BIDEN'S SLIPS
But why was no one interested in why exactly he made the slips? - a contribution from Darian Leader, psychoanalyst and author.
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Below, a contribution from my dear friend, Darian Leader, psychoanalyst and author.
Even more startling than Joe Biden's slips of the tongue at the NATO conference was the total lack of interest in what they might have meant. The gaffes - reported around the world and the subject of more mockery than compassion - were instantly taken to be signs of cognitive decline. These were the marks of an aging brain, unable to master speech and confusing words, and important words at that: he called President Zelensky 'Putin' and Vice -President Kamala Harris 'Trump'. If the President of the United States is going to make slips like this in public, something must be done. Supporters, press pundits and critics all suggested change, advising Biden to step down to let someone with a sharper brain take over. Â
But why was no one interested in why exactly he made the slips? It was as if they segued instantly into an explanation: this was the decline of aging rather than a source of meaning. Whereas Freud had showed more than a hundred years ago how slips of the tongue are a portal to unconscious truth, they now became little more than signatures of a neurogenerative process. We could contrast Biden's slip with Tony Blair's famous reference during the Iraq war to "weapons of mass distraction". This was also of course a gaffe: he had used the word 'distraction' instead of 'destruction', but it was seen not as a sign of cognitive decline but, on the contrary, the emergence of a truth - that the weapons of mass-destruction that were being vaunted as the reason to go to war were in fact just an excuse, a distraction necessary to swing public opinion in favour of military action.
Did Biden's slips also reveal a truth? Well, let's start by asking what they had in common. Calling Zelensky 'Putin' and Harris 'Trump' does follow a logic: an ally and friend's name is replaced by the name of an enemy and rival. The substitutions are thus perfectly coherent, and we might speculate that these very public slips reveal a truth - that of Biden's situation within his own party. The Democrats are his friends, yet he knows very well that they are out to replace him, to put someone else's name in the place of his own. His friends are in fact, at some level, his deadliest enemies - and this is exactly what the slips involved, as allies became adversaries.Â
We could contrast the lack of interest in the meaning of Biden's slips with the vast efflorescence of meaning surrounding the shooting of Trump. Conspiracy theories at both ends of the political spectrum were swiftly broadcast, seeking to make sense of what had happened, to give it a meaning within a wider network of actions, events, beliefs and interests. This couldn't be the work of a random shooter but must be part of some hidden programme, staged perhaps to inflate the Trump vote or permitted by malevolent secret service agents. Biden's self-harming acts are deprived of meaning where Trump's being harmed takes on more and more meaning.
Whatever we make of these semantic trends, they show how meaning - and its absence - are key parts of the political process.Â
Leader’s latest book, Is It Ever Just Sex?, published by Penguin, is available to buy here.
While your point that Biden's gaffes should elicit more compassion than ridicule is valid, your assertions that they find meaning based on Freud's assertions about the unconscious as a doorway to truth are questionable. Freud's theories have long been criticised for their lack of scientific validity as they are unable to be falsified; this places them more in the realm of pseudoscience. However, this is not to say that Freud's contributions are entirely worthless as his psychoanalytic approach has been fundamental to talk therapy. The idea that the content of the gaffes signifies an alternate and deeper meaning is a valiant attempt at attributing meaning where there likely is none. Sometimes a gaffe is just a gaffe; particularly when the speaker is advanced in years and likely experiencing excessive stress.
I once attended a meeting to discuss the provision of support for people with dementia and their loved ones (usually a spouse) who had become socially isolated as a result of the condition. For obvious reasons this is a very hard group of people to connect with. They are not able to organise on a local level and present a vocal united front in the way many charities have become very adept at doing, and yet they desperately need help.
Though I am sure there are those in the higher echelons of public healthcare in the UK who might, upon eyeing the budget sheet, be inclined to turn a blind eye and allow nature to run its course, there are also health and social care workers at ground level who will take up the fight on behalf of those who find themselves marginalised as a result of an illness. I have been watching this class of individual slowly vanish as the NHS progresses towards its reinvention as a private/public venture, that is restrictive when it should allow freedom to make judgement calls and alarmingly lax when professionalism should be the order of the day. You will not know what you have lost until people like this have been expunged from the service in the name of corporate interests.
The meeting was held in a room at the foot of a tower block of council flats; one of those liminal spaces, that the local authority has access to, that seem to phase in and out of existence like Brigadoon. Despite arriving early, I ended up being a quarter of an hour late because I couldn't find the place. I remain convinced that it only cycled into our plane of existence after I had walked around the foot of the block the requisite number of times.
The severity of the problem under discussion was made glaringly obvious by the fact that the healthcare professionals in attendance outnumbered the members of public who had turned up; the latter amounting to an elderly couple who lived just down the road.
I was very pleased to reacquaint myself with a speech and language therapist with whom I had formed a good working relationship while I was employed at Southend Hospital. During a break, she asked me to identify which of the elderly couple was the one with dementia. Though I answered correctly, it was more of an educated guess.
I understand that there is a phenomenon related to dementia called 'masking' where a spouse or a family member will, often subconsciously, assist in concealing the mental decline of a loved one, by covering for their missteps or, in extreme cases, by adopting a similar demeanour so the condition is less obvious. It is as touching as it is tragic. The kindest thing that you can do for a friend or family member who you suspect may have dementia is to steer them towards a diagnosis and treatment at the earliest possible opportunity.
I don't dispute that slips of the tongue are interesting and a potential revelator of hidden truths. However, I've been around enough dementia patients to recognise advancing cognitive decline when I see it. While I have no love for Biden (whose family make the Kennedys look like The Waltons by comparison) the collective masking of his deteriorating mental state, by his party and a complicit media, amounts to out in the open elder abuse, on a par with that experienced by the Marvel Comics founder, Stan Lee, during his final years. It is a cynical move aimed at ushering a clearly ailing man into the starting gate of a two horse race, so that whoever has been running the United States over the past four years can continue to do so.