George W Bush, Barbara and the fetus in the jar

What on earth was Barbara Bush doing when she showed her teenage son George the fetus she had kept in a jar following a miscarriage she suffered in the mid-1960s?

George W Bush's defence of waterboarding - and his claim that it saved lives by preventing attacks on Canary Wharf and Heathrow - has got all the headlines on the day of publication of his memoir, Decision Points.

But the oddest moment from his promotion of the book came during last night's TV interview with NBC's Matt Lauer when Bush, referring to himself in the third person, told this story about his mother Barbara (pictured above while George W Bush steps on his father, George H W).

"She says to her teenage kid, 'Here's a fetus". There's no question that it affected me."
 
Indeed. And it looks like it'll keep the shrinks busy for days.

Stacey J. McLaughlin, a Florida psychologist who wrote Surviving
Miscarriage: You Are Not Alone, told the Daily Beast website that people have a variety of responses to the death of an unborn child.
"The biggest thing now is for parents of, for example, a stillborn baby to call in a videographer or take some of the baby's hair, if the baby had hair. "

The Washington psychoanalyst Justin Frank, also talking to the Daily Beast, said he considered Barbara's behaviour to be that of an extremely depressed person. "Probably also extremely angry... because I think she's saying - essentially - that she has had to suffer."

Barbara Bush showed the fetus to her son after suffering the miscarriage at home and, with her husband George Snr out of town, asking George Jnr to drive her to the hospital. The book makes it clear that she placed the fetus in the jar because the hospital asked her to bring it with.

But why would Dubya be so keen to discuss the episode with Lauer? He said it explained his pro-life, anti-abortion stance - yet his mother has always been pro-choice.

Psychoanalyst Justin Frank has a theory. Bush had a younger sister, Robin, who died of leukaemia at the age of four, when George was seven.

She was, says Frank, who wrote the 2004 book Bush on the Couch, the light of the Bush family's life - but they never discussed her death afterwards.

Says Frank: "Maybe this is a displacement of his wish to talk about his dead sister, who he never really got a chance to mourn."

London psychoanalyst Coline Covington, a regular contributor to The First Post, was most taken by the absence - however coincidental - of the father during this strange episode and the need of Barbara Bush to treat her son as her substitute partner.

Picking up on the death of four-year-old Robin a decade earlier, Covington also said: "The miscarriage represented the second child in the family to die. Children can feel terribly responsible when younger siblings die. They can suffer from survivor guilt. The deaths could have left him with huge expectations of himself."

And who said George Bush's memoirs were going to be boring? ·