(FORTUNE Magazine) – We begin with a disclaimer. Your servant's review of the fall issue of the Journal of Psychohistory, scheduled to commence in the next paragraph, may be less than objective. This is because he is at present committed to the view that in the fall election George Bush represents the lesser evil, which is of course indistinguishable in algebraic notation from the greater good. He was therefore put off by the Journal's politically tendentious use of Sigmund Freud to make a case for Bill Clinton. The fall issue is all about the election. It probes the psyches of the candidates -- including several who fell by the wayside in primaries -- but is mainly concerned with answering two questions: Why is George so cruel and diabolical, and how did Bill get to be so heartthrobbingly wonderful? In equating Bush with Beelzebub, contributors to the special issue have a problem. Several of them appear to have exhaustively researched his early life, interviewing his siblings and Andover classmates. The interviews yield up a portrait of a young man who was invincibly admirable. Fair, decent, nice -- these adjectives turned up repeatedly. So how did Master Nice Guy evolve into the monster who unfeelingly demands sacrifices from the poor and rains down bombs on defenseless Iraqi children? Here is the perspective served up by contributor Suzy T. Kane: ''Where Adolph Eichmann once demonstrated the 'banality of evil,' George Bush manifests the gentility of evil.'' Following that sentence, Suzy quotes Lloyd deMause (editor of the Journal) as commenting, ''If anyone ever pushes that nuclear button, it will probably be a 'nice' person.'' Wow. Several contributors posit that George's inner rottenness is related to his ambivalent feelings about his father, a strict disciplinarian who sometimes spanked his kids with a razor strap. Ms. Kane notes that ''in the era when men used this leather strap to sharpen their razors for shaving, boys who were punished with it were particularly afraid that the metal clip on its end for hanging would hit their genitals, for the instrument was generally applied to bare bottoms.'' Contributor Casper Schmidt suggests that this treatment had something to do with President Bush's hostility to tyrants like Saddam Hussein. In a further fascinating reach, Schmidt postulates that Bush terminated the Gulf war early because his need to put away such tyrants had earlier been satisfied by the capture of Manuel Noriega. In Clinton's case, we again come up against a father feared by the kids, but this time the psychohistorian's task is to explain how parental brutality -- the brute being Bill's often-drunken stepfather -- produced a son with ''the intellectual and temperamental qualifications for wise leadership,'' to quote from the sometimes syrupy entry by Herbert Barry III and Paul Elovitz. The explanation is that the family tensions led Master Clinton to become a conciliator and cooperator who looked for the best in others. His maternal grandparents ran a small grocery store that catered to poor blacks, of whom Bill is quoted as recalling, ''They did not have much in the way of money, but a lot in the way of love and character.'' He clearly has the analysts psyched.