Psychiatry and Politics: A Panel

The word psychopolltics has considerable appeal to me. Politics has always seemed psycho-crazy. Despite the analyses and predictions of economists, politicians, and a wide variety of social scientists, politics has seemed to remain essentially chaotic, unpredictable, illogical, and confused. Helen Gahagan Douglas, a worthy liberal standard-bearer, voted against making mandatory the disclosure of presidential, so-called executively privileged material. Her political enemy, Richard Nixon, longtime symbol of antiliberalism, voted that presidents must disclose and that executive privilege must bow to congressional requirement. Today, Nixon fights for executive privilege and for his political life. Nixon, once the prototype enemy of Communism, now represents the position of profound and enduring friendship with Communist China and the Soviet Union. And indeed, he encouraged trade relations which may disturb our own economy for a decade. Senator Ervin, longtime anti-civil-rights legislator, becomes the champion of liberals. Henry Kissinger, once a well-known anti-Nixon Harvard intellectual, now delivers his president's middle-American messages to all parts of the world.

These seeming incongruities and inconsistencies are relatively simple and minor compared to the vagaries of how people vote. To me, the larger appeal of the word psychopolitics is its implication that there is indeed a psychology to politics. Since politics is practiced by people, then this area as well as any of its sub-areas must be at least as complex as people themselves are. I feel that psychoanalysis may conceivably reveal much about politics, and studies of politics may reveal more about people than do Rorschach tests. I have come to believe that people vote the way they do, join particular parties, and become impassioned about political causes more as a result of deep psychological motivations than because of apparent socioeconomic influences. Most of these psychological dynamics, like nearly all ot