Vladimir Putin: A psychological profile

Mediocrity is more common than malevolence. Yet when we don’t like a leader, we tend to see him as psychologically inadequate.

Psychiatric clinicians are rightly warned against diagnosing public figures if they allow personal politics to do the diagnosing. Laypersons similarly assume a generic folly, labeling the disliked leader as crazy. This is false logic. Anything done wrongly is wrong, but done right, it’s right. My view is that the diagnosis of public figures, as with patients in my office, can be done rightly or wrongly. I don’t fear such a diagnosis, and I’ve done it plenty, including with the manic temperament of the former American president.

The Presumption of Sanity

Done rightly, one should begin with the presumption of mental health, not insanity, and then seek evidence otherwise while banning personal political preferences.

Photo of Vladimir Putin.

Source: DimitroSevastopol/Pixabay

Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, is unpopular in the West after his invasion of Ukraine. Yet, beginning with the presumption of mental health, we have no known clinical evidence otherwise: no hospitalizations, nor documented depressive episodes, nor documented manic states; no knowledge of his sleep habits or sexual activities or energy levels. Of course, such states might be hidden from public view; they usually are, but not always.

There is no need to infer mental imbalance to explain the invasion of an innocent nation. An American president did it in Iraq in 2003 and also in Vietnam in the mid-1960s. An irrational political act doesn’t imply personal irrationality.

There is a far simpler explanation: This kind of political decision is what normal, mentally healthy leaders do. In fact, it’s the ones who are abnormal who tend to do otherwise.

The Power of Positive Illusions

To explain: Normal mental health involves mild positive illusion: this is the slight overestimation of oneself, one’s own ability, one’s control over the environment, and the prognosis of one’s life. In short, sane people are delicate optimists. They shoot slightly above and hit the mark. In normal circumstances, this mental health is productive. In most conditions of life, it is productive.

But political power is not a normal circumstance, especially in an autocratic state. The mild positive illusion of the normal, mentally healthy leader, in a bubble of yes-men, expands into a coarse hubris of error. Now the leader shoots way too high and misses the mark altogether. Unrealistic judgments grow and aren’t corrected. The sense of power and control over his surroundings is overestimated. In conditions of crisis, this positive illusion becomes a hubristic failure.

It takes a very sane man, in full control of his faculties, to rise in the KGB, to survive the end of an empire, to rise again to near-absolute power and immense wealth through bureaucratic intrigue and influence with a coterie of wealthy oligarchs, along with more than a little old-fashioned despotism.

You may be bothered by the phrase “mentally healthy.” But the phrase is descriptive, not normative. Mental health involves conformism; it entails being average. Mental ill-health can be worse, or it can be better, even exceptional. (I never understood the phrase “mental health disorders,” a stigmatizing euphemism that assumes health is good, and illness is bad; just say mental illness.)

Putin’s Next Move

Beginning with geopolitical views that may not be, in his context, wholly irrational, he invades a neighbor. Holding military views that also may not be wholly irrational, including the reticence of his opponents to conflict directly with a nuclear nation, he invades.

What will he do now? We need not guess along psychiatric lines based on presumed paranoia or pseudoscientific cliches like narcissism. We can infer what he would do as a rational, mentally healthy person in his position of power, suffused with a hubris syndrome (as identified by Lord David Owen, a former British foreign minister and physician).

His geopolitical rationale won’t change; if he doesn’t succeed, he fails. He cannot retreat. He won’t be convinced otherwise by reasoning. He will overestimate his own reasons, and no one in his circle will influence him otherwise.

There are three responses to injustice, Martin Luther King Jr always said: Passive acquiescence is the worst; it preserves peace at the price of evil. Violent resistance is better; it confronts evil but at the cost of great suffering.

Nonviolent resistance is best; it too confronts evil, but with less harm in the long run. Economic sanctions are a form of nonviolent resistance but slow in effect. A defensive no-fly zone technically is a nonviolent action, because nonviolence doesn’t mean absence of force. It means stopping injustice without causing injustice, meaning without harming the opponent. In the civil rights era, King’s movement relied on federal troops to protect them. That’s nonviolent coercion.

The genius of statesmen will show in what forms of resistance they can devise short of frank war. In that process, the best psychological profile of Putin, based on what we know, is to assume rationality given his geopolitical objectives, combined with an unrealistic overestimation of his abilities.