Psychopathology and Politics

CHAPTER I. Life-Histories and Political Science

LIFE-HISTORIES AND POLITICAL SCIENCE

Political biography as a field of political science has long been relied upon to furnish a vivid corrective to the overemphasis laid upon the study of institutional “mechanisms,” “structures,” and “systems.” The legal and customary position of the House of Commons, the House of Lords, the monarch and the electorate, as expounded in the commentaries of Gneist and Dicey, suddenly take on new meaning when viewed through the lens of Morley’s Gladstone, Strachey’s Victoria, or Lee’s Edward VII. The German imperial system of Laband is more fleshly and less transcendental when one has studied the lives of Bismarck or William II. An institutional account of the constitutional development of the United States without a life of Marshall and a life of Lincoln would be but the dregs of a rich and ebullient history. Political science without biography is a form of taxidermy.

When the tumultuous life of society is flayed into precedents and tanned into principles, the resulting abstractions suffer a strange fate. They are grouped and regrouped until the resulting mosaic may constitute a logical and aesthetic whole which has long ceased to bear any valid relation to the original reality. Concepts are constantly in danger of losing their reference to definite events. Notions like liberty and authority require a new birth of meaning after they have followed the tempting path of abstraction but a little way. If conceptions are to serve and not to master the mind, their terms of reference must intermittently undergo the most rigorous scrutiny.

The use of “institutional” categories in describing political life is indispensable, but the publicists who employ them have little to say about the “personal” influences which modify the expected behavior of “legislatures,” “executives,” and “judiciaries.” It is no news that “leadership” is an important variable in predicting the course of events, but the standard treatises on politics have next to nothing to offer about the traits of various kinds of agitators and organizers, and nothing to say about the kinds of experiences out of which these differences arise.

This limitation holds for the books about the theory of the state and of politics which are written by Englishmen like Sidgwick and Laski, Americans like Garner and W. W. Willoughby, and Europeans like Jellinek, Schmidt, Kjellén, and Kelsen. No doubt these men possess or have possessed a living sense of political realities. Of Sidgwick it is related that he was wonderfully adept in entertaining his circle for hours with incisive comments and amusing anecdotes about public men. But of this “humanity” of politics there is little to be found in what he wrote. Political biography has been relied upon chiefly to convey a sense of the unpredictable in human affairs, and to adorn an after-dinner tale. At its best, political biography has contributed to an understanding of the factors which differentiate one human personality from another. But it is no secret that the literary biography or autobiography omits or distorts much of the intimate history of the individual, and that many of the facts which modern investigators have found to be important are numbered among the missing.

Where is it possible to secure a supply of life-histories in which the usual conventionalities are ignored, and which are taken by specialists in the sociological, psychological, and somatic influences which play upon the individual? There exist in modern society sizeable collections of such material which have hitherto been accorded slight attention by students of social science. I refer to the case histories of those individuals who have been ill, and especially those who have been cared for in hospitals and sanitariums.

The richest body of psychological and sociological facts is found in the files of the institutions for the care of the mentally disordered, although the material available in general hospitals is of value. The case history of a patient in a good mental hospital is a document to which many have contributed. There is a report of the physical condition of the patient as it is revealed in the routine examination on his admission to the institution. This may be supplemented by transcripts of previous and subsequent examinations. There is also to be found the rating attained by the subject on several general-intelligence and special-aptitude tests. There is a report of the preliminary interview and the diagnosis by the psychiatrist. This is amplified by a summary of the proceedings at staff conferences to which the patient is presented, and which is attended by the whole body of physicians and psychiatric social workers attached to the hospital. The usual routine is for the physician and social worker in charge to present a summary of the case, to introduce the patient for observation, and to engage in general colloquy upon the diagnosis and therapy after the patient has been escorted out of the room. The patient may be brought before several staff conferences for the purpose of discussing whether he is in a condition permitting of release, parole, or transfer. During his stay in the institution the nurses, as well as the physicians who make rounds, add their descriptive comments upon his behavior. The social service department gets in touch with relatives and acquaintances and prepares a biography of the subject. Occasionally the patient will volunteer an autobiography, which is filed with the general record. Correspondence with individuals who have interested themselves in the case will often disclose valuable details. The exhibits frequently include letters written by the patient before, during, and after his illness, together with published works, drawings, paintings, and plastic productions. In some instances the record of a single patient who has been admitted, released, or transferred becomes very voluminous.

It is due to the growing emphasis upon the importance of understanding the personality as a functioning whole that modern medical men are willing and anxious to assemble data about the behavior of the individual in his family, business, and recreational relations. Such facts are often useful to the physician in making his diagnosis and in deciding how to handle the patient. The modern emphasis upon the rôle of reverie in developing one’s traits and interests has led to the inclusion of data about night dreams, daydreams, ambitions, grievances, enthusiasms, and loyalties of the subject. Not infrequently the productions of the patient are recorded in his own words by a stenographer who is present during certain interviews with physicians. All these psychological and sociological data increase the significance of the case record for the individual who studies it for the purpose of understanding the total developmental history of the person.

Sometimes the case histories concern people who are without mental disorder, but who have, for one reason or another, been committed for observation. The German government was not the only one in the late war which sometimes resorted to the expedient of avoiding the appearance of internal dissension by referring pacifists to a mental hospital. The records of the kind obtained under these circumstances are often of men and women without pathology, and serve to control the conclusions which rest on the study of pathological cases.

Quite often the specifically pathological features in the record of a sick person are very meager. Thus, one prominent politician, the mayor of a large city, was brought to a mental hospital suffering from an alcoholic psychosis, delirium tremens. He was only “insane” (to use a nonscientific term) when he was passing through this acute alcoholic episode, and was soon released. But the record of what he said and did during the delirium casts a brighter light on the deeper motivations of his political career than many pages of conventional biography. The hallucinations and delusions which he experienced were not entirely stereotyped for the disease. Since he was no longer able to maintain his repressions, his inner fantasy life came out in the clear, and his personality structure stood revealed. Another politician showed nothing abnormal except a propensity for collecting women’s shoe heels, which he found sexually stimulating. He came to the medical psychologist to be freed from his fetishist perversion, and in so doing he made possible the preparation of a document which intimately revealed the origin of certain political interests. From the point of view of the political scientist the most valuable parts of his history happened to be quite far removed from the narrowly circumscribed pathological symptoms.

The value of some records is enhanced by the fact that, besides the pathological productions of the patient, they contain much information which is volunteered by the person when he is himself again. Some forms of mental disorder show recurrent intervals of disturbance and normality, and during the “clear” interludes the patient is quite competent to furnish autobiographical data. Often the “remissions” in the individual’s condition extend over several years, although they may be momentary. Another form of mental disease is characterized by the fact that the sufferer’s difficulties center about a single system of ideas which, if left untouched by the interviewer, permits him to be dealt with as an ordinary individual. It should be evident from the foregoing that, contrary to popular impression, the histories to be found in institutions for the care of the sick are by no means exclusively confined to pathological subjects or to the merely pathological aspects of the person.

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