Psychoanalytic Scholarship on American Presidents

American presidents have long been a subject of fascination to psychodynamically inclined historians, political scientists, psychiatrists, and others. Even Freud himself contributed to this genre (1910). The following article draws upon many important studies in the field, including those by Abrahamsen (Nixon), Brodie (Jefferson, Nixon), the Georges (Wilson), Glad (Carter), Kearns (Johnson), Mazlish (Nixon, Carter), Renshon (Clinton), Rogin (Jackson), and Strozier (Lincoln). It explores many of the issues involved in doing presidential psychobiography; it discusses the sources available for examining contemporary presidents and presidential candidates; it spells out the ways in which psychoanalytic experience is useful to the psychobiographer; and it discusses some of the pitfalls to be avoided in doing this important work.

Psychoanalysts and others interested in the early application of Freud's insights to biography and history were soon applying their knowledge to American presidents. Not surprisingly, they started by researching deceased presidents who were safely in the past, and as time went on, came to write about more recent presidents. Some psychoanalytically informed scholars also began to study those still in the White House as well as presidential candidates. The results have been varied, but by and large they have enormously increased our knowledge of presidential childhoods, personalities, decision making, unconscious motivation, and the relationships between leaders and led.

In his classic study,  Psychopathology and Politics, Harold Lasswell (1930), a famous early advocate of applying Freud's findings to politics, correctly wrote that “political science without biography is a form of taxidermy,” lacking a sense of the life of the humans who make politics happen (Lasswell, 1966, p. 1). Political science as a profession has been fairly open to the idea of using psychological approaches to politics.