The Psychological Assessment of Political Leadersthen constructs a psychological explanation—in Greenstein's terms,
"the dynamics." That is, what combination of assumed psychological
concepts (motives, defenses, cognitions, traits) can transform the phe-
nomenology from something that is "surprising and unusual" to
something that is understandable, reasonable, or "normal." Here there
is more likely to be disagreement. For example, Runyan mentions
thirteen different theories that attempt to explain Van Gogh's action.
Runyan (1981) then goes on to suggest some criteria by which we
can evaluate alternative psychobiography explanations or dynamics:
comprehensiveness, consistency with other known biographical
facts, parsimony, and the ability to predict (or "retrodict") additional
behaviors. The problem, of course, is to avoid circular explanations
in which the validity of the explanation is no more than the behavior
that the explanation was constructed to explain. It advances our
understanding very little if we explain Woodrow Wilson's unwill-
ingness to compromise as due to his obsessive-compulsive personal-
ity and then attempt to validate our explanation by citing his
unwillingness to compromise. At the very least, we need to adduce
further supporting biographical evidence for our interpretation; bet-
ter still, we should try to develop some independent measure of the
postulated psychological dynamics.
Finally, some psychobiographers try to trace the origins, or gene-
sis, of the presumed dynamics in the childhood, early experience, or
development of their subject. This third task is optional: an account
of the origins of a psychological characteristic may bolster our
confidence in the correctness of the analysis, but it is by no means
necessary. In fact, such accounts are often quite controversial, for
independent supporting evidence that the relevant trauma, experi-
ence, or events actually happened is usually quite hard to uncover
from historical sources, which are usually more meager in their cov-
erage of childhood years. As a result, many psychobiographers are
thrown back upon unsatisfying circular explanations that involve
speculative phrases such as "X must have felt that..." or "most chil-
dren react to this by developing ..."
Psychobiography Illustrated: The Case of Woodrow Wilson
We can illustrate Greenstein's three tasks by referring to psychobio-
graphical interpretations of Woodrow Wilson, the twenty-eighth