Trump on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President / Justin A. Frank

A full psychoanalytic portrait of President Donald Trump by the New York Times best-selling author of Bush on the Couch and Obama on the Couch.

No president in the history of the United States has inspired more alarm and confusion than Donald Trump. Questions and concerns about his decisions, his behavior, and his qualifications for office only seem to multiply with time. How can he behave so callously and irresponsibly? Does he pose a true danger to our country? How could he even have been elected? 

In answer, noted psychoanalyst Justin A. Frank takes a deep dive into the psyche of our president. Using observations gained from a close study of Trump's patterns of thought, action, and communication, Dr. Frank gives us a full portrait of the personality we saw on display during his remarkable campaign and helps us understand what has driven the decision-making during his first years in office. The result is filled with important revelations about our nation's leader and disturbing insights into his childhood, his family, his business dealings, and his unusual relationship with alternative facts, including how:

• The absence of a strong maternal force during childhood has led to Trump's remarkable lack of empathy and disregard for women's boundaries (as well as his unusual hairstyle);
• His compulsion to polarize America has grown out of the way he perceives the world as full of deceitful and destructive persecutors;
• His inability to tolerate the pain of frustration has triggered his belief that omnipotence will finally remove it;
• His idiosyncratic use of language points to larger issues than even his tweets might suggest.  

With Dr. Frank's penetrating examination of how we as a nation got here and, more importantly, where we are going, Trump on the Couch offers a candid assessment of the man who is arguably the most psychologically damaged president we have yet had.