For decades, Dr. Jerrold Post has been treating patients in the usual way, providing fifty-minute doses of psychotherapy in his home office in Bethesda, Maryland, surrounded by the requisite framed diplomas, primitive artifacts, and Kleenex boxes. But many of his most challenging cases have been referred to him by the evening news. As the director of George Washington University's Political Psychology program and the founding director of the C.I.A.'s Center for the Analysis of Personality and Political Behavior, Post is a pioneer in the field of political-personality profiling. He may be the only psychiatrist who has specialized in the self-esteem problems of both Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.
Some people regard the extension of psychology into the realm of world affairs as a kind of quackery. But to Post, a short, amiable grandfather with a thatch of gray hair, psychology is no longer on the periphery of political life. “Terrorism is really at the nexus of psychology and politics,” he said the other day in his office, “because terrorism is a vicious species of psychological warfare waged through the media.” He pointed out that the world today seems increasingly subject to the whims of relatively unknown and unstable rulers. (Post calls them “pop-up leaders.”) “We have satellite photography that can zero in on the dimples on a golf ball,” he said, “but we can't peer into the minds of our adversaries.”
Since last year's terrorist attacks, Post has been consulting confidentially with the Defense Department and the F.B.I. Next month, his conclusions about the mental health of Saddam Hussein and other despots will be published in a collection of essays called “Know Thy Enemy,” which he helped write and edit.
Post's diagnosis of Saddam Hussein, which appears in a chapter that was co-written with an Israeli historian named Amatzia Baram, may surprise some readers. Saddam “is not a madman,” the doctor insists. “It's too simple to just say he's crazy.” Baram, who has been studying Saddam for more than twenty years, says, “He may be a psychopath, but he's very sane.” Post points out that although Saddam is “dangerous in the extreme,” he remains “a judicious, effective political calculator who is by no means irrational, but is using different premises of rationality.” As a result, the authors suggest, “we can do a lot to predict” his behavior. And although Post does not want to appear critical of the officials who are charting our Iraq policy, he is worried that some recent steps by the Bush Administration may prove, as he puts it, “counterproductive.”
In the style of classic psychological case studies, the chapter on Saddam opens with a detailed portrait of the patient's miserable childhood, beginning with his prenatal history. Under a subheading, “The Wounded Self,” the authors reveal that Saddam was born in 1937 to a severely depressed mother. A recent widow, she was so distraught over the loss of both her husband and an older son that she tried repeatedly to abort Saddam and to commit suicide. A neighboring Jewish fam- ily, according to Baram, intervened and saved Saddam's life. (Baram says that this family, who now live in Tel Aviv, refuse to be identified because they are afraid of being blamed for allowing Saddam to be born.) Saddam's mother handed him off to a relative until he was three years old, when she remarried. Although she took the boy back, Saddam's new stepfather apparently despised and abused him. “These early experiences can be seen as profoundly wounding Saddam's emerg- ing self-esteem,” the authors write. From the age of ten, Saddam was reared by an uncle, who encouraged him to dream of becoming a nationalist Arab hero, like Saladin. Saddam's childhood experiences, the authors conclude, led him to grow up believing that the only reliable means of survival was ruthless force.
Post believes that Saddam suffers from “malignant narcissism,” and considers him to be a crafty survivor who will cling to power at any cost. He believes that Saddam is unlikely ever to be persuaded to yield his weapons of mass destruction, as the United States has called on him to do. Post also says that it's unrealistic to think that Saddam will accept any negotiated settlement that involves his own exile or removal from power. As he puts it, “This is a man who will always be power maximizing.” And he is concerned that the President's talk of “regime change” may be dangerous. “To the extent that Saddam comes to believe he has no way out, it backs him into a corner,” Post said. “I'd worry about exaggerated retribution.”
Post emphasizes that what he can offer is only an informed psychological opinion of Saddam, and not a medical diagnosis. After all, he has never been able to ask Saddam whether he's had recurring dreams about showing up naked in math class. But the doctor says that he'd prefer never to see the Iraqi leader on his couch. In the first place, after the years he has spent studying Saddam, there's very little about him that he still finds puzzling. And there's one thing he says he knows for sure: “If Saddam Hussein was in my office, I'd run.”