Word: abrahamsen
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IMAGING: Mark Stelzner (Manager); Gerard Abrahamsen, Kenneth Collura, Kin Wah Lam, Linda Parker, Lois Rubenstein, Simon Tack...
...signing of Lennon's name in the logbook last October. That act, they say, may indicate that he was losing what little remained of an obviously fragile sense of identity. "He had a superidentification with Lennon, but he was also in competition with him," says Manhattan Psychiatrist David Abrahamsen, who examined David Berkowitz, the "Son of Sam" killer. "His murder of Lennon was a substitution for his own suicide...
...Abrahamsen leaps from the known facts to argue that Hannah's home was "joyless," that she perhaps cared for Richard "as much out of duty as out of real love," was "repressed," "anger-filled" and "castrating." Abrahamsen offers scant evidence for these judgments, relying heavily upon a single, pathetic letter from Richard as a lonely ten-year-old. The ex-President's cousin. Novelist Jessamyn West, says she tried to talk Abrahamsen out of his opinion of Hannah, and his depiction of the father, Frank Nixon, as "brutal...
Nixon vs. Nixon has won praise, particularly from those involved in similar work. It is "a good, sound portrait," says Lloyd deMause, editor of the four-year-old Journal of Psychohistory. Duke's Barber thinks that Abrahamsen has shown "how far psychoanalytic interpretations can help in understanding" Nixon...
...Abrahamsen himself has no qualms about treating a living subject without permission. Says he: "It would be more irresponsible if we didn't make people aware of who Nixon was and what he is." Abrahamsen wrote the book to warn Americans about politicians' psychology and also in fear that Nixon will return to public life. Given Abrahamsen's thinly supported theories, however, even confirmed Nixon-haters might be tempted to think that the poor man deserves a better job of analysis...