A Psychohistorical Exchange on Barack Obama’s Family Background

Introduction

Two psychological historians writing and presenting on the childhood and family dynamics of Barack Obama came to some different conclusions. The situation was the Psychohistory Forum’s Research Group on the Childhood, Personality, and Psychology of Presidents Panel of the International Psychohistorical Association at its meetings at Fordham University on June 10, 2009. Ken Fuchsman (KAF) presented “Barack Obama and the Cycle of American Liberalism” and Paul Elovitz (PHE) “Psychological and Political Reflections on Obama’s Presidency.” Their varied choice of words and differing conclusions were even more apparent when Professor Fuchsman submitted the valuable paper, “The Transformation of Barack Obama,” to this journal. While appreciating each other’s papers, we think certain differing decisions warrant further discussion continuing in print below.

The Dialogue

PHE: Why did you choose to begin your paper with “Barack Obama occasionally sounds like Sigmund Freud?”

KAF: I connected Freud and Obama to highlight the combination of paternal deference and rebellion that characterize the father of psychoanalysis, our current President, the cycle of American liberalism, and many modernist cultural-intellectual movements.

PHE: You focus on the question raised by Obama, as to why his grandparents allowed their teenage daughter to marry the older African student. In “A Comparative Psychohis-

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tory of McCain and Obama,” Journal of Psychohistory 36, #2 (Fall, 2008): pp. 98-143, I wrote Ann “was already three months pregnant and probably would have married in any case.” What I did not write, but what I always thought important, was that she might elope with her African lover and break off relations with her family, as her parents had at about the same ages. Ann was an only daughter and her loss would have been extremely painful to them. I doubt that as a young man this consideration was clear to Barack. What are your thoughts on this formulation?

KAF: In his 1995 book Dreams from My Father, Obama has his parents marrying in 1960 rather than 1961, which would likely make his August 4, 1961 birth date occur at least nine months after the wedding. Therefore, he does not appear to know that his mother was pregnant when she got married. The first time I am aware that he knows about his mother’s condition is when he was interviewed by Time for an April 2008 article on his mother, when they told him his mother was married six months prior to his birth. While Obama asserted in his memoir that his maternal grandparents, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham, accepted the marriage of their daughter, there is conflicting testimony. In 2004, Mama Sarah, Barack Obama Sr.’s Kenyan stepmother, said that Stanley Dunham opposed the marriage and was trying to get Obama Sr. expelled from the University of Hawaii.

Their daughter did elope to get married, but returned to her family afterward. Since she left Hawaii for Seattle to go to college when her son was seven months old, there might well still have been tension between her and at least one of her parents. Who knows where this possible trouble between daughter and parents might have originated and what it was about, but it looks like the Dunhams did lose their daughter for a while. Why would she go to college far away when she could have returned to the University of Hawaii, which she attended in 1960, if she did not have difficu-

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lties with her husband and parents? It is not clear if Ann Dunham’s parents were more afraid of losing her or more upset about her marriage and pregnancy.

PHE: Previously, my sources had only indicated that Ann returned to Seattle on the way to and from visiting her husband in Cambridge when he left for Harvard. Ann was going back to where she had been a teenager and from where she had not been eager to leave in 1960 upon graduating high school. I am most impressed by how your detailed research resulted in bringing into focus new information on Barack Obama’s childhood and family relationships. A notable example is that Obama’s father had left him when he was only ten months old, not two years as the President wrote. In trying to determine why I did not focus on some of this previously, I have several thoughts. First is my over-reliance on, at least in retrospect, Obama’s own words in Dreams From My Father (1995), which I first read it in the spring in 2007, when his presidential prospects were quite poor and I did not anticipate the need to check out every fact as thoroughly as I would when he was the nominee.

In terms of my countertransference feelings for my subjects, I clearly identified with Barack and his grandparents in forming a picture of his childhood. Although I searched out a large number of sources elsewhere, I had already published when David Maraniss’ valuable article, “How Obama Had to Leave to Find Himself, It is Hawaii That Made His Rise Possible,” was published in the Washington Post (August 22, 2008). Also, as a historian, I tended to accept out-of-wedlock first-births as quite commonplace.

KAF: One of the biggest reasons for the differences between your work and mine is the evidence we had. What shaped my focus was reading about what Obama’s mother did. Ann Dunham Obama went to Seattle while her husband was still an undergraduate at the University of Hawaii. She was enrolled as a degree student at the University of Wash-

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ington in the spring quarter of 1962, which went from March 26 to June 7. Barack Obama Sr. graduated in spring 1962, and left Hawaii on June 22, 1962. His mother went back to the University of Hawaii in the spring 1963 semester. I was writing at a later date than you, so I had access to the Maraniss article showing when Obama Sr. left Hawaii and you initially did not. The newspaper stories I read about Ann Obama appeared in the Seattle area. These various articles led me to check with the registrar at Hawaii to see when the President’s father graduated, the same office at Harvard to confirm when this particular Kenyan began his graduate studies there, and the University of Washington to confirm the registration dates of the President’s mother.

PHE: As a psychological historian working on Obama, would you give an example of the problems with sources, the issue of verification, and the fallacies of memory?

KAF: An easy example of all three of these areas of concern is how each family of origin responded when Ann Dunham and Barack Obama Sr. married. In his 1995 memoir, Obama quotes his own mother as saying that back in Kenya, Hussein Obama was seeking to get his son expelled from the University of Hawaii. Nine years later, Sarah, the stepmother to the President’s father, tells a Nairobi paper that it was Stanley Dunham who opposed the marriage and was trying to get Obama kicked out of the University of Hawaii. Without additional reliable testimony, the psychohistorian should do little more than list both accounts to show there was opposition to the marriage. Now, Obama tells his biographer, David Mendell, that his mother said initially her parents were livid over the marriage. But this is not sufficient to resolve these different accounts.

PHE: Your careful historical research is greatly appreciated. Your tracking down that Ann went to the University of Washington while her husband was still in Hawaii is important. Of course, like all new evidence it raises additional

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questions. What was happening in her relationship with her husband? Was she fulfilling her high school dream of college in Seattle before the family moved to Honolulu, where her father insisted she attend school locally? How did she pay for school? The only reference I have to her working is as an au pair in Chicago as a 16-year-old.

I find myself ambivalent regarding your statement that “Obama as an adult, in part, developed a counter-identity in relation to both his parents.” All children identify with both their parents in some ways and reject them in others. Please list the ways in which Barack identifies and dis-identifies with each parent and discuss how conscious you perceive the process.

KAF: Now we are talking about how different concepts we employed are another reason for the differences between us. I agree with you that children generally identify with and against their parents. What makes for a counter-identity, which in Obama’s case is partial, is that the child is seeking to follow a different path than a parent; the parent is in some way a negative example. With his father, whatever unconscious motivation there might be, Obama is also quite conscious of these feelings. In Dreams, he writes of wanting to make up for his father’s mistakes, and worries that he “was living out a preordained script, as if I were…captive to his tragedy.” He wants to avoid being politically ostracized as his father was. In his second book, Obama writes that his own “particular malady” concerns trying to “either live up to his father’s expectations or make up for his father’s mistakes.” Obama identifies positively with his father’s ambition, education, and the heroic image of him created by his mother. With his white mother, his counter-identity is less conscious, and focuses on identifying himself as an African-American rather than as a biracial American. He tried to assure her that by doing so he was not rejecting her, but she did not buy it.

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PHE: You focus on Obama barely having a father in his life and the negative consequences in terms of greater poverty, behavioral problems, fatherlessness, and the inclination to run away. Without rejecting the greater statistical likelihood of these negative consequences, it is worth emphasizing that parental loss is also associated with greater creativity, as our colleague Andrew Brink has demonstrated in Creativity as Repair and other books. Young Obama was loved, nurtured, and given direction in life, such as when his mother showed up to get him to challenge himself in college on the mainland. To what extent do you see Barack Obama’s success as an attempt to compensate for his childhood losses?

KAF: Whatever creativity might result from parental loss, children of single-parent families have higher school drop-out rates, more behavioral problems, and if they are female, are more likely to become pregnant out of wedlock. Obama himself discussed what parental loss meant for him as a person and what negative impacts it has for society. I do concur with you that Barry Obama was cherished, nurtured, supported, and challenged by his mother and maternal grandparents, but he does not present himself as a sheltered and nourished child. In Dreams, he wrote of feeling abandoned and at one place stated that he felt utterly alone given his particular biracial makeup. According to biographer David Mendel, he told a number of friends that he felt like an orphan. Yet at the same time, he was attending Honolulu’s most prestigious private high school, and later was accepted to and graduated from Columbia University. His feeling emotionally bereft occurred in a setting of educational advantage.

Concerning his success being related to compensation for childhood losses, I would frame it differently. In his personal life, to make up for not having any parent who was always there for him, he sought to marry someone who would provide the secure emotional base he did not get. Publicly, besides wanting to avoid his father’s pitfalls, he found his

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identity in political reform rather than climbing the corporate ladder. For him, success cannot be achieved just individually; it is tied to the well-being of others. Certainly, this notion of achievement by giving to the beloved community and being dependent on it, can be seen as a way of hoping to avoid further losses.

PHE: I am troubled by your inclination to ascribe some behavior as genetic that I perceive as learned. Let me give you several examples. One, you seem to credit Obama’s intellect to “genetic[s] and culture.” You suggest that “maybe there is a genetic base” for his self-confidence “as well.” In the context of his self-confidence you use the word “cocky” and ascribe it to “inheritance and experience.” Throughout my career, I have seen highly respected historians credit inheritance and genetics for what I, and most psychoanalysts, would interpret as learned behavior. In the case of Obama, he had a mother who nurtured and demanded intellectual excellence and set the boy’s father up as the paradigm of intelligence, education, and self-confidence. In her absence, his grandparents supported these characteristics as he went to the finest school in Hawaii. In my opinion, there is no need to bring genetics into the picture, especially since you cannot provide any DNA or other empirical data for it. So why do you do it?

KAF: Whether or not most psychoanalysts emphasize learned behavior, Freud was a divided soul on the issue of inheritance versus experience. He clung to the notion of the phylogenetic inheritance derived from Lamarck, and stated a number of times that when experience conflicts with this biological force, experience is trumped by biology. While I have no adherence to Freud’s outmoded notion of phylogeny, I do think that temperament, an evolving mixture of inheritance and experience, is necessary to help explain individual differences. I do not believe that it is accurate to state that I ascribe some behavior as genetic, as you say in your opening

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sentence above. I state twice in my article for Clio’s Psyche on Obama that I perceive a combination of genetics and experience. I see no reason to place them in opposition or regard them as easily separable.

I am very fond of Winnicott’s famous statement about the maturational process and the facilitating environment. None of us is just a creature of our environment; decades ago Dennis Wrong warned against the over-socialized conception of humanity. It is not only what happens to us, but how we internalize things and what abilities we bring with us. Certainly, Obama had much to reinforce the value of education and achievement from his family and he went to fine schools, as you say, but he was also smart. His mental capacities had a strong biological base; if he was not well endowed mentally, he would have been less able to take advantage of his mother’s values and his educational opportunities. Are you saying that intelligence has no basis in genetics?

PHE: No, I am not saying genetics has no influence on intelligence. What I am saying is that most, if not all, of what is ascribed to genetics usually turns out to be learned behavior. Careful observation and discussion of the subject usually stops when behavior is labeled genetic. To turn to another subject, in discussing Obama’s restlessness, I am puzzled why you say, “Oddly enough, both Obama’s mother and his maternal grandfather were restless souls.” What is odd about a boy from a family so often on the move, whose mother moved him to another continent when he was a latency-aged child, then moved him home to Honolulu before going back herself to Asia and then Africa, being restless? To me it doesn’t seem odd at all.

KAF: “Oddly enough” was a poor choice of words. I do see the President’s impatience and restlessness as being connected to his mother’s wanderlust, which may be derived from her father. As an adult, Stanley moved from place to place.

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His own discontent may owe some of its origin to his being the one who discovered his mother after she killed herself, and was then almost immediately abandoned by his father.

PHE: Does your choice of the word “cocky” rather than “confident” or “extremely confident” in describing the President reflect your viewing him as arrogant, or feelings of envy you may have for him?

KAF: You make me laugh—am I possibly being diagnosed with Obama envy? It was after I saw Obama strut around the Hartford XL Center in February, 2008, and wondered how someone gets to see himself as the agent of massive political change, that I concluded he was cocky and also wanted to know more about him. I do not see him as arrogant. He may or may not be that, but I see him as paradoxical. He is very self-examining as well as having high self-esteem. He talks about his own maladies on a regular basis. He is not just one thing. I don’t see myself as envious of Obama; I would not want to be in his shoes, or follow his path.

PHE: I am glad to make you laugh. However, with your choice of words like “strut around” and “cocky,” I wonder if I should have asked if you dislike Obama. Do you?

KAF: These words are not value judgments at all, but observations. I actually admire Obama more than any President we have had since John Kennedy. Obama is deliberate, has far-reaching goals, is focused, and has a sense of humor. He also is more voluntarily honest and open about himself than any recent President (Clinton was more or less forced into discussing his private life). Obama’s soul-searching period at Columbia University also appeals to me. In his speeches, Obama says that children without fathers are more likely to drop out of school, commit crime, end up in prison, and become teenage parents. None of these things happened to Obama. Instead he overcame the emotional pain of his childhood and forged an identity that enables him to be highly dis-

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ciplined, committed, and concerned. How he has developed can well be a model for others with complicated childhoods.

PHE: Our sharpest initial difference was the role of Gramps (Stanley Armour Dunham) in Barack’s life. You portrayed him much more negatively than I did. When I reread Obama’s treatment of him in his two books, I realized that I had identified far more with Stan’s positive elements, ignoring or downplaying the negative elements you and some authors such as Maraniss focus on. Clearly, I identified much more with his positive contributions to his grandson, including his being present for the fatherless boy and having great dreams for him. I suspect our differences are based partly on my being a grandfather and you not yet having that pleasure and worry. I also grew up in a family where the only grandfather I knew on a regular basis was generally denigrated—which seemed unfair and unjustified to me. What are your thoughts on our different approaches?

KAF: I think our differences here are more connected to what our aims were. My negative portrayal of Stanley is not my own evaluation of the man, but is in regard to whether Obama saw him as a positive role model for himself—I don’t think he did. In his books, I think Obama underestimates the positive contribution his maternal grandfather made in his life and unfairly emphasizes Stanley’s quick temper and petty rules. What I was looking at was who Obama saw as positive and negative male role models, given that he hardly ever saw his biological father.

PHE: It is good to know that we do not really differ on how Barack saw his grandfather. Turning to the President as a parent, when I see certain pictures of Barack Obama with his daughters, there is sometimes a look of uninhibited joy seldom seen in an adult in his 40s. What do you make of these pictures?

KAF: Belonging is something that has not come easily to

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our President. It means a great deal to him to have a solid family of his own. This highly self-disciplined man has a strong playful side that comes out in his happiness with his children and the spiritedness of his interactions with Michelle. Also, I think he likes youngsters. I am thinking of the recent Presidential mid-day town hall, where a member of the audience said he had taken his daughter out of school to see Obama. The President then said he would write a note to her teacher excusing the absence, which he promptly did. The girl was delighted, as am I.

PHE: I think you are justified to write about Obama’s feelings of being orphaned as part of what drove him to search for a community. Do you have further thoughts on the subject?

KAF: Before Obama could reach out as a community organizer, he had to find a way to trust others and to start finding a base in his own life. The future President went through this intense, ascetic soul-searching period as an undergraduate at Columbia. It is only with that foundation that he had the inner resilience to start reaching out to others. Another episode in his evolution was in Kenya when he felt connected to the struggles by his father and grandfather. This helped him extend his identity to his paternal forefathers, and led him to no longer feel utterly alone.

PHE: Looking at Obama from a broader perspective, what do you think of the following thought? America has had such a troubled relationship with African Americans, toward whom there is a mixture of guilt, fear, envy, and admiration, that they have chosen as president a “safe black,” who was raised as a white, but who chose to be black, in his search for a satisfying personal identity.

KAF: Obama had to avoid coming across as too “black” in order to be elected President. I think that his temperament and outlook reflect more mainstream values than are some-

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times associated with so-called militant blacks. In the campaign, Obama remained composed and steady while McCain at times did not. I believe that McCain lost whatever chance he had to be President over his inconsistent responses to the September economic crisis. At that turning point, it did not matter what Obama’s racial makeup is, he seemed like a leader and President who then moved the electorate his way and largely nullified the issue of race in the campaign for many whites.

PHE: I would like to know your thoughts on the October 9^th announcement of Obama being named as the 2009 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for his work for nuclear nonproliferation, creating a “new climate” in international relations, and reaching out to the Muslim world. To me this award seems based on our president’s promise and his being the first African-American to hold the office—to say nothing of his not being George W. Bush. It is like giving the best baseball player of the year award in May rather than waiting for the end of the season in October. I suspect that it will be a political liability. What are your thoughts?

KAF: I agree, this prize is based more on promise than performance, peaceful intentions more than solving difficult problems. Obama is the fourth American President to win this coveted award: Theodore Roosevelt won from negotiating a peace treaty, Wilson for the League of Nations, Carter for the mid-East accord and other efforts, and now Obama for supposedly altering the climate of world opinion and promoting diplomacy. Obama’s rhetoric has a Wilsonian transformative quality. Where Wilson wanted to make the world safe for democracy, the Nobel announcement praises Obama’s call for ridding the world of nuclear weapons. There is the same millennial tinge in the rhetoric of both Wilson and Obama. The twentieth century was not kind to those who expected our better nature to curtail our capacity for mass destruction. We can only hope that Obama’s

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soaring rhetoric can be matched by diplomatic skills and sensible decision making. It is way too early to tell. The tough challenges of Iran and Afghanistan still lie ahead, and the internal and external forces promoting conflict and destruction have not retired from the field.

PHE: It has been a pleasure to have this exchange with you because I have seen where it increases our knowledge of Obama and gets us to question some assumptions made in writing. Do you have any last words?

KAF: You and I have always been able to talk easily and honestly, and I am sure we will continue this conversation. I appreciate this opportunity and hope that others can benefit from our dialogue.

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