Psychopathology and politicsLasswell, Harold D. (Harold Dwight)
Science
Psychopathology and politics
Lasswell, Harold D. (Harold Dwight)
Personality and politics; Political science; Psychoanalysis; Psychology, Pathological
Miss G had an enormous masculine complex. She chose masculine goals,
and ruled out the female rôle as far as she could. Her narcissism
brought her from obscurity to distinction, though at the cost of
several neurotic difficulties in which her repressed drives found
crippling expression. She swings between vanity and inferiority
feelings. She blushes when praised, she blushes in public because of
the dependence of her sex on men, and she is timid in the presence of
academic people. She always feels ill at ease with strangers, and lives
in isolation from society.
In theory and in practice Miss G is for free love, and for the complete
equality of the sexes. She sought out politics as a career as a means
of expressing the male rôle of dominance, a drive which was powerfully
organized in her early childhood experiences.[40]
What has been said about the agitator may be brought together at this
point in a provisional summary. Our general theory of the political man
stressed three terms, the private motives, their displacement on to
public objects, and their rationalization in terms of public interests.
The agitator values mass-responses. Broadly speaking, this requires an
extension of the theory to make it possible to divide politicians among
themselves according to the means which they value in expressing the
drives of their personalities. Now what is there about the agitator’s
developmental history which predisposes him to work out his affects
toward social objects by seeking to arouse the public directly?
Why, to state it another way, is he the slave of the sentiments of
the community at large? Why is he not able to work quietly without
regard to the shifts of mood which distinguish the fickle masses?
Why is he not able to cultivate interests in the manipulation of
objective materials, in the achievement of aesthetic patterns, or in
the technical development of abstractions? Why is he not principally
concerned with the emotional responses of a single person, or a few
persons in his intimate circle? Why is he not willing to wait for
belated recognition by the many or by the specialized and competent few?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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