There has been a decline in recent years of interdisciplinary efforts to apply psychiatric insights and findings to the explanation of social—and especially political—phenomena. After reviewing the puzzling pattern of social science data on the symbolic meaning of the American President to citizens, I have suggested why scattered psychoanalytic evidence on this topic, if systematically expanded and validated, might provide a missing link in our explanatory account of how the public orients itself toward the President. However, the several existing psychoanalytic case reports on public orientations toward the President (as shown by reactions to the death of a President in office) fall short of adequacy in terms of evidence and inference. A systematic, continuing program for accumulating understanding about the symbolic values to citizens of events in the wider environment (including the persons and activities of

the President)—a program of the sort proposed here—would do much to eliminate the methodological inadequacies.