ABSTRACT
In clinical terms, narcissism refers to the presence of unresolved needs and to the continued reliance on mechanisms for coping with those needs that remain in the adult from the stage in early childhood when the child is learning to deal with its growing awareness of the separation between itself and the world around it. The political leader performs a closely analogous and, indeed, possibly an identical, function for his followers. The power-seeker functions by socializing his private experience—rationalizing as being in the public interest the displacement of his private affects onto public objects. In view of the large and growing clinical understanding of the origins of narcissistic disorders, the identification of the quest for power as narcissistic opens up the possibility of obtaining important new insights into the early lives of political figures that may prove invaluable in biographical and other studies.
