Mariano Grondona on the Psychobiography of Argentine Politicians

Mariano Grondona is one of Argentina’s best known intellectuals and newspaper columnists, and one of very few who incorporates a psychohistorical worldview in his work. His book La Realidad: El Despertar del Sueño Argentino (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 2002) is a psychologically sensitive account of Argentine political culture. Now he is turning to psychobiography for insights into the behavior of the Argentine leadership. In a column called “The Psychobiography of Our Politicians” in a leading Buenos Aires newspaper (La Nación, September 2005), he observes that “it is common to evaluate our politicians by the goals they propose and the methods they use to achieve them. This means paying attention only to their rational side, as if they were chess players. A new vision of politicians has developed in the last few

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years, one which views them not as chess players but as beings of flesh and bone, with their passions and complexes, with their irrational side.”

Grondona describes psychobiography as a growing discipline that examines the unconscious minds of political leaders, paying more attention to their childhoods than to their political programs. He uses Jerrold Post’s edited book The Psychological Assessment of Political Leaders as a starting point, but develops his own simplified analytical framework. Grondona classifies Argentine politicians as integrators, conciliators or personalists. Integrators are politicians who devote themselves to defending the integrity of their own political party in difficult times. As an example, he cites Ricardo Balbín, a leader of the Argentina’s leading middle-class party, the Unión Cívica Radical, who defended his party during a period of dominance by the Partido Justicialista of Juan Domingo Perón. Later in his career, Balbín became a conciliator when he reached out beyond his party to help build a national accord. Perón had dominated the country as a personalist leader for thirty years when the country and its institutions revolved around him personally.

In Grondona’s view, integrators and conciliators are consistent with a democratic political system, but personalist politicians have psychological traits that must be constrained for a democratic system to function well. In his view, two of Perón’s successors in his political party have caused problems by prolonging the personalist style: former president Carlos Menem and current president Néstor Carlos Kirchner. Former president Eduardo Duhalde, however, was an integrator when he cut short his own presidency to resolve a crisis by allowing Kirchner to take power.

In Grondona’s view, “the personalist politician cannot prosper without the adulation and even the obsequiousness of those who surround him. At times, one does not know which is more shocking, the personalist leaders who continue to flourish in contradiction to our democratic system, or the wide reserves of obsequiousness displayed in our political life.” Grondona explains that personalist politicians have an inflated ego rooted in narcissism caused by low self-esteem which causes them to surround themselves with people who give them fawning adulation. This is often accompanied by a quasi-paranoid tendency to see everyone who fails to give unconditional adulation as a conspiring enemy.

Grondona says that three pathological personality types are common among Argentine politicians:

• the narcissistic personality who compensates for low self-esteem by surrounding himself with people who give him unlimited admiration.
• the quasi-paranoid personality who believes that all who disagree with him are part of a dark conspiracy.
• the obsessive-compulsive personality who is so single-mindedly committed to his own work that he rejects all compromise.

Domingo Cavallo, a brilliant and charismatic economist who had remarkable success as Economy Minister in the 1990s, is characterized as exhibiting obsessive-compulsive with narcissistic personality traits. Cavallo tenaciously tried to maintain his economic program in 2002 when there was little hope of it succeeding. Cavallo had accepted a second appointment as Economy Minister at a time when the convertibility plan he had established in the 1990s was in a profound crisis and many experts thought that a devaluation was inevitable. When his plans failed, despite a valiant effort, Cavallo was scapegoated and demonized by the public he worked to hard to serve. He and then President Fernando de la Rúa were forced out of office, with de la Rúa forced by crowds to escape from the Presidential Palace’s roof in a helicopter.

After a period of voluntary exile at American universities, Cavallo has recently returned to run for Congress despite polls that show his chances of success to be negligible. He believes that his economic ideas were right and is using the Congressional campaign to defend them. He now realizes, however, that it may be some time before the Argentine leadership and public are ready to accept the kind of economic policies the country really needs.

Grondona cites several Argentine politicians as examples of quasi-paranoid thinking, including presidential candidates Carlos Menem and Elisa Carrió who thought they detected a “sickness” in Néstor Kirchner’s aspirations to the

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presidency. Quasi-paranoid thinking is common in Argentine politics, perhaps because there actually are many political conspiracies. Grondona observes that “all politicians exhibit some form of psychological excess, without which they would lack the powerful ambition required to jump into the arena with the lions.” Democracy can be saved, in Grondona’s view, if politicians are able to put aside their animosities after the heat of the campaigns and listen to each other.

Psychoanalysis is well established as a therapeutic practice in Buenos Aires which probably has as many analysts per capita as New York. Only recently, however, have psychoanalysts been asked to comment on political events, and they have not been particularly well prepared to respond. In a BBC World Service broadcast on January 24, 2002, one analyst opined that “it is an essential aspect of Argentine political character to oscillate between periods of supporting illusions and periods when reality becomes plain and conscious.” Another stated that “the unconscious feeling of guilt in our society is very deeply tied in with the still unprocessed aspects of the military government, the repression, the murders.” Another stated that “we are a sado-masochistic country that can only feel joy in suffering.” (Quotes from Mariano Plotkin, Argentina on the Couch: Psychiatry, State and Society, 1880 to the Present, University of New Mexico Press, 2003, pp. 224-227).

In commenting on the BBC program, Mariano Plotkin observes that “the analysts’s contributions were mostly limited to reductionist explanations of the origins of the crisis based on psychological generalizations heavily loaded with psychoanalytic jargon.” They do, however, show an interest which might be enriched by study of psychohistorical literature. The fact that this literature is being read and discussed by a scholar of Mariano Grondona’s reputation is encouraging.

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