The Psychological Assessment of Political Leadersality puts constraints upon information processing, the range of beliefs and
attitudes, and the nature of relationships with the leadership circle, includ-
ing who is chosen to serve in the inner circle, all of which influence political
decision making.
Again, as with the longitudinal analysis and psychobiographic
reconstruction in the previous section, careful attention is given to
all of the traditional elements considered in the clinical case study,^1
but additional elements particular to political leadership are exam-
ined as well. Traditional elements of particular importance to polit-
ical personality include intelligence; knowledge; drives and affects,
including anxiety, aggression, hostility, activity and passivity, and
shame and guilt; evaluation of reality; judgment; interpersonal rela-
tions, including capacity for empathy; identity and ambivalence; and
characteristic ego defenses.^2 The additional elements applicable to
political leaders include health (energy level, working hours, drink-
ing, drugs); cognitive/intellectual style; and the drives for power,
achievement, and affiliation. The latter are important in attempting
to identify whether the leaders sought their leadership role in order
to wield power, to be recorded on the pages of history, or merely to
occupy the seat of power with the attendant place in the limelight.
Ego Defenses and Personality Types
It is particularly important to identify the characteristic pattern of
ego defenses, for it is this repetitive manner of mediating between
the subject's internal and external worlds that is at the heart of per-
sonality, the basis of the structure of character. The identification of
patterns of ego defenses is a matter not of intuition but of pattern
recognition. Well-trained clinicians will reliably identify the same
characteristic ego defenses, but it does not require clinical training to
be sensitive to and identify these patterns.
Clinicians and students of personality development have
identified particular personality types, each of which has a character-
istic array of ego defenses mediating between inner drives and the
external world, each of which has its own cognitive, affective, and
interpersonal style. In evaluating ego defenses, it is useful to dis-
criminate a hierarchy of defenses, from the most primitive through
the mature defenses.^3 Defenses do tend to aggregate, as exemplified
by the so-called psychotic triad of denial, distortion, and delusional