The Montreal Gazette  |  August 30, 1997

SHRINKING HEADS OF STATES

Can pschoanalysis cure political problems?

By Eric Siblin

Quebec separatist leader Lucien Bouchard is not the first politician to suffer the indignity of being psychoanalyzed behind his back, to see his larger-than-life stature brought down to life — shrunk, in fact — by the discerning eye of a distant and bearded observer.      Ever since Sigmund Freud turned his powers of observation on U.S. president Woodrow Wilson, few political leaders have emerged unscathed by the weaponry of modern psychology. Intelligence services, historians, political scientists and campaign strategists have regularly analyzed their subjects without a whisper of clinical evidence, and with varying degrees of success.      When Toronto psychiatrist Vivian Rakoff prepared his psychological profile of Bouchard, at the behest of federal Liberal Member of Parliament John Godfrey, he was operating in well-charted academic waters; it was an inevitably imperfect attempt to analyze someone from afar. It was not meant to be a “psychiatric report,” Rakoff said this week, because he did not have access to the premier's “intimate personal history.” Instead, Rakoff was aiming for something like a “book review” of Bouchard's psyche. And it was not meant for publication.      When Rakoff's “book review” came to light in the new biography of Bouchard by Lawrence Martin, it was greeted with much resistance. People rushed to wash their hands of Rakoff's snapshot, from the Reform Party to the New Democratic Party to official psychiatric opinion. Bouchard's inner circle dismissed it as “pseudo-scientific mockery.”      It would otherwise have been routine, innocuously academic, but for the fact that a federal MP had initiated the project and that Prime Minister Jean Chretien's advisers had read the 10,000-word profile, though the prime minister said he'd never heard of it.      Going public with someone else's psyche falls very much in a gray area, morally and scientifically. “In my opinion,” Freud wrote in 1922, “psychoanalysis should never be used as a weapon in literary or political polemics.” But even Freud could not resist such partisan temptation. His study of Wilson was largely written by his U.S. co-author, William Bullitt, yet reflected Freud's intense dislike of the subject.      “He had strong feelings about righteous moralists who think they have a direct pipeline to God but do things that really cause a lot of harm,” said Peter Loewenberg, a psychoanalyst and professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles. Freud's animosity toward Wilson gained ground in the 1930s; Wilson was dead, and Freud himself was at the end of his life, in poor health, embittered by the pernicious turn of events in Europe.      Wilson was viewed by Freud as the high-minded architect of the Versailles treaty, which ended World War I but set the stage for the next war. The “psychobiography” of the U.S. president — which was not published by Bullitt until after the death of Wilson's widow in 1963 — disparaged Wilson for having an unresolved Oedipus complex. It was not a high point in Freud's career.      But the patriarch of psychoanalysis routinely transferred his theories from couch to culture, playing psychological detective with historical figures ranging from Moses to Leonardo da Vinci. Many others in the social sciences would follow in his footsteps, some more cautious and persuasive than the master himself, others shooting from the hip.      The most famous case of political probing was in 1943, when the head of U.S. intelligence sought the guidance of psychoanalysis; not for himself, but for the war effort. General (Wild) Bill Donovan, who was in charge of the Office of Strategic Services, commissioned four distinguished psychoanalysts to put together a profile of Adolph Hitler. The OSS, precursor of the CIA, was looking for likely scenarios as to what Hitler might do as the war ran its course. The analysts did not have any clinical data and were forced to rely on speeches and writings such as the autobiography Mein Kampf, as well as an interview with the Nazi leader's chauffeur and accounts by defectors.      “They looked at what kind of a personality this man had and made an accurate prediction,” Loewenberg said. “They (concluded) that when the Third Reich comes crashing down, this man's going to suicide.” (The study was declassified in 1972 and published as “The Mind of Adolph Hitler: The Secret Wartime Report.”) ”We can infer that since (World War II) intelligence agencies government agencies do that sort of thing. And so when a leader has to meet with another leader, they prepare briefings, including psychological profiles.”      Loewenberg himself got a call in 1994 from the head of the Russian desk at the State Department. The CIA had translated the autobiography of Russian nationalist leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky and the State Department asked the UCLA professor to venture a psychohistorical study. The State Department was concerned about Zhirinovsky's sabre-rattling persona, Loewenberg said in an interview from Los Angeles.      After examining Zhirinovsky's autobiography and press clippings, the UCLA professor painted the picture of a politician with a “vindictive ideology” and a “desire to dominate and coerce submission from the Turks and those whom he views as enemies.”      In his recent book, “Fantasy and Reality in History” (Oxford University Press 1995), Loewenberg writes that Zhirinovsky “cruelly attacks perceived enemies in Russian politics and foreign countries and has paranoid fears of their retaliation. The human qualities of Turks and others he hates are polarized and split off, so they can be loathed without guilt, fear, or shame,” Loewenberg wrote.      Loewenberg also put together a memo for U.S. President Bill Clinton, advising him on what emotional buttons to push in a hypothetical meeting with the Russian nationalist leader.      All this he did with roughly the same type of second-hand evidence as Rakoff used to compile his Bouchard profile.      In the case of Bouchard, Rakoff describes the Quebec premier as a narcissistic personality, loyal only to himself, with a heartfelt penchant for assuming and shedding identities.      But attempting psychoanalytic sketches outside the confines of the analyst's office is a fragile business, and Rakoff acknowledged that his undertaking was intrinsically suspect.      The historian or political scientist cannot duplicate in the archives or the armchair what goes on behind the closed door of psychoanalytic therapy. That situation revolves around a protracted dialogue between patient and therapist, one based on free-association of thoughts, examination of dreams and subtle interactions. However, the process is also based on the notion that nearly everything is “grist for the mill,” opening the door to psychoanalytic inquiry in many corners of society.      The application of psychoanalysis to cultural investigation is an established, if controversial, practice. There has been a constant stream of studies which focus on the psychology behind leaders, the societies being led, and the connection between the two.      The pioneering work of “psychohistory” was written by psychoanalyst Erik Erikson in his 1958 study of Martin Luther. Although four centuries separated Erikson from Luther, there was plenty of grist for the analytic mill. Speaking of his subject in Young Man Luther, Erikson wrote: “He indulged himself as he grew older in florid self-revelations of a kind which can make a clinical biographer feel that he is dealing with a client.”      Peter Gay, a history professor emeritus at Yale University and author of a multi-volume history of Victorian society, also enlists psychoanalytic methods. Reading entries from private journals as though they were chains of associations, Gay — who is trained as an analyst — has been struck by how much the process resembled the verbal meanderings of patients on the couch.      That said, history is fair game for Gay, but contemporary public figures are out of bounds; on ethical grounds, he is opposed to publicly analyzing living politicians.      Psychobiographies aimed at contemporary politicians are usually written by authors with an axe to grind, which is far removed the “benevolent neutrality” of psychoanalysis, he said in an interview from New Haven, Conn.      “You should not use analysis as a weapon, no matter what — not to run somebody down at a cocktail party or run down a separatist leader,” Gay said. “I probably would be able to find nasty things to say to the separatist leader — without worrying about his Oedipus complex.”