Manned and unmmanned, in a crouch and on a couch... and not on a couch.

Sometimes Maureen Dowd gets weirdly caught up inside her own lingual playfulness. Today's column mostly poops on George Bush's new art project — a book about his father — but let me highlight this:

Even though both Bushes protested that they didn’t want to be put on the couch, historians will spend the rest of history puzzling over the Oedipal push and pull that led America into disasters of such magnitude....

W.’s fear of being unmanned led to America actually being unmanned. We’re in a crouch now. His rebellion against and competition with Bush senior led directly to President Obama struggling at a news conference Friday on the subject of torture. After 9/11, Obama noted, people were afraid. “We tortured some folks,” he said. “We did some things that were contrary to our values.”...

The Bushes did not want to be put on the couch, but the thin-skinned Obama jumped on the couch at his news conference, defensively whining about Republicans, Putin, Israel and Hamas and explaining academically and anemically how he’s trying to do the right thing but it’s all beyond his control.

Remember when it was completely the norm for elite cogitators to do Freudian analysis?

But what I to know is why Dowd — having analyzed Bush's writing a book about his father — gets to the topic of Obama and never mentions that Obama wrote a book about his father... especially when she's imposing a Freud template. Freud wrote "The Interpretation of Dreams," and Obama wrote "Dreams From My Father."

Let's be old-timey elite cogitators and crouch psychiatrically by Dowd's couch. When something so obvious is not said, that's a very meaningful statement. Why are you repressing that?

And speaking of repression, Obama's writing a book about his father is a magnificent repression of the truth of the childhood he actually lived, with his mother, not his father. That's the Oedipal dream, to have the mother all to yourself. What was missed — says the old codger cogitator dredging up Freudianisms — was the opportunity to kill the father. The father was already gone. Bush Jr., as Dowd expounds, had to develop his psyche in the shadow of a toweringly great father. (I chose tower as my image intentionally.) If you're writing a column... and, of course, column ≈ tower ≈ phallus... if you're writing a column comparing Bush to Obama, we've got a lot to talk about here. What happened to Obama, a man who began with the Oedipal dream fulfilled? He had to create his dream-book to resurrect the dead father to make something out of the nonachievement of beginning with the full possession of the mother.

If we're going to go old-school and get Freudian, let's say all the unsaid things. If you don't want to, I'll talk about your problem with repression.

And Dowd is highly attuned to language play, but I think she would have edited out the word "crouch" if she'd noticed the resonance with "couch," a word she used 3 times and which formed the concrete image of psychiatry (her central theme). I think "crouch" was an expression that slipped out, that missed the usual filter and is therefore quite telling. She uses "crouch" to signify weakness, but crouching has a closer association with a strong animal lying in wait, ready to spring:

Can you hunt the prey for the lion,
Or satisfy the appetite of the young lions,
When they crouch in their dens,
Or lurk in their lairs to lie in wait?

That was God — did you recognize His voice? — talking to Job.

(Freudian side note: Joe Biden calls himself Joe — not Joseph — so that you will hear the name "Job" in the spoken "Joe Biden" — Job by den — Job, crouching by the den, lurking and lying in wait.)

And why did Dowd say "jump on the couch"? The thin-skinned Obama jumped on the couch... A psychiatric patient does not jump on the couch, even when he is enthusiastic about beginning the session. It's a dog that jumps on the couch. So it slips out again, the animal imagery. Crouching. Jumping.  Why liken Obama to a dog? Why liken Obama to a dog at the precise moment when you are referring to his skin?

Oh! This Freudianism is great fun. Thank you, Maureen Dowd, for inspiring me to display these insights of mine, such as this revelation of your racism.

And thanks be to God who has put wisdom in the mind and given understanding to the heart...

Who can number the clouds by wisdom?
Or who can pour out the bottles of heaven,
When the dust hardens in clumps,
And the clods cling together?

ADDED: "When the weather was good, my roommate and I might sit out on the fire escape to smoke cigarettes and study the dusk washing blue over the city, or watch white people from the better neighborhoods nearby walk their dogs down our block to let the animals shit on our curbs—'Scoop the poop, you bastards!' my roommate would shout with impressive rage, and we’d laugh at the faces of both master and beast, grim and unapologetic as they hunkered down to do the deed."

Do you recognize the voice? It's Barack Obama, in that book about his father.

AND: "Rising ground, and on it something like an open-air latrine; a very long bench, at the end of which is a wide aperture. The whole of the back edge is thickly covered with little heaps of excrement of all sizes and degrees of freshness. A thicket behind the bench. I urinate upon the bench; a long stream of urine rinses everything clean, the patches of excrement come off easily and fall into the opening. Nevertheless, it seems as though something remained at the end. Why did I experience no disgust in this dream? Because, as the analysis shows, the most pleasant and gratifying thoughts have cooperated in the formation of this dream...."

Do you recognize the voice? It's Sigmund Freud in his book about dreams, pouring out the bottles of heaven.