https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/07/mary_trump_abusing_psychology_to_abuse_her_uncle.html
Sheldon Roth, M.D., a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, is the author of recently published Psychologically Sound: The Mind of Donald J. Trump.
Hidden Messages
Before you open this book or turn a page, look at the cover. What do we see? A handsome, young Donald Trump, in dashing cadet uniform, during one of the finest periods of his life. In his five years at New York Military Academy, he reaped undiluted acclaim from faculty and classmates — a model student in behavior and academics, popular with classmates, a star athlete elected to the school’s Athletic Hall of Fame, garnering offers from Major League Baseball. For a book entitled Too Much and Not Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, what is the meaning of this charming cover? Is it Simon & Schuster’s unconscious peeking through Mary Trump’s agonized victimization? Do they know something she is disinclined to acknowledge?
Turning to the book’s pages conjures another challenging image, a lexical one: Tolstoy’s opening line of Anna Karenina — “All happy families are alike, unhappy families are unhappy each in their own ways.” The story of the first proposition is yet to be written, since conflict — unhappiness — is inherent to life. Some families have more conflict, some less, but it is inescapable. Any family in COVID-19 lockdown will readily testify to this truism.
A Psychopathology of Everyday Life
Mary Trump turns all Trump family conflict into prima facie psychopathology. Relying as she does on fantastical speculation for thin formulations about the childhood experience of Fred Sr. and Mary Anne Trump’s complicated family of seven (decades before Mary Trump was born) further muddies her questionable psychological lens. Equally startling is the biased degree to which she views her deceased father, Fred Jr. — perpetrator of domestic wife abuse leading to divorce, repeated abject employment failures, and an ugly history of debilitating alcoholism that contributed to his early death — as the only “self-made” hero of the family. Even if one accepted her dubious psychological judgments, which I do not, her objectivity defies credulity.