My guest today is Dr. Justin A. Frank, a former clinical professor of psychiatry at the George Washington University Medical Center and a physician with more than 40 years of experience in psychoanalysis.

He's the bestselling author of Bush on the couch, Obama on the couch, and most recently Trump on the couch, inside the mind of the president, which we're talking about today.

Dr. Frank, welcome to the show.

Thank you.

Good to be here.

So the first question I had, Dr. Frank, is now that you've analyzed the last three U.S.

presidents, and I'm wondering, how does this sort of analysis at a distance work?

Well, there's a tradition of something that's called applied psychoanalysis, which is applying

psychoanalytic principles, which involves the family history, the background, various

character traits of a person and patterns of behavior and studying them when you can't get

the person into your consulting room. So it's a long tradition that has been done with historical

figures, with current political figures, et cetera, started really 100 years ago.

And it's very thorough.

The biggest difference is that the person is not in my office.

So what I do is I study everything they've ever written, everything I can find that's written about,

all the public information there is about them and their

family then in the modern living which is really has the benefit of video and tweeting and all

those things I can actually learn more about their behavior than I would if they were

exclusively in my office because then I would never know about their outside life, except what

they tell me about at my consultant. So it's a very thorough process. Each book took at least a year

and a half to write.

A lot of thorough research, a lot of reading.

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