Psychohistorical Essays on the Leader

Review of Charles B. Strozier, Daniel Offer, and Oliger Abdyli, editors, The Leader: Psychological Essays, 2^nd edition (New York: Springer, 2011), 179 pages, ISBN 978-1-4419-8385-5, Hardcover, $124.14.

The first edition of this book appeared in 1985 and its subtitle was then “Psychohistorical Essays.” Most of the contents of this second edition are quite modified from the first. Part One of the 2011 edition (totaling 50 pages in three chapters) is the least modified. It opens with an overview of several ancient leaders, followed by a chapter summarizing psychoanalytic leadership studies from Freud’s early ones through Erik Erikson’s studies of Luther, Gandhi, and Jefferson—recounting en route some highlights of the weekly deliberations that Freud hosted for many years at his home, and also describing vari-

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ous articles published in the journal Imago (which Otto Rank edited from 1912 to 1927). This second chapter insightfully speculates that when Freud pondered the career of Woodrow Wilson, he could discern his “excruciating ambivalence about papa” because he had earlier uncovered such a condition in his patient Little Hans.

The third chapter (“From Erik H. Erikson to Heinz Kohut,” by Strozier and Abdyli) summarizes Erikson’s biographical achievements in six pages, then more briefly summarizes Robert Jay Lifton’s work (highlighting Lifton’s Revolutionary Immortality, on Mao Zedong’s motives for the 1960s Cultural Revolution), and finally devotes eight pages to Heinz Kohut’s theories about leadership and charisma. As a side note, I wish Strozier and Abdyli had double-checked the historical “facts” they use to contextualize Heinz Kohut’s theories, as several mistakes were included. For example, on page 52 they mistakenly say that Otto von Bismarck’s ambitions for Germany were “grandiose” and envisioned “victory over all of Europe and domination in the world,” that the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk occurred in 1917 (rather than March 1918), and was negotiated by Lenin (actually Trotsky). Also, on the same page, that in the West in 1918 German lines were “about to break and a full-scale invasion of Germany was in the offing” (both wrong in my opinion)—that the Catholic Center Party leader Matthias Erzberger was Jewish and a Social Democrat, and that Hindenburg sent him to France “to sign the armistice” (Prince Max of Baden sent him to France to negotiate an armistice).

The book’s second part is much longer than the first and includes a truly outstanding 40-page chapter by Thomas Kohut on the leadership of Germany by Kaiser Wilhelm II. If you lack enough time to read anything else about Wilhelm II, this is what to read. Wilhelm’s lack of “empathetic caretakers in early life” left him reliant “upon ‘self-objects’ to direct his ambitions and determine his ideals.” Wilhelm thereby “could only feel harmonious when…affirmed and appreciated by those around him.” His “lack of a secure sense of psychological cohesion and continuity—that is, his narcissistic psychopathology—is at the heart of his historical significance” (pp. 81-83). Without being heavy-handed, Kohut shows not only the roots of Wilhelm’s neurosis but how disastrously it distorted Germans’ self-image (although I believe that Wilhelm’s ouster at the behest of Woodrow Wilson was even more disastrous, terminating as it did a salutary German learning curve and reawaking xenophobic German nationalism).

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Two other exemplary chapters are among Part Two’s total of five. Bruce B. Lawrence, editor of the 2005 book Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama Bin Laden, contributes a chapter on “Osama Bin Laden: The Man and the Myth.” Despite minimal reference to any particular psychologist’s theories, Lawrence’s speculations about Bin Laden’s inner life story are nonetheless convincing.

The other exemplary chapter is authored by Dan P. Adams, who wrote the 2006 book The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By. Here Adams’ chapter is on “Redemptive Narratives in the Life and the Presidency of George W. Bush.” His respectful analysis convincingly places Bush’s self-understanding of his mid-life transformation in the context of his upbringing, his alcoholic lost years, and his conservative cultural milieu.

Part Two also contains two other chapters, neither of which I warmed to. It begins with Charles Stozier’s “Lincoln and the Crisis of the 1850s,” which, besides over-generalizing, fails to keep its subject matter in the vicinity of its theoretical sounding board (which is Heinz Kohut’s theory of the group self). Likewise in the book’s final chapter, David Terman’s “Paranoid Leadership,” I again wished for fewer generalizations, but Terman does consistently “sound” his evidence against his sounding board, which is Heinz Kohut’s theory of narcissistic injury and subsequent narcissistic rage—which can then either match a society’s mindset (as in Hitler’s case) or not match a society’s mindset (as in Nixon’s case)—an interesting theory.

Overall, I found this book’s usefulness uneven. Its steep price would prohibit me from buying it, but some researchers and research libraries will surely want to acquire it.

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