Creating Presidential Images

by Ruthellen Josselson

As the current political campaign for President intensifies, we are all engaged in creating images of the candidates. The spin doctors try to manage how we will imagine them, but they know perhaps better than anyone that what we each take in about each of the candidates reflects our internal sensitivities even more than what the pundits say. We create one another in our social and political worlds just as much as we do in our personal life. Political drama offers the citizenry opportunities for playing out personal conflict but concealing it beneath the political debate.

I recall a conversation with my tailor several years ago when the debate about the Clinton impeachment was raging. My tailor is an aged man, an immigrant from Italy, who told me that he didn’t mind so much that Clinton was “playing around” with a young intern – but that he did it in the same house where his daughter was – THAT was unforgivable and deserving of ultimate sorts of punishment.

From the viewpoint of the theoretical framework that I set out in Playing Pygmalion: How People Create One Another,  I avidly read each day’s political commentary to track the latest in the imaginary constructions of each of these candidates. I wonder about what is in the unconscious of the American electorate. Are we in search of the good mother, the soothing father, the aggressive warrior, the stern taskmaster? Perhaps others would here like to add their observations of how this is unfolding.

Ruthellen Josselson, Ph.D. is professor of psychology at The Fielding Graduate University and was formerly professor at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem as well as at Harvard University.