Since the end of the second World War, mental health and mental illness in the United States have become progressively politicized. As a result, neither the Democratic nor the Republican Party nor any president could oppose the struggle against mental illness, for fear of appearing to oppose mental health itself. In the past 30 years, increased spending on mental health has been a more bipartisan policy than increased spending on defense, education, or welfare. Still, despite all the political and psychiatric hoopla, the actual personal support of politicians for mental health has always seemed halfhearted at best. It was like kissing babies for the photographers—something that had to be done to get oneself elected, not something one enjoyed, much less believed in.
With the election of Jimmy Carter, all this has changed. Here, for the first time in American history, a president, indeed a whole presidential family, really believed in mental health—just as they really believed in Jesus and being born twice. The upshot is a veritable “psychiatric presidency”—a fitting ornament for our Therapeutic State.
The Carters’ interest in mental health antedates their entering national politics. When Carter was governor of Georgia, both he and Mrs. Carter emphasized their commitment to that cause. Between 1971 and 1975, during Carter’s governorship, the number of community mental-health centers in Georgia rose from one to 18, admissions to state mental hospitals increased from 9,645 to 17,824, the number of full-time state mental-hospital employees rose from 6,467 to 8,247, and the annual state mental-hospital expenditures rose from $56,705,000 to $95,177,000. Not a bad record as madness-manufacturing goes.
During the 1976 presidential campaign, Carter ran, in part, on a mental health platform. A New York Times reporter described Mrs. Carter’s participation in the campaign in this way: “Her schedule is carefully planned around certain campaign themes. If there is a mental hospital in the city, she tours it, talking of the need for more such facilities. . . .” Addressing a meeting of the American Association for Social Psychiatry during the campaign, psychiatrist Dr. Peter Bourne, then the director of the Washington Carter for President Campaign (and later forced to resign as presidential
assistant for health issues), promised: “I think in Governor Carter and his wife, the psychiatric and mental health fields would have a very good friend, or two very good friends, in the White House.” This is true enough. But that the Carter presidency is good for the American Psychiatric Association is much more obvious than that it is good for America.
After he was elected president, Carter fulfilled at least one of his campaign promises: he appointed a presidential Commission on Mental Health with his wife as its honorary chairperson. In May 1978, after having spent an undisclosed amount of the taxpayers’ money in the course of its investigations, the commission issued its much-heralded report, titled Mental Health in America: 1978. The report consists of an expository volume of 94 pages plus three heavy tomes of appendixes. It is unlikely that many Americans outside the mental health bureaucracy (or even inside it) will ever see this document, much less read it.
Besides the sort or psychiatric propaganda one might expect from a presidential commission on mental health, the most interesting thing about the report is its advocacy of systematic racial and linguistic discrimination in psychiatry—partly, it seems, as an expression of a trendy pseudopopulism, and partly, it is quite clear, in an effort to strengthen the legitimacy of controlling racially and linguistically handicapped persons by means of coercive psychiatry. I list below some of the statements in it which I so interpret:
According to the 1975 Special Census, the population of America includes 22 million Black Americans…. Like everyone else, minorities feel more comfortable and secure when care is provided by practitioners who come from similar backgrounds. Yet fewer than 2 percent of all psychiatrists in America are Black.
Language and cultural barriers have prevented some minorities from receiving appropriate care. . . . Many patients needing treatment will not seek care if providers are not sensitive to their culture or are unable to speak their language.
To meet the particular needs of minority populations, the Commission recommends that: Mental health service programs should . . . provide culturally relevant services and staff them with bilingual, bicultural personnel.
At the commitment hearing, the rules of evidence should apply, and the respondent should have the right to wear his or her own clothing, to present evidence, and cross-examine witnesses. The petitioner [sic] should also be represented by counsel fluent in the petitioner’s [sic] primary language. [By “petitioner” is presumably meant “respondent.”]
State laws establishing rights of mentally handicapped persons should be printed in the natural or dominant language of the persons to whom they apply…. A copy of the rights should be given to each patient and should be read or explained in an easily understandable way and in the person’s natural or “dominant” language.
The proposition that white (or yellow) psychiatrists cannot treat black (or Hispanic) patients is here advanced as a self-evident truth, supported only by the assertion that all “minorities” prefer to be treated by psychiatric “practitioners who come from a similar background.” Presumably, then, so do majorities—an idea full of momentous implications for American psychiatry, a heavily Jewish profession in a predominantly Christian country. When Carl Jung dared to suggest that individuals from different cultural and racial backgrounds possess different psychologies, he was promptly branded a Nazi anti-Semite by Jewish psychiatrists. Of course, Jung was never so stupid as to suggest that membership in a particular ethnic group automatically guarantees compassion for or understanding of the problems peculiar to members of that group. He was merely emphasizing the cultural reality of human behavior. Not so the report of the President’s Commisson: It urges the adoption of an explicitly racist policy with respect to psychiatric services—namely, that each racial or linguistic group be served by practitioners recruited from among its own members. Implementing such a quota system would, of course, affect Jewish-American psychiatry much the same way as National Socialism affected Jewish-German psychiatry.
The Commission’s views on language are also startling. It has always been the case in America that persons who spoke no English or who spoke it very poorly were more likely to be incarcerated as mental patients than those who did speak it. If one wished to protect innocent persons ignorant of English from being deprived of their liberty by psychiatrists, the obvious way to do so would be to abolish involuntary mental hospitalization. But the psychobureaucrats responsible for the report do not want to protect non-English speakers from psychiatric oppression; they want to legitimize their oppression by extending to them the legal formalism of being read their paper “rights” in their own language.
Moreover, the report treats the inability of some persons to understand or speak English as an immutable fact. It is not the would-be client’s fault that he has not mastered English. It is the fault of American society that it has not provided services in the client’s own language. Nowhere does the Commission even allude to the possibility that, in the United States, failure to master the English language may be bad for one’s “mental health.” Accordingly, the “particular needs of minority populations” do not include learning English, but include providing them with “bilingual and bicultural” experts. But if the patients cannot or do not want to learn English, why should they be treated by bilingual psychiatrists? The recommendation is not only politically repugnant, it is also illogical. Why couldn’t such persons be treated by psychiatrists fluent in the patient’s dominant language alone? Moreover, in view of the ethnic and linguistic diversity that exists in America, the report’s recommendation is pure humbug.
That an American president and his administration should mindlessly support mental health is, of course, hardly novel. What is novel, as I have
noted, is the Carter family’s own involvement in mental health. Thus, Rosa-lynn Carter’s pet project is mental health. Her devotion to this cause has led her to endorse the “finding” that 50 million of her countrymen are “in need of” mental health services and to display special solicitude for black Americans who are mad and whose need for mental health care she considers especially neglected. Her conviction that so many black Americans are psychi-atrically “underserved” should, perhaps, be seen in the context of her criteria for mental health, exemplified by her remark quoted in the French magazine Jeune Afrique (March 25, 1977): “1 do not think that Amin Dada is crazy. He is a very intelligent man.”
Ruth Carter Stapleton, the President’s sister, is a famous spiritual healer. She attributes her therapeutic powers, about which she is not unduly modest, to her special relationship to God. “God speaks to my thoughts,” she explained to a reporter for New York magazine. “That’s how He talks to me. Sometimes I don’t know whether I’m thinking it or He is thinking it. But
often I know it couldn’t be me—-I have found that Jesus loves a rapist, an exhibitionist, a drug addict, a communist.”
The Carters’ passion for mental health is particularly significant in view of the fact that psychiatrists have a similar passion for diagnosing prominent political figures as mentally ill. Indeed, while Mr. and Mrs. Carter are pushing psychiatric services on the American people, leading American psychohistorians are proclaiming the Carter family to be sorely in need of such services.
The fall 1977 issue of The Journal of Psychohistory, labeled “Special Jimmy Carter Issue,” is devoted to a “psychohistorical analysis” of the President and his family. True to the psychohistorical form of psychoassassination, Lloyd deMause, the editor of the Journal, disclaims any intention to harm Mr. Carter; indeed he claims that he wants to help him. Should Mrs. Carter read this, I hope she will begin to understand how hapless Americans might feel about the psychiatric “help” she proposes to unleash on them. Writes deMause, director of the Institute of Psychohistory, publisher of the Psychohistory Press, a member of the training faculty of the New York Center of Psychoanalytic Training, and chairman of the International Psychohistorical Association: “One final word on the Carter project before I begin the presentation of my evidence. The demands of group-fantasy in America today are such that the majority of the press, including reviewers, will probably refer to these essays as an ‘attack’ on Jimmy Carter. Nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed, quite the opposite. I even suspect that Carter would both enjoy and profit from these studies. In point of fact, we all voted for him….”
The first contributor to the special “Jimmy Carter Issue” is Paul Elovitz, a contributing editor to the Journal. Elovitz’s “diagnostic formulation” of the President is, deMause’s self-congratulatory remarks notwithstanding, hardly likely to please him. “In psychoanalytic terminology,” declares Elovitz,
“Jimmy Carter can be considered a narcissistic personality with obsessive compulsive defenses. His narcissism is reflected in his need to gain praise to compensate for his own sense of inadequacy, stemming from insufficient emotional nurturance during early childhood.”
The person responsible for that “insufficient emotional nurturance” is, of course, Jimmy Carter’s mother, usually identified, Southern-style, as “Miss Lillian.” In view of the Carters’ concern for mental health, their unconcern for Miss Lillian’s mental ill-health (as defined by the authorities they respect) is rather surprising. Let me hasten to emphasize that 1 offer this “diagnosis” not as a personal judgment but rather as a logical inference from pronouncements made by Miss Lillian and by psychiatric experts. In 1975, the American Orthopsychiatric Association’s Committee on Minority Group Children declared that “Racism is the number one public health problem,” adding for good measure that “Racism is probably the only contagious mental disease.”
According to the evidence presented by James Wooten (author of Dasher: The Roots and the Rising of Jimmy Carter), Miss Lillian shows signs of suffering from just such a mental disease. “A week before her son was elected President,” writes Wooten, “an erratic black preacher from a nearby city tried to worship in the Plains Baptist Church. He was ejected, rather forcefully, though not bodily. The door was literally shut in his face. It was instant news around the country—big news. It might have cost her son the White House. Several weeks later, after he had won, she remembered the incident at the church. ‘Somebody,’ she snarled, ‘should have shot that nigger before he came on the lawn.’” The effect on “mental health” of the hypocrisy implied in the gulf between Miss Lillian’s “nigger” and the capitalized “Blacks” in the presidential commission’s report requires no further comment.
According to David Beisel, another contributing editor of the Journal, Jimmy Carter has dealt with his feelings of “maternal loss and maternal distancing” by internalizing maternal functions: “Without a mother he has become his own mother and performs domestic duties himself. Pridefully, Rosalynn proclaimed that ‘Jimmy really likes to cook….’” If poor Rosalynn only knew what psychiatrists can infer from the sinister symptoms of masculine domesticity which her husband displays. Our President has been known not only to cook but also to sew on buttons and wash his shirts. Better not let Anita Bryant hear about this! But why bother with psycho-pathological innuendos when the psychohistorical evidence clearly proves that the whole Carter clan is just plain crazy. That is the conclusion of Henry Ebel, associate editor of the Journal:
The suspicion that the President may be nuts cannot—in view of his entirely projective function [s/c]—be dissociated from the growing suspicion, by “average” Americans in “average” American families, that they may be nuts…. At the unconscious level, in other words, the Carter family, with its bizarre admixture of rednecks, faith-healers, convicts, and puritanical obsessive-compul-
sives, is perceived as being just as distorted and “crazy” as the families of “average” American voters: a Munster clan or Addams family that has somehow wandered off the TV screen and into the White House. The concern with “mental health,” which for the Carters themselves may be a quasi-therapeutic involvement in other people’s problems, is politically necessary to counterbalance this image____
With that piece of psychoanalytic psychohistory, we come full circle: from the report of the President’s Commission on Mental Health, to the demonstration of the presidential family’s mental ill-health, and back to the Carters’ own meddling in other people’s private lives. The measure of that meddling is best reflected in its cost to the taxpayer. “In the late 1950s,” observes the Commission, “the direct cost of mental illness was estimated to be $1.7 billion a year. By 1976 the direct cost of providing mental health services was about $17 billion . . .” The cost is steadily rising and the commission is recommending further sizable increases.
The President and his economists never tire of scolding us about our inability to afford imported petroleum, but they are remarkably silent about our ability to afford domestic psychiatry. Sooner or later we shall have to confront our value preferences. Perhaps the time is near when we shall have to choose between a system of “mental health care” so repugnant that it has to be financed through tax monies and imposed on the populace by means of force and fraud—and food and shelter and energy, that is, “essentials” for which individuals are quite willing to pay themselves. What President and Mrs. Carter are telling the American people is that mental health is more important than the “essentials.” That is why mental health should be paid for by the government with tax monies—whereas food, shelter, and energy should be paid for by individuals with what the tax collector leaves them.
Psychodrama in the White House
President Carter is greatly devoted to Mrs. Carter, who, in turn, is greatly devoted to psychiatry. Hence, it is not surprising that the Carter presidency has come to be characterized, first, by the replacement of a president by a marital presidential team, and second, by an imitation of the language and style of the mental health professions. Thus, the United States is now headed not by a male chief executive who is the leader of his party and the president of his country, but by a marital pair of faith healers who lust to replace politics with a religious psychodrama.
In a psychodrama, so-called mental patients are invited to enact their major life problems. The ostensible purpose of the enterprise is to help them confront and master their problems. Its only result, however, is that the performers’ weaknesses are exposed. That, it seems, is what President and Mrs. Carter are doing to each other and themselves. It is to this phenomenon—which has not received the attention it deserves—to which I propose to devote my following remarks.
What does a faith healer—a term I use to mean charlatan or quack— typically do? He assumes a posture of boundless compassion and wisdom and so equipped pronounces the gravest diagnoses upon his clients. Then, he promises to cure them, provided that they place their complete trust in him. Carter’s diagnosis of our condition could hardly be more gloomy; “I think it’s inevitable,” he told some of his guests at Camp David,
that it’s going to get worse in ’80 than it was in 79, and it will get worse in ’81 than in ’80. The only trend is downward…. I think it’s inevitable that there will be a lower standard of living … I think there’s going to have to be reorientation of what people value in their own lives. 1 believe there has to be a more equitable sharing of what we have.
Ignoring for the moment Carter’s remark about the need to “share what we have”—a precept he is obviously more fond of preaching than practicing— let me try to develop his image of our country. It is an image that fits comfortably into, and issues logically from, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter’s dual infatuations with redemptive religion and rehabilitative mental health.
In this Carterian view, America is, quite simply, a sinful and sick addict: Americans are greedy for gasoline and other goodies they don’t need, shouldn’t have, and would be better off without. In his Baptist bull of July 15th, Carter admonished his recalcitrant addict-subjects in these words:
I’m asking you, for your good and the nation’s security, to take no unnecessary trips, to use car pools or public transportation whenever you can, to park your car one extra day per week, to obey the speed limit, and to set your thermostat to save fuel. Every act of energy conservation like this is more than just common sense. 1 tell you it is an act of patriotism.
President Carter here addresses us in a voice such as might have been used (but never was used) by General MacArthur addressing his vanquished Japanese charges. Indeed, while Carter is waging a metaphorical war of moral equivalents against OPEC, he is waging a real war of “therapeutic” emasculation against his own people: he is demeaning us for what we value, he is attacking us for how we behave, he is depriving us of our comforts and pleasures—all the while that he and his entourage are living more lavishly than the most profligate of private citizens, on money extracted by the Internal Revenue Service from us no-good gasoline addicts. Jimmy Carter’s politics is thus the epitome of what Bernard Crick called anti-politics: “Only anti-political regimes,” he wrote in his In Defense of Politics in 1972, “are forever preparing the individual to sacrifice his freedom of action for the collectivity, or trying to persuade him that freedom is not the positive experience of diversity, but is the euphoria that comes from making the right choice in good company. Yet people who are reborn are seldom reborn free [p. 192].”
As might be expected, some of our statist political commentators loved President Carter’s castigating his fellow Americans for their addiction to oil. “Some complain that he [Carter] was ‘too evangelical,”’ wrote Carl Rowan.
A leader speaking to sinners always preaches. And we have long been the energy sinners of the world. We have virtually “stolen” the petroleum of other poor nations for years and have become the gasoline junkies of the world.
Just when did we become the “gasoline junkies of the world?” Six months ago? After the Six-Day Arab-Israeli War? When Henry Ford built the Model T? As we all know, until very recently the oil industry in concert with the American government “pushed” gas—that is, they “pushed” it just as any seller pushes his product. Too, until recently, the oil-producing countries were happy to sell us a product that cost them next to nothing and whose availability seemed unlimited. Furthermore, the American government is still “pushing” oil by preventing market forces from dictating the price of petroleum in America and instead keeping that price at levels still well less
than one-half of what it is in other industrial nations.
It is worth noting, in this connection, that there is a three-year backlog of orders for Mercedes automobiles, that there is no speed limit on German superhighways, and that there is no shortage of gasoline in Germany— although the Germans must, of course, import every drop of oil they use.
Mrs. Carter shares her husband’s image of Americans as greedy materialist addicts who ought to do with less and worship Jimmy. For all we know, she may even have developed this image herself and infected her husband with it. On a tour in July selling the President, she told reporters: “What I would like the people of this country to do is every time they turn out a light, every time they ride a bicycle or car pool, to think about Jimmy and that they are doing this for the country.”
I submit that President and Mrs. Carter treat us, the American people, as if we were sinful addicts, given over to unpatriotic dissipations, not because that is the way we are, but because that is the way they want to see us. Theirs is the pat, time-honored priestly-psychiatric posture: I am virtuous— you are wicked; I am sane—you are insane; I know how to cure what ails you, and I’ll fix you, whether you like it or not.
Politicians used to promise us two chickens in every pot. The Carters tell us we are eating too much chicken, that eating less of it is good for us—and patriotic to boot. But the facts are all the other way. There is no “shortage” of oil. That is to say, there is no more of a shortage of oil than there is of anything else in the world that people desire and the supply of which is limited. Nor are we addicted to oil—any more than are the people of all industrially advanced and politically free societies—with whom most people in the rest of the world would like to change places. Finally, we are not—and let us make no mistake about this—going to be better off by emasculating ourselves, economically, politically, or psychologically. The idea that it is sinful and wrong for one person to have more than another goes back to ancient history. The Greeks feared and sought to placate their jealous gods. The Christians elevated self-abnegation and poverty—at least in principle—to a virtue, giving Marx and Freud powerful ammunition in their efforts to replace Christianity with their own brands of anti-individualistic gnosticism. The Carters have managed to combine the worst—the most selfdestructive and undignified—elements of these three creeds into a single vision, if one can call deliberately self-induced blindness vision.
The Carters’ vision is one of unrelieved bleakness for America. “After listening to the American people,” Carter declared in July, “I have been reminded again that all the legislatures in the world can’t fix what’s wrong with America.” Note that Carter always knew that America was sick unto death, and was merely reminded of this once more. How does Carter know this? The same way Susan Sontag knows that “the white race is the cancer of human history.”
Actually, the Carters gloat over the moral corruption of America, which, they seem to think, presents a background against which their own moral rectitude can shine forth with dazzling luminosity. Thus, on August 6, with Carter’s performance as president generally rated as falling, he let the American people know of his efforts to Christianize a heathen head of state: “While teaching an adult Bible class at the First Baptist Church of Washington, Carter said yesterday that the ‘roots of the weakness of the Christian church, one of them anyway, is the reluctance to assume the responsibility placed on our shoulder.’” He was referring, of course, to his responsibilities as a Baptist, not as a president: “Noting that a Christian should try to win new followers [reported the UPI news dispatch], the President said he made such an effort during his trip to South Korea in late June.” President Carter, we learn, “tried to convert President Park Chung Hee to Christianity and the South Korean leader was ‘very interested’—but matters now rest in ‘God’s hands.’” One wonders which god, or whose god, will decide this matter. After all, let us not forget that even the officially atheist Mr. Brezhnev “has” a deity, for he warned Carter that God would not forgive us if the Senate did not ratify SALT II.
Apropos of President Carter’s attempts to religionize politics, what was curiously much less publicized than his efforts to convert President Park was his inviting not one, not two, not three—but five—theologians to his Camp David domestic summit. The sociologist Robert Bellah shared the evening with them and described the experience as follows: “Carter feels at home with the religiously sincere; he opened and closed with a prayer. It was actually very moving; we felt like we’d been at a religious experience.” It is an altogether deliciously ironic situation: A child cannot now say a prayer in school, but abroad, on a tax-supported diplomatic mission, the President can try to convert another head of state to Christianity; while at home, at a tax-supported gathering organized to prop up his sagging authority, the President can open and close the meeting with a prayer.
Thus, we are confronted with a president who talks incessantly about making sacrifices, but is unwilling himself to make the sacrifice of, say, restricting his Christianizing efforts to non-official occasions. But, then, why should hesacrifice? He is not a sinner. We are. This explains why both President and Mrs. Carter feel so strongly that it is we who should make sacrifices and more sacrifices—and who should be grateful to those who so abuse us. The Carterian remedy—a veritable witch’s brew of religion, socialism, and mental health—is, indeed, a fitting potion to be dispensed by faith healers.
Like all such remedies, it is, of course, for patients only. Bertrand Russell did not only preach about sharing. He believed that a man should live from what he earns and give away his inheritance. Ludwig Wittgenstein, the great Austrian linguist-philosopher, gave away an even larger patrimony. But what have the Carters and their cronies shared with the poor? What sacrifices have Peter Bourne and Bert Lance made for the country?
Patrick Caddell, the Carter’s personal pollster, we learn from Time magazine (August 6, 1979), relaxes by “whipping around town in his gold-covered Mercedes.” Let the peasants relax by riding around in car pools.
Rosalynn Carter as Big Nurse
If Jimmy Carter is the doctor, determined to wean his addict-patient off everything that makes his life worth living, then Rosalynn Carter must be his nurse-assistant. Sally Quinn, writing in the Washington Post, has actually suggested that Mrs. Carter is “playing nurse.” As Quinn sees it, however, it is Jimmy Carter who is the patient, and we are the worried relatives whose anxiety she tries to soothe:
She is the nurse. He is the patient. She has come to the waiting room to reassure the concerned relatives. They are not listening to what she is saying.
They are listening to how she is saying it____She tells them everything that can
be done is being done. She tells them the patient is fine. But he needs their encouragement and support.
While Quinn’s interpretation is not without merit, the facts fit the scenario I am suggesting better. Rosalynn Carter is the nurse, all right—but she is the Big Nurse, she is Nurse Ratched of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest fame. Jimmy Carter is the emasculated doctor whose formal powers she wields. And we, the American people, are the patient-enemy, whom she/ they are determined to bring to heel. With the best “therapeutic” intentions and methods, of course.
“I bring,” said Mrs. Carter in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, in July, “greetings from Jimmy. I left him at home and Amy is away at camp so he’s going to be very lonesome. But he said to tell you hello. I want you to know he’s healthy and we’re having a wonderful time at the White House. . . . He’s healthy. He’s happy. He’s confident; and he’s optimistic about the future of the country.”
Quinn quotes this passage as typical of the sort of thing Rosalynn Carter says when she is standing in for the President. It illustrates, she says, “the nurse-patient image [which] arises time and again as she continues to defend her husband; to promote him in a way one would not expect a President to need.”
Quinn’s remark is consistent with my suggestion that while Mrs. Carter seemingly enhances her husband’s image, actually she diminishes it. Since it is unlikely that she would publicly announce feeling ashamed of Mr. Carter, her protestations of “I am proud of Jimmy” strike a false note.
Increasingly, commentators are noting that although the American people elected Jimmy Carter as president, they have got Rosalynn Carter as co-president—at least. In Dallas, in July, she was called “the President’s secret weapon” (an interesting metaphor), and a minister there led prayers for
“those who lead this great nation, Jimmy Carter and Rosalynn Carter.” In one of her speeches on her Texas tour, Mrs. Carter slipped into speaking as if she were indeed president. After touring a “camp for emotionally and physically disadvantaged children,” she told an assembled group that “I have a bill now before Congress” to implement improved mental health care. Speaking in Dallas on the same tour, she modestly remarked, apropos of the Camp David domestic summit: “I sat in on the meetings; I listened with him, and we, uh, he made the decisions.”
In a story that verged on being adulatory, Time magazine (August 6) reported on Mrs. Carter’s July tour of the country in praise of the President. Under the title of “Selling True Grit—and by God She’s Good at It,” Time illustrated Mrs. Carter’s effectiveness as a popular politician by citing a Los Angeles bystander who witnessed her performance and remarked admiringly: “Now why couldn’t she be the President?”
In an unofficial sense, Mrs. Carter is, indeed, the president. She views herself, at the very least, as co-president. Her own remarks about her role are revealing. “The President of the United States [not Jimmy] cares what I think,” she has told reporters. “I have influence. I know it.” About her present situation, she has remarked: “I find myself in the eye of history.” Since she has also claimed having “always been more political” than her husband, it would have been more truthful if she had taken more responsibility for her actions and said that she had thrust herself into the eye of history. Surely, there is nothing passive about her advice that the White House band stop playing “Hail to the Chief”—a suggestion ostensibly made to “de-imperialize” the presidency. She succeeded. “The White House discovered,” commented Harry Kelly (in the Chicago Tribune, August 2), “that without pomp, the President was just another guy with a shoe shine.” In the meanwhile, Mrs. Carter has done everything possible to insure that she is not perceived as just another woman with a rich husband.
The impresssion that Mrs. Carter is using not only her position as the president’s wife but also her much-touted concern for mental health to satisfy her own cravings for power and publicity is supported by everything that has happened, or not happened, with respect to mental health during the Carter administration. Instead of a survey of official psychiatric “achievements” or statistics, I shall cite some events that, I believe, illustrate Rosalynn Carter’s real stand on mental health.
Mrs. Carter, let us keep in mind, has not been unduly modest in her role as the promoter of psychiatry. She has served as honorary chairperson of the President’s Commission on Mental Health. She has received numerous honors from psychiatric groups, such as the American Psychiatric Association—and for psychiatric causes, for example, from the National Council of Negro Women. She was an ardent supporter of Dr. Peter Bourne. Furthermore, as she herself has stated, she now has a bill before Congress—“to implement improved mental health care” (whatever that means).
Rosalynn Carter often speaks on mental health. On May 7, 1979, she addressed the World Health Organization in Geneva. On that occasion, she was, as usual, full of compassion for the psychiatrically downtrodden. “The reality of mental health care in America,” she said to the guardians of mental health in, among other places, the Soviet Union, “is that in too many cases those without power or influence suffer from severe discrimination in the delivery of services.” Note here Mrs. Carter’s emphasis on discrimination against mental patients, a subject to which I shall return in a moment.
On May 16, only nine days after speaking in Geneva, Mrs. Carter addressed the American Psychiatric Association in Chicago. That speech— full of psychiatric platitudes praising the mental health lobby—nevertheless also contained some notable passages. She spoke of her devotion to building “a more caring society,” of her “sense of compassion for those who are vulnerable,” and of her determination to eradicate the stigma of mental illness. “Until we change this aura of ignorance and prejudice, our efforts to improve care will be in vain,” she concluded.
But words, as an old saying has it, are cheap. They are especially cheap if they are unsupported or contradicted by the speaker’s actions. Such is the case with Mrs. Carter’s platitudinizings about psychiatry. As it happened, very soon after her ringing speeches against psychiatric stigmatization, delivered in Geneva and Chicago, she had a chance to show whether she meant what she said.
In June, according to press reports, two foreigners, one from England and the other from Germany, holding valid U.S. visas, were denied entry because as homosexuals they were automatically classified as “psychopathic personalities.” Here, in summary, is one of these episodes, as reported by the Associated Press:
Customs officials asked Karl Kinder if he was homosexual when they found a copy of a gay magazine in his suitcase, when he arrived in Minneapolis from his home in West Germany. Kinder, 32, said he replied: “No, I’m bisexual.” As a result, U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service inspectors denied Kinder entrance into the United States and he was forced to fly back to West Germany.
… The incident was the second time in two weeks that a foreigner was denied entrance to the United States for reasons of sexual preference. … “1 don’t believe it,” Kinder said as he held his passport open to show the large “CANCELLED” which covered the page. “They say this country is free and everything. I feel like a criminal, but I’ve done nothing wrong…. In Germany gay is legal since 1969.”
Human rights, as we know all too well, are won by confronting actual, real injustices—not by protesting about abstract “discriminations.” They are won by refusing to recant one’s religious or scientific views, by publicly denouncing the scapegoating of a Dreyfus—or of a homosexual. Has Mrs. Carter spoken out against the U.S. Immigration code’s psychiatric standards, which enshrine the very discrimination that she claims to be opposing? No,
she never has. To my knowledge, she has never spoken out about any actual case of psychiatric violation of human freedom and dignity. Indeed, how could she? She supports the organizations responsible for these discriminations.
As 1 noted earlier, Mrs. Carter brags shamelessly about having a bill of her own before Congress “to implement mental health care”—a remark all too revealing of her personal vanity rather than of her concern for individuals accused of mental illness. In the immigration cases I cited, Mrs. Carter had a golden opportunity to demonstrate her sincerity in doing away with psychiatric stigma and opposing political discriminations against persons identified as psychiatric patients. She could have introduced a bill—or, more modestly and precisely, she could have asked for a bill to be introduced—in Congress repealing the immigration law excluding homosexuals from America. She could have done so—but she didn’t.
While still on the subject of our immigration regulations, I want to call attention here to the contrast between their unremitting hositility toward psychiatry’s favorite scapegoats and their truly enlightened attitude toward those suffering from real, though contagious, diseases. On July 19, apropos of the influx of Indochinese refugees into the United States, the New York Times reported that San Francisco health officials found a “significant” incidence of tuberculosis and leprosy among them. However, this constituted no bar to their entry into the country. A U.S. Public Health Service official, quoted by the Times, commented that “tuberculosis responded quickly to antibiotics, and that leprosy was very difficult to transmit despite its biblical image.”
In short, it is the state—the United States government—that produces the psychiatric stigma attached to homosexuals. And it is the state—the United States government—that produces the stigma of Americans as gasoline junkies. It is a supreme irony of history that in Germany today homosexuality is legal and gas is plentiful—while in America homosexuality is, in most states, illegal and gas is about to be rationed.
Stigmatizing the Stigmatizers
In an essay in Inquiry in September 1978, 1 predicted that President Carter’s playing psychiatrist was not going to protect him from himself becoming the target of psychiatric derogation. Now my prediction has come to pass with a vengeance—and I must say it could not have happened to a more deserving person. On July 20, Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska declared, on the Senate floor, that President Carter “may be approaching some sort of mental problem … we are worried about his having some kind of breakdown.” Questioned about his remark by reporters, he later repeated that President Carter “is acting, I think, in a very erratic manner and I do not think that’s good for the country. …” Senator Lowell Weicker of Connecticut was more direct. “I think the President is nuts,” he told the press on July 17.
Soon the New York Times published an article [in its Sunday Magazine, August 5, 1979] by Eugene Kennedy, professor of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago, suggesting that Mr. Carter was mentally ill. Kennedy speculated about “the darkness that invaded [Carter’s] soul” and, in effect, diagnosed the President as suffering from depression:
The President has spoken words that seemed to be carefully prepared, but he also invested them with the downbeat music of his own depressed attitude. For now his own immobilized spirit has been laid bare, as he almost plaintively asks the people to show him how to lead them. The enormous passivity of the man, as revealed in the last section of his speech, distresses Americans because it pulls at them like an ethnic mother in a situation comedy who battles for self-esteem and dominance through making other people feel guilty…
Having diagnosed Carter, Kennedy called for therapy—recommending that “we offer [the President] support and sympathy along with a demand [sic] that he do something about the internal conflicts that he has so publicly advertised.”
For my part, 1 will eschew analyzing (in the sense of psychoanalyzing) the President. Instead, I will cite evidence to show that far from being a mad person, he is just a bad president.
For example, after his Camp David domestic summit, Carter declared that “the problem [facing the nation] was not primarily political. All the legislation in the world can’t fix what’s wrong with America.” Such statements—and Carter has made many—make it frighteningly clear that he has no concept of what an American president, the leader of a free, pluralistic society with a limited form of government, is supposed to be or do. Sometimes it seems that Carter confuses himself with, or would like to be, an Ayatollah Khomeini, or at least an Alexander Solzhenitsyn. But, luckily, Americans do not look to their president for moral leadership. They look for that to churchmen, to writers, to poets and social critics, to Supreme Court justices—and, most often, of course, to respected members of their own families. The American president is the leader of his political party. He is supposed to be a politician—and he is a politician, whether he likes it and admits it or not. Instead of listening to living socialist critics of America, President Carter might learn more by reading dead masters of political philosophy—like Aristotle, who warned that “the man who seeks to dwell outside the political relationship is either a beast or a god.”
In their amateurish attempt to depoliticize politics, President and Mrs. Carter are setting a dangerous example indeed. It is unfortunate enough that the American state has as much power to meddle in our lives as it now has. It is positively alarming when the President asserts that the powers the state wields are totally insufficient for the task at hand. Such a view, however obliquely stated, can only mean an advocacy of still greater powers for the state. That such a stance should now be assumed by a man who is powerless
through his own faults makes it only the more dangerous and pathetic. For an American president to plead with the American people that “We simply must have faith in each other,” and that “restoring that faith … is now the most important task we face” is, in my opinion, both dangerous and pathetic.
A grown-up person does not whimper for faith or trust in him. He knows that there is only one way to gain such faith—by earning it through demonstrated competence, honesty, and reliability. There is no other way. But like the priests and psychiatrists he emulates, Carter believes in word magic. He prays often. That may be good for his soul, but it won’t do any more for our gas supply than the Indians’ rain dances did for their harvest. How deeply Carter believes in word magic is illustrated by the closing cadences of his July 15th sermon to the nation. After detailing the countless ways in which he proposes to curtail our freedoms, Carter added—as if Orwell had never written 1984: “I do not promise you that this struggle for freedom will be easy.” What struggle for freedom? The struggle to abstain from driving our own cars and setting our own thermostats?
But the most significant, and perhaps the most alarming, part of Carter’s speech was yet to come. “Let your voice be heard,” he said. “Whenever you have a chance, say something good about our country.” Is it enough if we say something good? Do we also have to mean it, or is that not necessary? Does what we say have to be true, or doesn’t that matter either?
That Carter is scapegoating us is really too obvious to need belaboring. Mary McGrory has also noted it. “Washington’s first Citizen, Jimmy Carter, just can’t stand the capital,” she has written. “It’s the city he loves to hate. On television, he said, ‘Whenever you have a chance, say something good about our country.’ But whenever he has a chance, he says something bad about us.”
Carter thus blames the American people for the mistakes of their elected representatives—in particular, the president and the cabinet he appoints. Existentially, the people too are, of course, responsible for what has gone wrong. But that surely does not excuse the politicians for what they have done wrong.
Tragically, what American politicians have done wrong is too painfully obvious for words. The very simplicity of their “sins” makes their mischief seem somehow not their fault. We libertarians know that isn’t so. We know that they have sinned against us and against our country by taxing too much, spending too much, wasting too much, and interfering, in every way possible, with the power of the free market to regulate the exchange of goods and services.
The Carters’ evasion of these elementary facts of economics and politics is, in the end, what makes them resemble so much the modern psychiatrist and makes their performance resemble a psychodrama. The modem psychiatrist’s trick of the trade has been to claim that whatever is, is really something else. A man kills someone; he didn’t do it because he wanted his money or
because he hated him—but because he was mentally sick. A man has sexual affairs with many women; he doesn’t do it because he likes sex or sexual variety—but because he wants power. And so on, ad infinitum.
In the same way, the Carters claim that what looks like politics is really something else. Addressing the National Urban League in Chicago in July, Mrs. Carter declared that “the problems go deeper. We, as a country, are losing our confidence and our values.” When Solzhenitsyn said the same thing last year, Mrs. Carter vigorously protested. But never mind that. What I want to call attention to here is her repeated use of the word “deeper”— which is pure psychobabble. To the psychobabbler, nothing is ever “more superficial.” Say that someone else’s “problems” are “deeper”—and presto, you appear to be a “deeper” person.
President Carter too, as I noted earlier, likes to hint darkly that our political problems are really not political at all. That, no doubt, is why of the 18 congressmen he invited to the Camp David summit, not a single one was a Republican; or why, after the summit, not a single person fired by Carter “happened,” in Mrs. Carter’s memorable words (spoken to the National Urgan League), “to be black.” Mrs. Carter has articulated her own denial that the Camp David theatrics had anything whatever to do with “politics.” “I might add,” she said in her address to the National Urban League, “that none [of the guests invited to Camp David] was called to talk about politics. The matters of importance to our country today transcend politics.”
If that is what happened at Camp David, what does the columnist Nick Thimmesch mean by asking: “… what are we to think about the prevalence of liberal economists (not known to support energy development) and other hangers-on at the Camp David revival meeting? Or was this really a political gathering?”
Is Rosalynn Carter’s version of this affair rhetoric? Is it mendacity? Is it self-deception? Who is to say? It seems best to view her utterances as the lines spoken by one of the leading figures in the psychodrama the Carters are putting on in Washington. But performing in a psychodrama is—as I noted at the beginning—not the sort of thing that is likely to enhance the actors’ credibility or dignity. And so it is with the President and Mrs. Carter.
Matrimonial loyalty is one thing. Deluding oneself that one’s wife is an economic and political expert, when she is not, is quite another. Deputizing her to act in loco presidents is going out on the proverbial limb still further.
The same considerations apply to Mrs. Carter. Her devotion to her husband (if that is what it is) is admirable. But does she really help or harm her husband’s cause? She stomps the country repeating over and over again that “He [Jimmy] is healthy” (Who said he wasn’t?); that “he’s happy” (Who said he isn’t?); that “he’s confident; and he’s optimistic about the future of the country.”
But if President Carter is so confident about the future of the country, why does he preach the very opposite message? And if he is so happy, why doesn’t he look happy?
Thomas Szasz – The Therapeutic State