SADDAM ON THE COUCH.

For decades, Dr. Jerrold Post has been treating patients in the usual way, providing fifty-minute doses of psychotherapy in his home office in Bethesda, Maryland, surrounded by the requisite framed diplomas, primitive artifacts, and Kleenex boxes. But many of his most challenging cases have been referred to him by the evening news. As the director of George Washington University's Political Psychology program and the founding director of the C.I.A.'s Center for the Analysis of Personality and Political Behavior, Post is a pioneer in the field of political-personality profiling. He may be the only psychiatrist who has specialized in the self-esteem problems of both Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

Some people regard the extension of psychology into the realm of world affairs as a kind of quackery. But to Post, a short, amiable grandfather with a thatch of gray hair, psychology is no longer on the periphery of political life. "Terrorism is really at the nexus of psychology and politics," he said the other day in his office, "because terrorism is a vicious species of psychological warfare waged through the media." He pointed out that the world today seems increasingly subject to the whims of relatively unknown and unstable rulers. (Post calls them "pop-up leaders.") "We have satellite photography that can zero in on the dimples on a golf ball," he said, "but we can't peer into the minds of our adversaries."

Since last year's terrorist attacks, Post has been consulting confidentially with the Defense Department and the F.B.I. Next month, his conclusions about the mental health of Saddam Hussein and other despots will be published in a collection of essays called "Know Thy Enemy," which he helped write and edit.

Post's diagnosis of Saddam Hussein, which appears in a chapter that was co-written with an Israeli historian named Amatzia Baram, may surprise some readers. Saddam "is not a madman," the doctor insists. "It's too simple to just say he's crazy." Baram, who has been studying Saddam for more than twenty years, says, "He may be a psychopath, but he's very sane." Post points out that although Saddam is "dangerous in the extreme," he remains "a judicious, effective political calculator who is by no means irrational, but is using different premises of rationality." As a result, the authors suggest, "we can do a lot to predict" his behavior. And although Post does not want to appear critical of the officials who are charting our Iraq policy, he is worried that some recent steps by the Bush Administration may prove, as he puts ...