Diplomacy & Abnormal Psychology: Are Countries Sometimes Crazy?

Diplomacy & Abnormal Psychology: Are Countries Sometimes Crazy?

Abnormal Psychology is one of the most intriguing areas of psychology for its focus on cognition, emotion, and behavior that falls outside the range of “normal” – that is, outside the range of what the majority of people experience. Certainly creative genius can be considered unusual, but Abnormal Psychology’s focus is on the maladaptive. On September 12^th, this blog showcased five broad psychology paradigms: Psychoanalysis, Behaviorism, Humanism, Cognitivism, and Evolutionary Psychology. Abnormal Psychology is not a paradigm per se, but a sub-field of content in psychology. Psychologists can use one or more of the five broad psychology paradigms as analytical reference points for interpreting Abnormal Psychology, just as with Social Psychology, which appeared on this blog on September 25. Our focus in this blog entry is, how can Abnormal Psychology be brought to bear on Diplomacy? Can a discussion of Abnormal Psychology help us in any way to better understand international relations? Are countries and/or leaders sometimes “abnormal” on the world scene? As a concrete case in point, might the international slave trade of the colonial period be considered to have been a mass mental illness? A collective delusion?

Abnormal Psychology probably stretches back historically to the dawn of human understanding, in that early peoples tried to understand mental illness in terms of demon possession, Gods, and magic. The Ancient Greeks and Romans began to think of mental illness in terms of medical, biological disorders (especially Hippocrates). Ancient Chinese thought of mental illness in terms of imbalanced “Yin” and “Yang”. Yet for most of human history, mental illness has been grossly misunderstood and incorrectly interpreted as possession, witchcraft, lunacy, and/or a consequence of sinful or immoral behavior – especially during the Middle Ages when scientific thinking was rejected. Since the Age of Reason and Enlightenment, mental illness has been viewed principally in naturalistic, scientific terms. Then in the 20^th Century, Sigmund Freud, B.F. Skinner, and John Watson were able to establish classification methods and a research tradition for advancing the professional field of abnormal psychology in order to address psychosis and neurosis empirically.

Abnormal Psychology has almost never been applied to diplomacy, at least not publicly or formally. Exceptions include the work of creating psychological profiles and explanations of behavior for certain notorious world leaders, for instance: Hitler, Stalin, Idi Amin, and Milosevich. Here is an example of a report on Hitler’s personality generated by a psychologist working for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), forerunner of the CIA, during WWII: http://library.lawschool.cornell.edu/WhatWeHave/SpecialCollections/Donovan/Hitler/index.cfm

With the benefit of over 60 years of psychological research since WWII, psychology now has the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association. The “DSM” is a massive guidebook of mental disorders used by mental health professionals to diagnose and treat people with psychological disorders. Though far from perfect, the DSM strives to have a solid, empirical foundation for its classifications. The APA releases new editions as the field of knowledge grows, based on scientific research and clinical practice. Factors that contribute to mental illness are well-established now in terms of stress, genetics, and environmental influences. The brain is, with its complex biochemical processes, well-established as the seat of psychopathology. The DSM categorizes mental disorders in terms of axes, with the understanding that clinical interventions can take place both at the cognitive-behavioral level and by taking direct action on the biochemistry of the brain, through therapy and drugs, respectively. Axis I includes major mental disorders such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Axis II includes pervasive conditions such as personality disorders and mental retardation. Axis III includes brain injuries and other acute medical conditions. In reviewing the details of the DSM and its axes, it is tempting to consider this guide in terms of the affairs of international leaders, nation-state populations, and domestic and foreign policies.

We might simply ask: do some nations, leaders, and citizens (including our own) exhibit anti-social behavior, relative to those of other countries, as a function of some sort of mental disorder, caused by biological, social, or cultural forces? If so, can we bring their thoughts, emotions, and behaviors into the “normal” or “acceptable” range by some sort of “clinical” intervention? Do some people have chemical or emotional imbalances which need to be considered in our interactions with them? Can we better understand and work with other nations and their leaders and citizenry by looking into where their (or our) behavior fits in terms of world norms and how we can get the behavior into the normal range (or into an ideal range that is not the norm)?

We might consider that some world leaders throughout history have engaged in behaviors so extreme and malicious that it would be naïve not to consider that some type of personality disorder, or at least delusional thinking was involved. For example, who can argue that Ivan the Terrible was a psychologically balanced person? We might consider too that the populations that make up some nations or groups of people in a given time period might have social or cultural propensities that would put them in the category of neurotic or psychotic as a group collectively. For example, consider the group mentality, comprised of individual mentalities, in groups of people during the Salem Witch Trials of colonial Massachusetts. And what about some of the torment that took place during China's Cultural Revolution? More recently, look what is going on in the Congo, where rape is being used as a military weapon:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/africa/10/16/amanpour.congo.rape.documentary/index.html

Can anyone legitimately argue that this behavior is in any way representative of psychologically healthy individuals? In all of these cases, to exclude psychology’s role in international relations would be short-sighted, no doubt. The difficulty in making the leap from Abnormal Psychology to Diplomacy is that we have to understand that mental health tends not to be a binary question. One is not either normal or mentally ill. Mental health runs on a continuum – a continuum comprised of a multitude of sub-continua, running along many different factors. As we have noted before in our discussion of the psychology of terrorism, people can be totally “normal” in nearly every way in terms of their cognitive functioning and yet they can still be prone to engage in gross acts of violence or inhumanity. Therefore, creating a Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of diplomatic proportions would be an undertaking of large scale complexity, something much harder to do scientifically than to analyze the behavior of individuals.

Nevertheless, what we are doing with treaty and protocol tools like those of the Geneva Conventions is precisely to create international standards for what is and what is not disordered or “ill” behavior. This is no doubt challenging when there are often deep-seated conflicts in the very fundamentals of what people of different nations consider “normal” and “acceptable” behavior. When you look at the underlying value debates between concepts such as individualism and collectivism, secularism and sectarianism, and those of different economic models such as capitalism and communism, you are really hard-pressed to come up with universal norms for what constitutes a “healthy and balanced” leader, nation, or citizenry in any global sense of the word. That said, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights established by the powers that comprise the United Nations is probably the best vehicle for this discussion. Running at the PsyDip nexus, we might consider it to serve as a kind of “Diplomatic DSM” and a guide that can help us interpret when a country's behavior may border on “disordered”, if “only” in a global, value-judgment sense.

http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/

As a caveat, we certainly do not want to get into the business of labeling all our adversaries as mentally ill and the target of diplomatic therapy. Nevertheless, PsyDip argues that we can and should pursue interpretations from Abnormal Psychology for the realpolitik that so often underlies the pomp and circumstance we observe in global affairs. If all we do is look at our own national behavior with the humble lens of “self-improvement”, it could serve as a catalyst for other nations to do the same. It is no accident that would-be clinical psychologists are typically required by graduate programs to undergo their own psychotherapy as part of their training to provide such services to other people. The notion is that relations between people always occur through the ether of psychology, whether one-on-one or between countries.

This posting started out by mentioning slavery. We might do well to consider how else to explain slavery and other such dehumanizing global practices if not by way of Abnormal Psychology. In closing, here are some other diplomatic topics which could potentially fall at the nexus of Abnormal Psychology and Diplomacy: genocides, terrorism, arms races, dictatorships, demagogues, crises, paranoia, censorship, extreme unilateralism, coups, election fraud, torture, atrocities, holocaust issues, kidnapping, parental child abduction, war crimes, trafficking in persons, sex trafficking, piracy, etc. There is clearly no shortage of inhumanity to consider on the world scene. The question is, are we ready to do what it takes to become better people, better countries?