Who would want to carry the weight of expectation that is piled upon Barack Obama's slim shoulders? But it isn't just the incoming president who will suffer if he fails to live up to our hopes. By idealising him so much we are engineering our own inevitable disappointment. Instead of enjoying what he achieves, we will end up comparing his time in office not with what went before, or even what might have reasonably been expected, but with our own impossible fantasies.
It's not just in politics, of course, that we torment ourselves in this way. In relationships and in our careers we often fall into the trap of predicting that things will be perfect rather than just OK. Examine the language we use: we search for our "soulmate" or "Mr Right" or our "dream job". Subconsciously, I suspect, we are searching for something that we, if we were lucky, once had: the all-attentive parent we felt we could rely upon completely. The perfect employer or romantic partner conjures up that safety and security. So, of course, does the perfect politician.
Renowned psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott came up with a phrase for parenting that represents a more realistic ambition: the "good enough" mother or father. This implicitly rejects the notion that perfection is possible (or even desirable) and that a mistake or two must mean total failure.
Obama today - and, hard though it is to believe now, Tony Blair in 1997 - seem to promise so much. It would be better, though, to take on board Winnicott's notion, and judge our leaders not by our unconscious need to be wholly and effortlessly looked after but by what, given the challenges and complexities of our world, might be "good enough".
By that criteria there is every reason to believe that Obama will be an outstanding leader, and that despite some inevitable wrong calls and bad luck, he will inspire and sometimes, even delight. But to really enjoy him as the flawed human being he is requires us to let go of our symbolic sense of him as so special as to be flawless. We must, in short, perceive him as just a good father, not a fallen God.
Psychologists have devised a trick for moving to that more realistic place. Instead of getting caught up in the excitement of an election day or inauguration - what psychologists call a "peak experience" - and then expecting that to continue indefinitely, project yourself forward. Consciously imagine an Obama presidency three months, a year, five years from now. Consider what he might have done that would feel good to you. If we anchor our visions in timescales like this, and detach them from the excitement of today, we adopt a more cautious set of expectations.
Then, as time goes by, instead of Obama betraying our impossible ideal, we might find, if we're lucky, that he lives up to our more realistic hopes. That would relieve him of his terrible burden but it would also free us up to enjoy something that might, even stripped of its idealism, be pretty wonderful.