The Psychological Assessment of Political Leadersevidence—perhaps especially the written words—of the person
being studied. To do this well, psychobiographers must have both
empathy and detachment, as well as an awareness of their own emo-
tional reactions to their subject (George and George 1998, 1). After
immersion in these "data," psychobiographers then employ all their
mental faculties to work over the data.
All this mass of material the biographer lets flow freely into
him. He is the medium through whom the chaotic raw data
{are} digested, ultimately to be rendered back in an orderly ver-
bal re-creation of an intelligible human being... what kind of
person {he} was, what his characteristic attitudes and defenses
were and how they developed, what made him anxious, what
gratified him, what goals and values he adopted, how he went
about pursuing them. (George and George 1998, 17-18)
This process often involves a repeated cycling back and forth from
biographical fact to theoretical concept. Of necessity, it engages
every mental faculty of the psychobiographer: curiosity and sensitiv-
ity to "facts," the capacity for logical thought, a fine-tuned awareness
of feelings, and a mobile, even playful intuition (see George and
George 1998, chaps, 1 and 3). Finally, successful psychobiographers
must have an appreciation for complexity, realizing that the person-
ality of any political actor is always expressed in a context—that is,
in "institutional variables, situational variables, and those aspects of
political culture that the leader has internalized during the course of
his or her political socialization or that affect his or her performance
even if not internalized" (67). In this connection, psychobiographies
that offer a longitudinal perspective are particularly valuable,
because they help us understand how previous life experiences shape
present political behavior and help us distinguish political behaviors
that are merely the result of role from those that reflect strong person-
ality influences engaged by political circumstances.
Several books and articles contain lists of psychobiographical
studies (Cocks and Crosby 1987, esp. 217-22; Crosby and Crosby
1981; Elms 1994; Friedman 1994; Glad 1973; Greenstein 1969,
esp. 72; Howe 1997; McAdams and Ochberg 1988; Runyan 1983,
1984, 1988a, 1988b, 1990, 1997; Simonton 1999; Stone and
Schaffner 1988) that provide a good survey of this literature.