The Psychological Assessment of Political LeadersFromm (1973), and Waite (1977), as well as the comprehensive
review of Hitler biographies and psychobiographies by Rosenbaum
(1998), Kershaw (1999), and Langer (1999). Compared to their col-
leagues working in government, academic profilers have it easy.
Academic political psychologists have also had the scholarly
leisure and resources to reflect about what they are doing when they
try to assess the personalities of political leaders they have never met.
As a result, they have formulated canons of principle and procedure
for studying personality at a distance. This chapter reviews the aca-
demic side to profiling leaders' personalities. It begins with the
academic development, elaboration, and critique of psychobiography
and related techniques that are similar to how clinicians (psychia-
trists or clinical psychologists) would assess someone if they had
direct access (via therapy, interviews, and so forth). It then moves on
to discuss the development of objective and valid techniques for mea-
suring, at a distance, specific personality variables and syndromes.
Perhaps the first attempt to relate a leader's foreign policy to that
leader's personality factors was the brief interpretation of a dream of
the nineteenth-century German chancellor Otto von Bismarck by
the psychoanalyst Hanns Sachs (1913). (Freud reprinted the paper in
later editions of The Interpretation of Dreams {1901} 1953, 378—81.)
In 1863, Sachs noted, Bismarck had dreamed that he was at an
impasse on a narrow Alpine mountain path. With his riding whip,
he struck a rock, which crumbled to reveal an easy, broad path down
to a forest valley in Austria, where there were Prussian troops with
banners. According to Sachs's interpretation, the dream suggested
that beneath the conscious political plans of Bismarck the statesman—
to provoke a war with Austria to achieve German unification (repre-
sented in the dream by the presence of Prussian soldiers in Aus-
tria)—were unconscious personal fantasies of infantile masturbation
(handling the whip), erotic conquest (the broad path through the
mountains), and even an identification with the Biblical Moses
(striking the rock).
Doing Psychobiography
What is a psychobiography or clinical at-a-distance assessment? One
useful definition, based on Glad 1973, is that psychobiography
involves the systematic application of psychological theory or con-