Friday, August 19, 2011

Is Obama The Ultimate Teacher/Idealist?

Andrew Atkins is a graduate student of Clinical Psychology and a personality consultant for an upcoming personal discovery and social networking site. At Associated Content (a Yahoo contributor site) Andrew has written an interesting personality analysis of Barack Obama.
To be sure, I don't make it a habit to psychoanalyze famous people. In fact, from a psychological standpoint I often can't even figure out why dear friends and family members act the way they do. Go figure.
But Andrew's analysis is intriguing . Drawing from the work of educational psychologist David Keirsey, Andrew identifies Obama as a teacher/Idealist personality type. And Andrew believes that Obama (who as an idealist would naturally seem to be power averse) was drawn to politics because of his own identity crisis.
Here's part of what Andrew has to say:

Obama's life has been one of duality: he is black and white, American and international. For a young Idealist, whose driving mission is "personal fulfillment," such identity confusion must have been unbearable. Obama's identity crisis was evident in his admission that his adolescent drug use was an attempt to "push questions of who I was out of my mind." For Obama, identity is paramount, and he eventually found his, not in being a member of any one group, but in being a bridge between groups.
Thus, from Hawaii to Indonesia, from Harvard to South Side Chicago, Obama has sought to integrate his worlds by becoming the personification of unity. That is what drove him to teach, to organize communities, and to pursue high office. His belief that he is the long-sought adhesive for a fractured world is what drives his presidency. It is the backbone of his policies, as he seeks to "spread the wealth around" and apologize to the world for America's past.
Click here to read more from Andrew Atkins.

BTW: I'd be interested to know how all this fits (or doesn't fit) with Obama's apparent ego-centric nature. Why does him seem to be so grandiose and so self-absorbed?

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