Bonjour Eric de Russie

Il est bon que des rédacteurs soulignent les contradictions émises par les hommes politiques. Peut-être prendrez-vous la relève de ce bon Imhotep, ce qui serait une bonne chose pour la vigilance citoyenne. Les médias ne jouent pas leur rôle, serviles créatures.

En revanche, suis complètement en désaccord avec vous sur certains points.

D’abord, on ne peut pas distinguer la personnalité de l’élu de sa politique, les deux sont indéfectiblement liés. Ce serait mettre de côté toutes les recherches sur la personnalité individuelle, les traits sociaux, la relation entre la cognition et l’émotion, ou l’influence de la personnalité sur l’intelligence. A cet égard, je vous invite à lire le volume 5 de l’handbook of psychology publié par Wiley and Sons (691 pages) qui vous donnera un bon résumé des différentes théories et expériences sur le sujet. Vous serez ainsi convaincu de ce que j’avance ici. On peut même vous connaître – un peu - sans que vous donniez d’information sur vous, et formuler ensuite des probabilités sur les actions que vous allez prendre face à tel ou tel événement. Croyez bien que la personnalité d’Hollande, de Sarkozy ou de tout autre leader est analysée par les Américains et les Russes qui ont au sein des agences gouvernementales d’intelligence une section consacrée à l’analyse des personnalités. Si vous avez le temps, vous pouvez également lire le livre de Jerrold Post, The psychological assessment of Political leaders, qui contient quelques clés pour l’analyse du profil des leaders politiques ainsi que les profils de Bill Clinton et Saddam Hussein. Je reproduis la préface en fin de post, vous verrez que c’est intéressant et utile.

Ensuite, vous parlez de probité, en minimisant les écarts. Je crois que cela fait trop longtemps que vous vivez en Russie. Il y a pas mal de gens honnêtes, fort heureusement, pour lesquels l’argent n’est pas une fin ; des gens qui se savent biodégradables et qui nourrissent une ambition plus élevée que garnir son compte en banque et se permettre des écarts avec la loi ou la morale pour y parvenir. Et quand on aspire à une vie publique, surtout s’il s’agit de polis, alors on doit être irréprochable. « Qui vole un œuf vole un bœuf » !

Reproduction ci-dessous de la préface au livre de Jerrold Post

With the wisdom of hindsight, many of life’s most consequential decisions are often a matter of happenstance. In the spring of 1965,1 was in Washington, DC, completing my second year as a Clinical Associate of the National Institute of Mental Health before I was to return to Boston for a planned career in academic psychiatry, when a friend from medical school approached me to discuss « an unusual job opportunity. » Despite having secured a position on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, I could not resist this provocative invitation. We met for lunch, and he offered me the opportunity to develop a pilot program for assessing at a distance the personality and political behavior of foreign leaders for senior U.S. government officials. A service of common concern, the unit would be administratively based in the Central Intelligence Agency. I thought it would be an interesting divertissement and decided to delay for two years my entering the groves of academe. In what was to be a marvelous intellectual odyssey, the planned two-year diversion lasted twenty-one years. On assuming my position at the Central Intelligence Agency, it was immediately clear that my training in clinical psychiatry, while useful, was clearly insufficient for the complex and daunting requirements of the challenging task ahead. The clinical case study was designed to establish a diagnosis in a patient suffering with mental illness, but the large majority of political leaders are psychologically normal. Indeed, severe mental illness would be incompatible with sustained leadership. Yet political leaders from different political cultures differ profoundly, and understanding those differences would be of inestimable value to our senior leaders both in negotiating with them and in dealing with them in politico-military crises. But what elements of leadership should be delineated ? When the pilot program was institutionalized, I sought out leading figures in the emerging discipline of political psychology and developed a senior advisory panel to ensure that state-of-the-art knowledge and methodologies were applied. Serving on the panel were two of the contributors to this volume who specialized in the psychological evaluation of political leaders at a distance : Margaret Hermann, professor of psychology and political science at the Mershon Center of Ohio State University, and David Winter, professor of social psychology at Wesleyan University. The ranks of the core group of profilers were augmented by Steve Walker, professor of political science at Arizona State University, and Walter Weintraub, a research psychiatrist at the University of Maryland, who had applied a method of psycholinguistic analysis he had originally developed working with patient populations to political personalities in his analysis of the Watergate tapes transcripts. Over the years at the annual scientific meetings of the International Society of Political Psychology, it was rare when a panel of profilers did not consider presidential candidates or the new Soviet Party chairman. The Gulf crisis again highlighted the importance of leadership psychology. I had the opportunity to testify twice before congressional committees holding hearings on the Gulf crisis—the House Armed Services Committee under Les Aspin and the House Foreign Affairs Committee under Lee Hamilton—to present my assessment of the personality and political behavior of Saddam Hussein. In 1991 Stanley A. Renshon, professor of political science and director of the political psychology program at the City University of New York, convened a conference on the political psychology of the Gulf crisis, which became the foundation of an edited volume (S. A.Renshon, ed., The Political Psychology of the Gulf War : Leaders, Publics, and the Process of Conflict [Pittsburgh : University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993). At the conference, I remarked to my long-standing colleagues Hermann, Walker, Weintraub, and Winter that a book bringing these methods for the psychological assessment of political leaders together was long overdue. The group seized upon the idea, and the notion of an edited volume, in which each methodologist would first describe his or her method and then apply the method, was born. Indeed, a unique feature of the book, chosen by its contributors, is to illustrate these methods using two leaders from radically different societies, William Jefferson Clinton for a democratic society and Saddam Hussein for a closed totalitarian system, showing how personality manifests itself in such different systems. Renshon and Peter Suedfeld, professor of social psychology at the University of British Columbia, both major figures in the field of at-a-distance personality assessment, were also invited to contribute. This book represents the fulfillment of a long-cherished dream : to bring together within the covers of one volume the specialized methods for psychologically evaluating the personality and political behavior of world leaders pioneered by a small group of specialists, many of whom I have been working with for nearly thirty years.