Psychoanalytic Assessments of Character and Performanceefforts to surmount them. However, the emphasis in assessing a pres-
ident's performance cannot lie in appreciating the distance he has
traveled to become president but what he actually did once he got
there.
Constructing Psychological UnderstandingsOnce the analyst has assembled anecdotes, biographical information,
news reports, or other material that points to something that sus-
pects psychologically driven political behavior, the second phase of
the analysis, the formulation of psychological meaning, begins.
Establishing the meaning of the psychological elements revealed in
the data is critical to the analysis. This means trying to formulate
how the element functions, what psychological purposes it serves,
and what role it plays in the subject's overall psychology.
There is, of course, a theoretical and conceptual paradox in such
work. Evidence of any psychological element, including character
and personality, is found in behavior, but it is also behavior that we
seek to understand and explain. The analyst cannot use the very same
behavior to both extract by inference and cross-validate an element
that is then used to explain that same behavior. What the analyst
must do in these circumstances is examine a range of behaviors in
order to strengthen such psychological inferences. These must then
be cross-validated by reference to both other psychological character-
istics that are theoretically linked as well as behaviors other than
those used to make the original inferences.
This does not require the analyst to pierce the deepest recesses of
a president's psychology. The psychoanalytically trained observer of
candidates and presidents can often find some insight into the mean-
ings of their behavior by observing behavior in a variety of contexts
to gain some understanding of their most important behavioral pref-
erences. The analyst can then seek out clues to the pattern of such
behaviors. These patterns, which form the basis of psychological
inference, need to be tested against other, different behaviors for con-
sistency with theoretical understanding and an understanding of the
contexts in which these behaviors took place.
The psychologically minded analyst of political leadership faces a
number of dilemmas in formulating dynamic understandings. The
first involves uncovering and establishing the psychological ele-