By James C. McIntosh, M.D.
Prologue
Section 7 of the American Psychiatric Association’s Principles of Medical Ethics of 1973 reads as follows:
“On occasion, psychiatrists are asked for an opinion about an individual who is in the light of public attention or who has disclosed information about himself/herself through public media. In such circumstances, a psychiatrist may share with the public his or her expertise about psychiatric issues in general. However, it is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement.”
There is no rule I have ever been happier to have been accused of violating than this one when I published
the first 7 chapters of my book, “The Unauthorized Psychoanalysis of Rudolph Giuliani” in the Amsterdam News and the Daily Challenge newspaper in the seven weeks between March 28, 2000 and May 12, 2000. That is, I have never been happier until now. My latest unauthorized psychoanalysis is “The Unauthorized Psychoanalysis of Donald Trump”.
Weak Disclaimer
As in the case of my first unauthorized psychoanalysis, this book is obviously just my personal opinion, no matter how professionally it is rendered. It is my opinion about a man many other professionals have already labeled as narcissistic, sociopathic or just plain crazy and dangerous. In the case of Donald Trump, some of the brightest lights in white American Psychiatry and psychology have already gone on record labeling Trump as ill.
Psychologist John Gartner, who taught psychology for 28 years at Johns Hopkins University, began his article published in USA Today with the words, “If you take President Trump’s words literally, you have no choice but to conclude that he is psychotic”.
In a letter to President Obama, Judith Hermann, M.D., a Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Harvard University Medical School who is also the author of the former NY Times best-seller “Trauma and Recovery”; Nanette Gartrell, M.D., a former member of the faculty of Harvard University and Dianne Mosbacher, M.D., Ph.D. wrote, among other things, that Trump’s “widely reported symptoms of mental instability — including grandiosity, impulsivity, hypersensitivity to slights or criticism, and an apparent inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality — lead us to question his fitness for the immense responsibilities of the office (of President of the United States)”. These psychiatrists went on to recommend that Mr. Trump “receive a full medical and neuropsychiatric evaluation by an impartial team of investigators”.
Never Mention Fake Hair in a Psychiatric Report
So the purpose of my book, deliberately overstated as a “psychoanalysis”, albeit “unauthorized”, is to offer a Black psychiatric perspective on a man who, if the U.S. was a hospital, could in the manner of Hair Club CEO Matt Heinz, boast that, “I am not just the CEO, I am a patient”.
The perspective of this psychoanalysis has to be different from the above-mentioned doctors because I am (identifiably) a descendant, not of American but of African people who were held in chains (enslaved) by at least 18 former holders of that office. Until March of 2015, the official logo of the A.P.A., featured a picture of Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence who is known as the father of American Psychiatry. Just to put the APA and their rules into perspective, consider this, Rush, considered a butcher by many of his colleagues, supported practices such as bloodletting and blistering as treatments, and wrote that Blacks suffered from a curable noncontagious form of leprosy called Negritude or Negroidism. He also wrote that Blacks do not feel pain as sharply as whites, a rationale that allowed other butchers such as J. Marion Sims, a former president of the American Medical Association, to do dozens of surgeries without the benefit of anesthesia on African women that he owned. So, quite naturally, it takes real pathology to cause me to distinguish Trump’s insanity from so many other presidents, be it of the AMA, APA or USA.
A Long Line of Sadistic Swindler Presidents
For an instance, George Washington once asked with these lofty words, “How can we claim to be men of freedom while we willingly submit men to the chains based on a presumption of inferiority?” Yet, in spite of those words, Washington would twice (annually) move his enslaved African captives (slaves) back and forth from Pennsylvania to Virginia in order to avoid the Pennsylvania law that would require they be freed if they stayed in Pennsylvania more than 6 months in a row. Thomas Jefferson wrote in his “Notes on the State of Virginia” that Black people, whom he called Niggers in the same text, “secrete less by the kidneys, and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odor”. Yet, the married Thomas Jefferson tolerated that alleged odor enough to clandestinely sire as many as 6 children by a Black woman named Sally Hemings that he owned. She was also, by the way, his wife’s “half-sister”. That’s right, his sister-in-law. The same Jefferson wrote and signed, along with Benjamin Rush, M.D., that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”. Yet, when Jefferson caught up to an African named Thomas Hubbard who had escaped Jefferson’s enslavement, Jefferson, in his own words, “had him severely flogged in the presence of his old companions”. Note, that is not just flogged but “severely” flogged.
So, in some respects, it seems that Donald Trump should have to stand his place in a line of those presidents needing psychoanalysis. Nevertheless, this book will show that Trump is a quick study in crazy, doing all that he can to work his way to the head of that line.
