Secondhand Shrinking

Daniel Ellsberg is a man prone to "apparently sudden and extreme shifts in loyalty and enthusiasm." Always wrestling with a submissive side of his personality that he dislikes, he has plunged into "blatant sexual activities with a wide variety of women (Swedish to East Indian)," perhaps to prove "he was his own man." He also harbors feelings of rage against authority figures ranging from his father to the President.

So reads a CIA psychiatric profile of Ellsberg pieced together by doctors from news clips and FBI and other Government reports. The CIA doctors never so much as met Ellsberg. Their analysis, the second of two requested in 1971 by White House Plumbers, was released recently by the House Judiciary Committee. More detailed than the initial CIA profile revealed last summer, it also reaches a startlingly different conclusion. According to the first profile, Ellsberg probably leaked the Pentagon papers out of a need for recognition as well as what "he deemed to be a higher order of patriotism." But according to the second profile, "to an important degree, the leaking of the papers was an act of aggression at his analyst, as well as at the President and at his father."

That two such clashing conclusions from the same source could be reached about Ellsberg suggests the trouble with behavioral profiles. Some news commentators feel the studies were ordered as part of a White House "smear" campaign against Ellsberg. In fact, the first profile, which turned out to be reasonably favorable, was judged unsatisfactory by the White House, and the CIA was sent back to crank out another.

The authors slapped the information together in a hurry and under pressure. They say in the second report: "The overall result must necessarily be highly impressionistic ... further investigations might support other (and contrary) conclusions." Moreover, Dr. Bernard Malloy, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Georgetown University and a consultant to the CIA'S Division of Psychiatric Services, informed the Senate Watergate Committee that CIA doctors had reservations about the project from the start, fearing that it could be "misinterpreted and mistakenly considered to have been derived from the doctor-patient relationship."

Active-Negative. Psychiatrists are outraged by such remote-control analysis. Protests Harvard's Dr. Robert Coles: "This is the most blatant kind of psychiatric reductionism. It's hard enough to interpret a person's motives or reasons even firsthand." Dr. Jacob Swartz of Boston, spokesman for the American Psychoanalytic Association, says: "To form a valid opinion, one should see the patient."

Still, there are supporters of behavioral profiles, often called "psychohistories." Retired Harvard Historian William Langer, former chief of research at the OSS, says that secondhand material can sometimes tell more about a person than his own words when he knows he is under analysis.

Psychohistory, in fact, is nothing new. Numerous widely respected behavioral analyses have been done on world figures, notably Psychoanalyst Erik Erikson's profiles of Martin Luther and Gandhi, and Duke Political Scientist James David Barber's The Presidential Character, which contends that "active-negative" Presidents like Nixon face crises by "riding the tiger to the end." M.I.T. History Professor Bruce Mazlish adds in his 1972 psychohistory, In Search of Nixon, that because two of the President's brothers died in their youth, he continually struggles with "death fears"; to confront these, he may subconsciously seek out crises.

Perhaps the most famous behavioral analysis was the Hitler study done by Dr. Walter Langer, William's brother, for the U.S. Government during World War II. Declassified in 1972 and published as The Mind of Adolph Hitler, Langer's work proved uncannily accurate; he not only predicted Hitler's suicide, but also that "each defeat will shake his confidence and ... he will probably try to compensate for his vulnerability by stressing his brutality." In fact, Hitler began ordering mass slaughters of the Jews as his military position crumbled. But even Langer calls psychiatric profiles "90% guesswork."

Encouraged by Langer's accuracy, the Government has been using psychiatric profiles as a tool ever since. Though Ellsberg was the first U.S. civilian to get the treatment, intelligence experts regularly do analyses of world leaders, including Chairman Mao, Indira Gandhi, Archbishop Makarios, as well as Soviet Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev, Defense Minister Andrei Grechko and Military Theorist A.A. Sidorenko. Says one official: "Everything a person has written, what he reads, who influences him, his sex life, ailments and prognosis--everything goes into the making of a profile."

Many diplomatic sources consider these reports invaluable in negotiating with a foreign leader. Says one: "The profiles provide pertinent and practical guidance in sizing up a guy."

Industry too has experimented with psychiatric profiles, requesting them on likely executive talent. In recent years, however, the business has slumped. Alfred Marrow, president of the National Academy of Professional Psychologists, explains that "the profiles turned out to be useless" because there was little relationship between their conclusions and an executive's performance on the job. James Clovis of Handy Assoc., an executive-recruitment firm, reports that companies are now more interested in their own personal evaluation of a job candidate and his performance records than what psychologists might say. Perhaps most important, many firms have an understandable fear: that behavioral analyses will break the laws guaranteeing a citizen's right to privacy.

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