” (p. 71) self-confidence and self-control, to have “an exquisite sense of humor” (p. xvi), and so forth. After the author finds a plethora of evidence to the effect of Obama being arrogant, he declares that Obama “succeeded in conquering his arrogance” (p. 145).

An element Avner Falk fails to deal sufficiently with is the audience for which Dreams was written. Upon being elected as president of the Harvard Law Review, Barack Obama was paid a

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large sum of money to write a book about race relations in America. As a young black man who had been raised by Caucasians with white values, he certainly was not in a good position to expand on race relations. Quite sensibly, he chose to write about his own idea of blackness and his quest to know and understand the father who abandoned him. Consequently, what he writes in Dreams From My Father reflects not only this mission but also his desire to focus on his African ancestry and the African Americans he worked with as a community organizer in Chicago. As a source for understanding of his life, his autobiography is biased in favor of these elements rather than of the white world that he knew so much better.

Although there is much to criticize in Dr. Falk’s The Riddle of Barack Obama, it is worth reading if you can tolerate the heavy-handed psychological labeling, repetitions, tendency to go well beyond the evidence from his sources, and overemphasis on the maternal issue. The latter even has its advantages as an antidote to the overemphasis on the father who was never there for our President.

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