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In this short paper, I try to explain how an American career diplomat discovered the critical importance of psychoanalytic theory to political analysis and the making of foreign policy. This is a daunting task, not least because I have never formally studied psychoanalysis, and my knowledge of its extensive literature is limited. But perhaps there is an advantage in this.
Whenever I came across a theory that explained a political, especially conflicted, situation to me, I made a note of it and continued on about my professional business. I was lucky enough to meet several psychoanalysts and psychoanalytically sensitive psychiatrists and political psychologists in Washington in the 1970s. And after a few years, I was able to write (in collaboration with William D. Davidson) (Davidson and Montville, 1981) an article entitled “Foreign Policy According to Freud,” which was published in the prestigious quarterly, Foreign Policy. This was my first major attempt to marry psychological theory and real-world problems and the beginning of a theory-building process that had started some 15 years earlier.
My first foreign service post was Baghdad, Iraq, in 1965. The basic lesson for a political officer there was that real political identities in Iraq—and therefore loyalties—were found in substate or subnational groupings. Majority Shiite Arabs at that time felt themselves economic and political victims of discrimination by minority