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.