Harold Lanswell probably pioneered psychoanalytically oriented profiles of political actors (as against more sweeping hypothesis about political processes, viz. classes, revolutions, national character, antisemitism, racism, etc.), in this book Psycho-pathology and Politics, in 1930. This new collection takes its place in this area of psycho-politics. Edited by Angus McIntyre, of Latrobe University, it concerns itself with how the ageing process affected a number of political leaders. These are Willi Brandt, Stalin, Mao, Henry Parkes, Begin, Sir Oswald Mosley, Peru’s Haya de la Torre, and Ronald Reagan. There are also cameos of, or extended references to Tolstoy, Churchill, Tito, Khomeini, Sukarno, the Perons, and Jack Lang. Fascinating stuff.

Those who don’t like this approach to politics – and they are thick on the ground in universities – say that social movements are too large, too volatile, Burke’s sea of the multitudinous causes … to be domesticated by such crude yet fanciful reductionism; and that on the other hand, ‘findings’ about individual actors can’t be converted into generalizations about groups, given their complex culture, historical, economic, and situational envelopes. Thus, the brand of psycho-politics represented in this book can never be more than anecdotage like an upmarket Godfrey Winn – say the critics. That is, unless you believe in the Great Man Theory of History, which should have gone out with Carlyle, but unfortunately didn’t.

Well … we are told a great deal nowadays about leaders, cult figures, charismatic captains, of the degradation of political discourse, and the neutering of talk about principles and ideology, of the packaging of Presidents, etc. There are more and more political systems with no valid formula, or just no formula, for organizing the leadership succession. This is a world of one-party status, and one-leader states, and lifetime leaders of opposition – and there are a number of such case studies included here. Now, if ever, would be a good time to inquire into the inner workings of such fulcrums of power. Finally, for those whom the name Freud brings on the heeby-jeebies his name appears rarely, though the psychic mechanisms which he deployed are among those utilized by these symposiasts. But the main indirect influence is Melanie Klein, with people like Jacques, Bion, Nevinson, Kohut, and Erikson figuring. Carl Jung is referred to from time to time. Not a wide range of theorists and explanatory devices, you might say: but certainly not a monocausal or reductionist approach. And how many theorists and models is it possible to work with, in a serious way?

The collection breaks up into three – early adulthood and middle age; old age; and a contemporary case, done in extensor. This is of Ronald Reagan with the L-shaped mind, as the observer Norman Holland puts it, or the Dorian Gray complex, according to Graham Little.

I don’t know whether it is important or not, though I suspect it is; but while the parental backgrounds of the various leaders are described and connected pretty adequately, wives and lovers, siblings, and children, in the main, are not. Striking exceptions are Reagan, his Nancy, his brother, and his distanced children, and Henry Parkes with his succession of twenty-three-year-old wives. Mao is credited with two children, one dead the other insane. Stalin had a son who eventually gets himself killed in a suicidal escape attempt to the jeers of his father. And then there is Svetlana. Mosley’s two wives, the first who died early on, (not in the book) her great beauty forever mourned by Mosley and his second, a Mitford, who accompanies him into his suicidal lurch to the Far Right, are important in McIntyre’s study. But in many other cases the leaders might just as well have had no family.

One reason may be that narcissism and its vicissitudes underpin much of the discussion, with the Oedipal conflict and its resolution, or lack of resolution, a secondary theme. There is little doubt that narcissism is all the rage now, and not merely in politics. It complicates the acceptance of the ageing process; fouls up the acceptance of the inevitability of one’s death; makes some leaders, (any professors listening?) most reluctant to give up power or status, to train competent successors, or even leave the ship in a seaworthy condition.

It helps explain the impoverished interpersonal relations many public actors have, and the consequent emotional overload into group transactions, and the rectifying of programs, slogans, concepts, and ideologies. It helps explain the appeal of a Reagan to the electorate itself deeply into narcissism, an increasing number of them greying and with similar problems to the President – the manic denials of prostate politics. But also his strange latency image, of an amiable young innocent who has a healthy contempt for facts and boring details but is very much one of the boys, with the world his oyster. Without giving away the plot, (and Graham Little’s Dorian Gray piece is both intricate and eloquent) Reagan has successfully combined appealing to the simple verities – Mom, family, the comer gang, the college football team, and black and white values with the young male/‘young’ nation, for whom anything is still possible. Damn the facts, cause and effect, limits on action. The rejuvenation politics of a life-long Peter Pan – and Reagan is not the only one of this tack.

Mao, a more erudite and perceptive character than Reagan or some of the others, also took on the politics of rejuvenation with appeals to the young, and contempt for the old fixtures – the Party, the bureaucracy, the mandarins, ideologues, the centralizers. The Great Leap Forward – a disaster taken against all advice – the 100 Flowers, and then the Cultural Revolution, are all ventures of his later years. In a word, the politics of second childhood, flying in the fact of the limits imposed by reality, and his own remorseless ageing. Mao reflected the ambivalence of Chinese society. The worship of ancestors, custom, gerontocracy; but also the radical protests against stasis, custom, and inflexible hierarchy. His father ruled the roost, regularly beat the sons; the stem, punitive authoritarian. Mao’s mother he describes as warm, permissive, and repressed by the father. Young Mao had no difficulty in identifying with the cause of youth and the spirit of revolt.

This attitude tempered by prudence, carried Mao through to middle age – through the long period of struggle, and establishment of the New Society. Yet he started to worry about ageing, the succession, even death. He worried about gravitating into his father’s world, turning his back on youth, moving into the shades. Mao’s reaction to his fate, or temptation, was to jump into projects of rejuvenation, campaigns against ossification, the flattering of youth; (his mirror of self-deception.) The campaigns were never worked out, and aborted when in full passage, by the author himself. His ambivalence showed out more and more, and most of Mao’s old comrades couldn’t follow him, couldn’t see the point. And of course, as in Russia, no formula for orderly succession was allowed to come into being.

These studies are not all psychological frescoes. There are large chunks of straight political history, and personal description – so the psycho-political dimension really drives from the back seat, most of the time. Two long and quite gripping stories concern Parkes and Haya; and the latter ranges through Latin America and Europe in the 1920s, and a whole pot-pourri of cults, offbeat political and religious savants, gurus, and bohemians. There products all carried around in Haya’s head. Tom between anarchism, pacifism, spiritualism, and solidarism, Haya periodically set up revolutionary opportunities, then unaccountably turned away. An exotic charismatic figure – unlikely to be seen around the Members’ bar, or place seeking in the Labor Caucus.

Needless to say, the descriptive and analytic techniques brought to bear here on politicians can be applied to many other professions, and of course people in general. And they are often to abuse or misuse, as is just about every human activity (Remember St Augustine). But politics does seem a fly trap for some of the more disturbed, and narcissistic members of the population, (as well as some of the more boring), and some of them wield great power or influence, while sheltering behind slogans, banners bearing strange devices, and striking postures, whether these be Peter Pan, Boadicea, or some born-again life force. They repay close study, and this examination of strategies of ageing as determinants of leadership styles is one way of approaching them.