HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON: FREUD NOTES

by Paul Lowinger

 

"Like most mothers, I am the designated worrier in our family." It Takes A Village by Hillary Clinton, Simon & Schuster, 1996

"I'm proud of my marriage. I have women friends who choose not to marry, or who married and choose not to have children, or who married and then divorced, or who had children on their own. That's okay, that's their choice. This is my choice. This is how I define my personhood - it's Bill and Chelsea." Hillary Clinton in The Unique Voice of Hillary Rodham Clinton, editor Claire Osborne, Avon Books, 1997

"It took Hillary to raise a president." by Gail Sheehy in Hillary's Choice, Random House, 1999 "I looked Xat some of the Icelandic Saga manuscripts...I even found a new heroine, Gudridur, who grew up in Iceland at the dawn of the last millennium, and who as a young woman sailed off in one of those open Viking ships to North America on one of the first expeditions ... She gave birth to the first known European child in North America...returned to Iceland and then decided to take a journey to see the Pope in Rome which she did. She returned to Iceland where she lived to a wise old age and she became a very important personage..." Hillary Clinton, Vital Voices Conference on Women and Democracy, Reykjavik, Iceland, October 10, 1999 in Vital Voices 1997-1999, Washington D.C., PREX 1.2 v 66

"Our mother's spirits stay with us always." 'A powerful memory of constant love' by Bill Clinton, syndicated column in the San Francisco Examiner, May 10, 1996

"...I spotted a dark haired young man, about fifteen years old...He seemed so sweet, so innocent. I realized suddenly that I was in love with him - something decidedly strange because in my dream I was my twenty-four-year old self and Clinton was a fifteen-year-old boy. " Dreams of Bill Edited by Julia Anderson-Miller and Bruce Joshua Miller, Citadel Press, 1994

"He's like a God in their eyes," says a former Little Rock resident about Arkansas' opinion of Governor and President Bill.

"Today's search for "character" is a lazy man's quickie therapy diagnosis of politicians based on third-hand potty training reports--and no way to come to terms with the crumbling of our political institutions... Every public event becomes the echo of a perverse upbringing..." by Susan Faludi, "The Malling of America," The Nation, May 27, 1996

"In Clinton, the inner conflicts - both the personal psychodrama and the policy debates - rage on." The Agenda by Bob Woodward, Simon and Schuster, 1994

"Clinton was far more psychologically disturbed then the public ever imagined." Uncovering Clinton by Michael Isakoff, Crown Publishers, 1999

"Jack Stanton could be a great man if he weren't such a faithless, thoughtless, disorganized shit." Primary Colors by Joe Klein, Random House. 1996

"...The Oedipus complex is not normal in the way the nose is normal. Rather it is like the thymus gland - i.e. it is normal at a certain period but abnormal if it persists unchanged beyond that period. Everybody has it between four and six; later in normal people it seems to vanish...The adult neurotic has retained his Oedipus complex. He knows nothing about it, but nevertheless we can show it to be operative, and this is what we mean when we say it is 'unconscious.' " The Collected Papers of Otto Fenichel, W.W. Norton, 1953

"Character is destiny." On the Universe, Heraclitus

"Eros is chaos." Jennifer Stone on The Morning Show, KPFA, November 4, 1999

"The mind of man is capable of anything - because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future." Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, W. W. Norton, 1963

"...I don't know why I'm doing it. It's trying to kill to keep yourself alive...I'm crazy as a coot and being as cruel to as I can be." Harry in "The Snows of Kilimajaro" from The Complete Stories of Ernest Hemingway, Scribner, 1987

HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON

•Hillary s Psychohistory

Understanding Hillary Rodham Clinton demands close attention so that her life won't be obscured behind a puffy Bill Clinton like the sun on an overcast day. There is also a tendency for the flesh and blonde Hillary to be hidden by icons: woman, wife, mother, daughter, attorney, politician, First Lady and candidate. Another hazard is the Hillary's biographers who demonize or glorify her so she appears in one dimension as good or evil. My tool of understanding is psychohistory and particularly psychobiography.

Psychohistory begins with Freud's studies of Leonardo da Vinci and Moses and includes a book on Woodrow Wilson he coauthored with American diplomat William Bullitt. Many followed including Erik Erickson who wrote on Gandhi and Luther. They write abo ut the minds of Alexander the Great, Queen Victoria, Lawrence of Arabia, Lincoln, Hitler, Van Gogh and Glenn Gould.

The study of an individual mind is the choice of a psychological viewpoint over a social perspective and it is a challenge to the usual way of looking at reality. The method is to produce a personal psychological script and to correlate this with life events and even the development of the nation or the world. A biological dimension of psychohistory described by Abram is the influence of George Bush's sudden thyroid illness on the causes of the Gulf War in 1991 while I related President Bush's desultory 1992 election campaign to his lethargic depression caused by his poorly controlled hypothyroidism.

Psychohistory is a variant of Thomas Carlyle's Great Man theory of history, "Universal history, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the history of the Great Men who have worked here." An opposite view was that of Otto von Bismarck, the Prussian politician who said, "The stateman's task is to hear God's footsteps marching through history, and to try to catch on to his coattails as He marches past."

In psychohistory, the explanation of the leader's behavior and national events depends on unconscious and conscious factors in the mind of the leader. The emotional meaning of experience is translated here primarily according to the psychology of Sigmund Freud with help from Carl Jung. The other Freudian psychoanalysts, feminist psychologists, Jungians and social psychologists whose ideas are useful are mentioned in the bibliography. Psychohistory uses individual mental development to explain both personal behavior and social events but co ntemporary critics like Susan Faludi who look to the culture for explanations reject a psychoworld where "...the public event becomes an echo of perverse upbringing..."

The unconscious is the part of the mind which is hidden from awareness and is not accessible to the imagination. It is impervious to rules of reality and morality and it is timeless because it mingles the emotions and ideas of a person's mind at all ages. Between the unconscious and the conscious is the preconscious or subconscious which can be reached by introspection. In altered states of consciousness we can reach into the unconsciousness during dreams, sleep deprivation, meditation, psychosis and the use of psychedelic substances. Repression, the force which separates the conscious from the unconscious mind will be described under Hillary's Ego Defenses.

I believe skepticism is the best way to look for terra firma in the wetlands of psychohistory and psychoanalysis so, trust me you're in the hands of a restless guide, not a true believer. Still my friends say that they didn't know I was so Freudian. Well, I'm not really and certainly I wasn't when I practiced psychiatry and psychotherapy, taught and did research for forty years. My own analysis was Freudian but later I had humanistic therapy based on Maslow, Gestalt and Wilhelm Reich. I went to Esalen and I was in a peer group. All were useful. So why do I write a Freudian story? Although I'm not a psychoanalyst, I like the elegance of Freudian theory; its canvas offers an intellectual and literary richness that invites this psychohistorical effort.

My personal attraction to the Clinton's, Hillary and Bill is undeniable. My editor on the Web suggested I write about The Pope or Bill Gates but I choose Hillary and Bill. I am engaged by their Sixties' passion for social justice, their quest for power, their political and sexual theater, their intellectuality, their martyrdom and their religious and charismatic intensity. Bittersweet are Hillary's and Bill's opportunism, their cruelty, their character defects, their failures of nerve and their faithlessness. All are part of a pastiche that evokes my own identity, real and fantasied.

Psychobabble is an unavoidable hazard in writing psychohistory but I'll try to translate it. Much psychological analysis of the heroes and villains of history leads to the mind of the writer so this is an effort to avoid a pitfall and a warning to the reader.

Biography itself is, "...a cannibal feast of family dysfunction, vile apprenticeship, open wounds, big scores, closet secrets, love gone wrong, grief and grudge," according to critic John Leonard as he regards the 686 page study of novelist Saul Bellow.

I've not been to the Clinton White House nor have I interviewed Hillary or Bill but I'll emerge from the closet of impartiality and list my biases. I admire both Hillary and Bill but I feel they both are ill equipped to cope with our mean spirited nation in the late 20th century. They share this limitation with other recent American presidents and leaders.

The portraits offered by psychohistory lack the authority of the therapist who deals with live patients and the precision of historians like Thucydides, Gibbon or Tuchman who record events and trends. Still the canons of history and psychology are used insofar as they further the task and otherwise they are set aside. The interchange of terms like psychohistory, psychobiography, psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis is not accidental since these overlapping disciplines all contribute to my study and are mostly complementary here, even though elsewhere they may engage in turf wars.

What do these terms mean? Psyche was a nymph in Greek mythology who came to personify the human soul or mind . Psychology is the organized study of the mind and behavior. Psychohistory is the use of psychology in the interpretation of history. Psychobiography is the study of a person's life using psychological methods. Psychiatry is the diagnosis and treatment of mental and emotional illness. Psychoanalysis is the science and treatment of emotional problems according to the theories of Freud using the unconscious, psychosexual development , free association and transference.

The psychohistory of Hillary Rodham Clinto n is a challenge since the sources are limited. The biographies of Hillary lack information about her early development although they offer some childhood particulars. We have no maternal autobiography like the one by Bill Clinton's mother. On the other hand, Hillary has written a book which is sometimes personal and even intimate as it offers a potpourri of child rearing, child psychology and public policy about children. It Takes a Village and Other Lessons Children Teach Us is about Hillary's beliefs and experiences so it qualifies as a psychological script to be deciphered. A brief public controversy about this book revealed that Hillary's was the primary author. Hillary's public appearances, remarks, publications and speeches are useful. Her biographies and the books and articles about both Clintons contribute to my study.

The question persists. Why study Hillary? The primary goal is to understand Hillary herself. However, the influence of Hillary on the culture and politics of the Ninet ies is significant so as her psychological story is told, we will illuminate ourselves and our times.

•Hillary's Oedipus

Hillary was Daddy Hugh's girl but what does this mean? She was Hugh Rodham's victim who wanted his love and approval even as she tried to escape his stinginess, irascibility and perfectionism. The victim survived and was marked by an identification with the aggressor. Hillary was "...always Daddy's Princess" according to Tony, her youngest brother who was interviewed for Jerry Oppenheimer's book about the Clintons and their marriage. Hillary's cousin, Oscar Dowdy explains, "Hillary got the love and Hughie (the other younger brother) got booted...Tony got his share. too...both of them (were) pretty envious of the attention she got. Hillary was just very smart and earned her father's respect...On Dorothy's (Hillary's mother) part there was a bit of jealousy of Hillary...Aunt Dorothy was always very, very defensive of Hughie because Hughie used to get the shaft from the old man... it was a protective mother thing." Cousin Oscar Dowdy who is three years older then Hillary is the son of Hillary's aunt Isabelle, Mother Dorothy's sister so these families were often together on holidays and birthdays.

My first attempts to explain Hillary's Oedipus complex involved her attraction to and struggle with Powerful Daddy Hugh, the curmudgeon and her frustration and rivalry with Passive Mother Dorothy as I studied the Hillary biographers. However this theory became more robust when I learned in the Oppenheimer book that Hillary was also Dadd y Hugh s Princess based on new interviews with Hillary's cousin Oscar and brother Tony. Like an ongoing psychoanalysis, these recent revelations led to progress.

Like Daddy Hugh, the adult Hillary became irritable, demanding and the family breadwinner but that's getting ahead of her story. When she brought home a report card with all A's, Daddy replied that it must be an awfully easy school. We're not told what Dorothy Rodham said when she saw the grades maybe because this wasn't important to Hillary or perhaps Mother Dorothy was also hard to please.

Dorothy is described by Joyce Milton as "...stern and even slightly bitter" in her biography of Hillary. In Oppenheimer's book, Oscar Dowdy describes his aunt as "kind of cold, kind of standoffish...she ha d a difficult time being warm and truly affectionate...Dorothy's always mad at somebody. And it tends to last forever "

Oscar recalls the Rodham family at Christmas as being "plastic" and without the mother-daughter-son cookie-baking amity celebrated in Hillary's book, "It Takes a Village." Oscar and his wife Helen remember that Mother Dorothy hated cooking and housework.

Everyone has a biased view of their family and their own life so everything said by the principals should be received with benign skepticism including the words of Dorothy, Hugh, Hughie, Tony, Oscar and Hillary herself. Psychoanalysis is about uncovering hidden and unconscious emotions and also about changing behavior but it is not a method for uncovering "the truth" although this may happen. Despite the similarity of psychoanalysis to psychobiography, it is the later that tells the story of the subject's behavior as well as its meaning. Beyond "just the facts, ma'am," this is an exploration that takes us to the motivations of Hillary's mind, conscious and unconscious.

Dorothy has a fear of her own feelings and keeps an emotional distance from Hillary so that in 1998, she tells Gail Sheehy, "I don't talk to Hillary about anything deeply personal...her husband...her daughter..." Dorothy's explanation about this is circular but informative when she says that although Hillary is sensitive, she doesn't over emotionalize, so "she (Hillary) doesn't go into one of these horribly overwrought kinds of tizzies. That's one thing I never did either." "In a tizzy" is a phrase from the early 1900's defined as being very upset, in a state. Avoiding a tizzy means using isolation as a defense so feelings are repressed (see Hillary's Ego Defenses) which is quite different from the Dionysian emotionalism of Bill's family including Mother Virginia and Grandmother Edith whom we'll meet later.

Daddy Hugh was from Scranton, Pennsylvania where he grew up and where he took each of his children for their Methodist baptism. Family vacations were at a Rodham lakeside cottage in Pennsylvania. The Rodhams were immigrants from England where they worked mostly as laborers in the coal mines and the lace factory but included civil servants, the owner of a hotel in the red light district, a respected doctor and a Scranton political boss who served as a city councilman. To further a scheme to develop parking lots, Daddy Hugh ran for Alderman in the 49th Ward in Democratic Chicago in 1947 as an independent and after his defeat, he abandoned his real estate venture.

The solid, blue collar Rodhams stood in contrast to Dorothy's family who were "marginal people" according to a researcher. Dorothy was born to teen age parents who divorced and then Dorothy and her sister were sent from Chicago to California to live with paternal grandparents who were abusive and were themselves on welfare during the depression years. Dorothy's father who got custody after the divorce largely disappeared from her life. Her mother remarried after the divorce but she wasn't given custody then because at the time of the divorce she had been considered to be abusive to her husband and was called violent by her own sister. Dorothy's father is described as a fireman or a chauffeur. Mother Dorothy's parents were the children of immigrants from Canada and England.

Dorothy who had survived childhood abuse (the details are in Hillary's Burden) learned to live passively with hidden and muted feelings and this use of repression, denial and isolation were transferred to Hillary who suffer ed a kind of verbal childhood abuse from Daddy Hugh. (See the next two paragraphs on Hillary's childhood abuse ; Repression, Denial and Isolation are explained in Hillary's Ego Defenses)

But it was an active Dorothy who said there was no room in the house for cowards when four year old Hillary ran home after an attack by an "obnoxious girl." We learn from Hillary's youngest brother Tony that "our mother was pretty tough..." so Hillary was forced to confront her attacker and hit back. She won the battle and now had the respect of the players, according to biographer David Brock. Dorothy's memory of Hillary's plight is sometimes more vivid with Hillary's routs leading to successive tearful flights home from this older adversary, Suzy. The story of the counterattack is even more dramatic when the larger girl is knocked down or hit in the nose before an audience of neighborhood boys who now all wanted to play with Hillary.

A curmudgeon was the way one Hillary biographer, Norman King descr ibed Hugh while another, Roger Morris finds him guilty of the "psychological abuse" of his children even though Hillary was "Daddy's princess." Chief Petty Officer Hugh Rodham was a drill instructor who trained recruits in the Navy during World War II. Afterward he became a successful businessman in Chicago who moved his family to Park Ridge, an upper middle class suburb from a city apartment three years after Hillary was born October 26, 1947. Tobacco chewing and fly fishing Hugh who had attended college on a football scholarship was a regal presence in this family; Hillary says it was like the television sitcom, Father Knows Best. But the humor was lacking according to Dorothy who said of Hillary, "She had to put up with him." Of course, Dorothy did too. The Rodham marriage was described as "icy" and in "constant tension" by Helen Dowdy, the wife of Hillary's cousin Oscar.

The current picture of Hugh as a genial task master is a sanitized version of his behavior thi rty years earlier. After his death, he was characterized as "confrontational, completely and utterly so" by Hillary's brother , Tony. Hillary recalls him as "empowering" but then she was favored over her two younger brothers, Hugh Jr. born in 1950 and Tony in 1954. Cousin Oscar Dowdy explains, "Hillary was born with uncanny, extreme intelligence. Her dad recognized it...Tony and Hughie were regular kids, but Hillary was not a regular kid...He (Hugh) was proud as a peacock of her. Hillary knew how to get what she wanted out of him. She knew the right buttons to push."

Family symbols were Hugh's new Cadillac every year and the elegant Georgian suburban home on the corner which was ice cold each winter morning because Hugh turned off the heat at night. Was this family purification or an atonement ritual led by Hugh, the high priest who wanted to turn off the libidinal night dreams?

The struggle between Daughter Hillary and Daddy Hugh like most family feuds went through several acts an d intermissions but was often one in which Hillary did the manipulating. It reached a resolution with Daddy Hugh, then post-stroke and retired moving to Little Rock with Dorothy and the sons, Hugh Jr, and Tony. The focus was on Granddaughter Chelsea, now seven who needed more of Hillary's family nearby when it seemed that Bill and Hillary would be in the 1988 presidential race. Although Bill didn't run as explained later, Hillary had taken over the Rodhams and installed them in her city far from Park Ridge or from Daddy Hugh's roots in Scranton. Still, Arkansas was retirement country from the northern winters of Illinois for many who didn't make it to Florida. Passive Dorothy and Powerful Daughter Hillary agreed and so now brother Hugh Jr. known as Hughie and brother Tony went to college in Arkansas where Hillary was a corporate attorney and the First Lady and Bill was Governor.

•Hillary's Oedipus Meets Feminist Theory

It is convenient to begin the description of Hillary's development with the Oedipus complex because this is a crucial event. Also, an examination of the Oedipus complex is often the most direct route to hidden conflicts and the sources of anxiety. The fateful and incestuous union between the son Oedipus and the z mother Jocasta and was a symbol of the desire of the daughter for the father. The selection of a male centered myth for understanding women's development emphasizes the sexist bias of Freudian psychology. Using the Electra Complex as a label for the Oedipal phase of female psychosexual development didn't help much although it was now named after the daughter of Agamemnon who killed Clytemnestra, her mother.

Freud and his followers debated for decades about how Oedipal events form the female personality, her sexuality and feminity itself. In contrast, the early explanation of the male Oedipus complex achieved a prompt consensus among these Freudians. More recently women analysts and feminist psychologists have amended Freudian theory removing penis envy, vaginal orgasm, girl's castration fears, feminine passivity and the weakness of the female superego from the Freudian pano rply. The gender-free constructs of id, ego, superego, the unconscious, ego defenses, bisexuality, the psychosexual developmental stages and transference remain.

A new Freudian psychology with the centrality of the mother in human development which blends with the older gender-biased Freudian ideas is the result. The preOedipal mother before the age of three has a greater influence on both sexes and the effect on girls is more important and more prolonged then on boys.

Freud's theory of personality was based on biologically determined instincts which were shaped during infantile development. This idea was revised in favor of a new objects relations theory, the result of the discovery of narcissism and borderline personality (to be explained later in Slick Willie and the Genes) and a new psychology of women. Object relations theory meant that people especiall y the mother entered the infant's mind and remained as objects. These objects influenced the fundamental options about the gender behavior, sexual preference and the aggressive or life forces. In this land between biology and social influence, an object relations theory extended the role of culture.

Another important discovery was of a core gender identity for female and male infants so both psychological feminity (and masculinity) had a biological origin. Feminity was now removed from its earlier dependency on its being a reversal of the male Oedipus complex by the new objects relations theory and a core biological female identity.

Feminist psychologist Nancy Chodorow explains, "... the earlier criticisms of Freud's bigotry and phallocentric theories could still stand without ... being obliged to discard psychoanalytic theory in its entirety." She concludes that both the traditional ideas and the new theories can be used to understand the female (and male) Oedipus complex.

I will use this feminist psychoanalytic theory with some asides to older concepts such as penis envy which is now cast in a secondary role in female development. An example of secondary penis envy was the announcement during a holiday gathering by Claire, my four and a half year old granddaughter, "Penis, penis, penis, Julian, penis," as she looked in the direction of her two year old brother.

The investigation of Hillary begins with the questions about her image, character and behavior. "Very sharp, very Chicago," is the view of Ann Douglas' photojournalistic essay in Vogue. W We immediately recognize Hillary's energy, intelligence, organizational and leadership abilities, political and professional ambition, charisma, social and religious motivations and family commitment. The puzzle is reconciling this with her chronic anger and impatience, temper outbursts, anxiety as the "worrier," the victim of a philandering husband, the family breadwinner who cut some ethical corners and as the icy "Sister Frigidaire," a label from her high school newspaper. These are the complexities and polarities that we explore with Hillary's psychohistory.

How do the explanations of Hillary's problems fit in with the older Freudian and the new feminist Oedipal models? First, the Freudian Hillary. She was fixated in her love for her father according to the Freudian explanation of this universal and fateful event after her Oedipal disapp ointment when she discovers at four or five years of age that she doesn't have a penis. So penis envy moves the Freudian Hillary from the mother-love of the preOedipal years to a father-love which is never resolved.

Penis envy, a Freudian universal means that her mother is held responsible by Hillary for the loss or absence of the treasured organ which she will replace with the father's penis and by having his baby. (I use the word "treasured" with irony but in order to prevent misunderstanding, I also regard the female organs as treasures.) This wish is repressed and held in the unconscious where it mobilizes jealousy and death wishes for the mother. It is this fear of the loss the mother and the mother's love that leads to the development of the conscience or superego. Freud said that the superego was weaker in girls because their fears did not require a resolution of the Oedipus complex as effectively as the boy's castration fears. But Hillary's connection to Dorothy remained intact and Hillary developed a strong superego with her teenage social conscience and interest in community service and religion.

The tie to Hugh continued and then Elisabeth King and Don Jones appeared. Hillary remained uninterested in teen clothes, hairstyles and dating and her mother expressed some annoyance at sixteen year old Hillary's disdain for makeup. Hillary didn't shop, gossip or talk about sex like the other teens, observes Helen Dowdy, cousin Oscar's wife who was only a year and a half older then Hillary. Meanwhile, she was a good athlete playing soccer, tennis, field hockey, volley ball and softball which recalled her meticulous training by Hugh for hitting a curveball. She was a good hitter and a shortstop who knew all about the Chicago Cubs.

At eleven, a view of Hillary as "teacher's pet" emerges from Donnie Radcliffe's biography. This was when her sixth grade teacher, Elisabeth King transferred to a new school s yo she could continue to teach Hillary for two more years at the intermediate level. In the class picture Elisabeth has her hand on Hillary's shoulder. Such a school girl "crush" on a teacher and vice versa points to homoerotic feelings which may become conscious and sometimes overt at puberty.

This picture was given another dimension as I looked at the homoerotic painting, "The Guitar Lesson" by Balthus. It shows a prepubescent girl lying across the knees of her music teacher whose hand is on her inner thigh just below her vulva while the eleven or twelve year old student reaches for the aroused breast of the teacher. The abandoned guitar, the clothes in disarray and the facial expression of the student "between misery and ecstasy - alarmed but also transfixed" informs us that "sex is naughty, pleasure and pain were coexistent...the state of arousal was close to the d lemonic." The words are those of critic Nicholas Fox Weber who writes in the New Yorker about this Modernist work which is often considered pornographic.

All the early phases of development, oral, anal and Oedipal involve bisexual feelings and these remain mostly unconscious. This is a look at Hillary's childhood and adolescent feelings not an attempt to uncover a historical infatuation. Maybe these emotions were repressed and forgotten or perhaps her unconscious presented them in disguised dreams or even in daytime questions like, "Do I love Elisabeth? Does Elisabeth love me? What if Elisabeth was my mother?" The homosexual impulse often reflects the negative Oedipus complex beginning about age five when a rejection by the girl's father is accompanied by death wishes against him and a revival of the earlier love for the mother. Again this an explanation of mat `uration, not a theory about female homosexuality. Here it seems to be a vehicle for Hillary's escape from her frustration in the unresolved Oedipal link to Hugh before her next important pubescent event, the appearance of Don Jones.

Don Jones was the new 30 year-old youth minister of Hillary's Methodist Church who arrived when she was thirteen. Don drove a fire-engine-red Impala convertible, played Dylan on the guitar and offered the modern theology of Niebuhr. But most important, Don Jones was a different kind of father because he was not a father-aggressor.

Don's emotional impact on Hillary's libido was to sublimate her teenage eroticism into art, theology and social concerns. Maybe she told her diary that she was in love with Don or pondered the question. Compliant Hillary, the teacher's pet, was to give way to the new argumentative Hillary. Today she has "...a temper you would not believe" according to the New Yorker profile by Connie Bruck who tells us that Hillary's staff is "terrified of her." Roger Morris describes how Hillary "ate him (Bill) for breakfast." She was elected to high school and college class offices and by the late Eighties she was mentioned as a candidate for governor of Arkansas to succeed Bill. But it was the thirteen year old Hillary who completed the transition from conformity to a controversial leader.

How does the feminist Oedipal Hillary differ from the Freudian Hillary? Hillary's basic gender identity is a response to her preOedipal mother and the security of this relationship was fertile for a transition to the Oedipal attachment to Hugh. Again Chodorow clarifies, "...women experience themselves as part of a relationship triangle in which their fat qher and men are emotionally secondary, or at most only equal in importance to their mother and women." The relationship to father Hugh was not a threat to the relationship to mother Dorothy since Hillary was not a murderous rival, rather it was a part of family development.

The homosexual attraction to the teacher Elisabeth gives the preOedipal mother a new identity without Dorothy's defects such as her passivity in the face of Hugh's sadism and her aggression when she sent Hillary back to the Park Ridge streets to face the belligerent playmate.

Don Jones' arrival added to Hillary's experience of love for men and so he amplified the Oedipal-Hugh attachment. Don showed Hillary and the other suburban teens the hidden and emotional world of art, politics and religion. They read e. e. cummings, T. S. Eliot and Stephen Crane and saw Picasso's Guernica mural about t whe Spanish Civil War. They met black and Hispanic youth including gang members from the inner city. Their projects included Bible study and baby sitting for the Mexican migrant farm workers who lived west of Park Ridge. They went to hear Martin Luther King Jr. speak at Orchestra Hall in 1962 and afterward Hillary met him personally shaking his hand just as teenage Bill did with JFK in the Rose Garden. These are experiences of good and evil, the words, images and passion of hell and heaven which revive the repressed, primal and unconscious forces of the Oedipal conflict.

Hillary's intellectual and religious stimulation in the long private sessions in Jones' office were a metaphor for and a reactivation of the sexuality of the Oedipal relationship. Were these new erotic feelings unconscious, conscious or even overt? Maybe all three. Thirty-five years later Joyce Milto un says that Don Jones' trips with Hillary and the other teens in his Impala made some parents "nervous" and then quotes Jones, now 65 who recalls that there was no "flirting" as though he knew the role of Eros in the minds of teen age girls.

The Oedipal era with expressions like "I want to marry daddy," is typically is resolved at six and is followed by a latency period which lasts until puberty. Don Jones was the marker for earlier sexual events during the Oedipal period that Hillary may not recall or understand. Such events can be as ordinary as mutual manipulation while playing doctor with a younger brother or a sexual overture by an uncle or a cousin or even just hearing a story about this happening to a girlfriend.

The relationship with Jones was a visible token of her earlier Oedipal love for Hugh which was not extinguished. The feminist psychoanalytic theor zy of Chodorow explains the female drama: the quality of a girl's sexuality is determined by her relationship with her mother. The mother's unconscious as well as her behavior are major factors in the psychological development of sexuality in girls. This cultural story which begin with object relations theory stands in contrast to Freud's instinct-determined and biologically controlled Oedipus complex.

In addition to the psychocultural factors, women and men have different core biological identities from birth and earlier based on hormones, anatomy and the new findings about female-male brain differences. The irony is that Freud's dismissive remark about women, "Anatomy is destiny," has come full circle.

In the feminist psychoanalytic story, the resolution of the female Oedipus complex leads to a superego or conscience that is just as strong as that of the male in contra diction to Freud's view that it wasn't. But the content of the women's superego is different. It is more concerned with affectional and personal relationships and less with male abstracts and absolutes.

A feminist psychoanalyst Shahla Cherazi summarizes recent views about penis envy and women in 1986 so she is quoted directly:

Over the past twenty years, research studies and substantial clinical material have provided new information regarding female psychology and development. The sociocultural attitudes and the phallocentric orientation that prevailed during Freud's time contributed to his theory of female psychology. The issue, however strong the possibilities for politicizing it are, is essentially a clinical one. The oversimplified and reductionistic interpretation of penis envy in the analysis of women often leads to a lowering of their self-esteem and an intensification of the neurotic image of themselves as deficient and damaged.

The girl's mental representation of her genitals at an early age (2-3) is less well established then a boy's at the same age, whose visible and protuberant genitals lead to a clearer mental representation. However, no matter how vague and incompletely defined the little girl's representation might be, it seems to reflect her awareness that she has "something there." That "something" is pleasurable and will later, under optimal conditions, become highly valued. Furthermore, recent work suggests that early genital awareness is accompanied by an early or primary sense of femaleness. Core gender identity, an early (preoedipal) sense of femaleness or maleness is established by age two or three.

The early theory emphasized what the little girl does not have rather then what she indeed has. If we reverse our focus, then it becomes evident that penis envy may b e a phase-specific reaction since the little girl will soon come to value what she herself has, and relinquish the envy of what she does not have. Current views do not underestimate the trauma of observation of anatomical differences and penis envy, but they do suggest that at the time of its occurrence, the little girl already sees herself as a girl and has some awareness of her femaleness and her genitals. Her wish to have a penis, therefore, does not necessarily imply that she wants to be a boy, but that she wants a penis in addition to the vagina and clitoris she already has.

The factors that assist the reworking or attempted resolution of penis envy are: good enough relationship with the mother; awareness and appreciation of one's genitals; further cognitive development, which aids comprehension of the complex inner and outer genital; and most important, the resolution of the Oedipal conflicts, and identification with th e mother. Current views reject a reductionistic equation of the wish for a baby with the wish for the penis. The wish for the baby can be seen prior to the penis envy reaction and is often an expression of identification with the mother, as well as inborn gender characteristics.

•Hillary's Sadism and Masochism

Sadism received its modern expression in the books by the Marquis Donatien de Sade in the eighteenth-century while masochism appears in the nineteenth-century in the work of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Their names are used for sadism, pleasure derived from causing pain and for masochism, pleasure from suffering. Such behavior is ordinary and widespread and quite different from the exotic S and M of whips and chains.

Like a finch which has two songs, one for mating and another for territorial protection, traditional Freudian theory tells us that humans have two kinds of instincts or drives: the unconscious has the sexual instincts in the id and the survival or life instincts are in the ego. Aggression in human behavior is an aspect of the life or survival instincts which are directed toward satisfying the need for food and shelter and are expressed in work. Of course aggressive and sexual behavior are not only an expression of unconscious instincts since work and love are everyone's conscious concerns.

During childhood, the life instincts including aggression become sexualized while the sexual instincts are tinged with aggression. Freud says "...the two classes of instincts are fused, blended and mingled with each other..." so we enjoy the spectacle of love and death in Romeo and Juliet and in Verdi's Aida. However, these instincts don't have free play because their expression is controlled by that part of the ego that represents both reality and parental rules, the conscience or superego where guilt is generated. I've returned to using instincts to describe the theory of development because it's easier then a translation into the complexities of object relations theory.

Sadism and masochism which originate during the oral and anal phases of infantile development are altered by later experience. While the cruelty of sadism and the suffering of masochism appear to be separate, they coexist, one overt and the other covert in a combination called sadomasochism.

Does Hillary's identification with Hugh's aggression lead to sadism? Hillary's brother Tony says, "...my sister is tough as nails." But aggression is not sadism which is cruelty or destructiveness experienced as pleasurable. Hugh's aggressiveness toward Hillary can be called sadism, pleasure produced by causing pain, a mixture of Hugh's sexual and aggressive instincts. Hillary learned to play the victim role in Hugh's punishments followed by her rescue and solace. He taught her about life in visits to Chicago's skid row and the dark and dangerous Pennsylvania coal mines where he had worked. Hugh's impl icit or explicit threat to leave her there predetermined that he would rescue her, a frightening moral lesson from Mr. Reality Check. Hillary's identification with Hugh made this behavior her own so she became a sadist.

It is interesting to look at the Rodham family through the eyes of Helen Dowdy who married Hillary' s cousin Oscar when she was sixteen and Hillary was fourteen. Helen who was a frequent visitor in the Rodham home says in Oppenheimer's book, " I wouldn't put anything past Hugh in terms of put-downs to anybody but Hillary...But the boys! Oh boy! That was a different story. I mean it was like night and day." A Park Ridge neighbor heard Hugh's booming voice "yelling at the boys...Hughie and Tony" through the summers' open windows. Grumpy Hugh's a .ggression was sadism on display and Hillary had learned to escape it and identify with it too. Sadism was learned by Hillary in a family process. Hugh didn't yell at Dorothy but there was an observable mutual antagonism between them. Subservient Dorothy called Hugh "an old fart" while he watched television in the next room and he stonewalled for years on fixing up their home ignoring her complaints.

Bill calls Hillary "the dragon lady" and "the warden" while Carpozi's Clinton Confidential has a list of nicknames which include Lady Macbeth, The Hun and Iron Lady. Political operative Dick Morris called her "Madam Mao."Her wrath is feared by her staff who are, "...intimidated she will fire them if they tell her the truth," according to interviewer Connie Bruck.

In Arkansas, pitched battles raged at the Governor's mansion as Hillary screamed, "That sorry son of a bitch," when she woke to discover Bill was out "for a drive" at one a. m. according to the state troopers. As he arrived home, she shouted, "Where the fuck have you been?" Driving in a State limo with the First Couple was to see "...screaming quarrels and styrofoam cups, books, papers and keys thrown by Hillary."

In the White House family quarters, Hillary continued to scream in her husband's beet-red face as a Secret Service agent saw her pick up a lamp and throw it at the President. These are reports from domestics, the Secret Service, Arkansas State troopers and other deep throats known to biographer Chris Andersen. Echos of these events also appear in Milton's biography of Hillary and in Woodward's Shadow.

An objective observation about Hillary's sadism was made in April 1993 when Andersen tell us that the President appeared at a White House news conference with "a lurid two inch gash running from his right earlobe down his jaw wline and a smaller cut on his neck...Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers ...reported that the President had cut himself shaving...later, the President offered a different explanation, "I got hurt playing with my daughter, I'm ashamed to say...Rolling around acting like a child. I reaffirm I'm not a kid anymore.' Chelsea was thirteen and it seemed unlikely that she would be 'rolling around' with her father and that she could inadvertently inflict such a deep cut. Word had filtered down that the President and First Lady had another of their window rattling rows." Bill's masochism complements Hillary's sadism which is discussed later in Bill's Sadism and Masochism.

Hillary's sadistic impulses produce both pleasure and guilt. Her masochism is also experienced as painful and pleasurable. The two are part of the same emotion, sadomasochism. Her sadomasochism, like Hugh's is derived from aggression tinged with sexuality. Although Hugh's sadism is a family legend, his masochism is only briefly visible in Hillary's account of his youthful prank when he broke his legs falling from a truck on which he was stealing a ride.

Hillary defends herself and responds while she suffers as a victim of womanizing Bill , the sniping media and a hostile Congress. "Tough" Hillary retained the capacity to be hurt as explained by Robert Reich who saw her as a frightened rabbit when she came under attack during Bill's first term. (See Bill and Hillary in Group Process With Dick, Dolly, Gennifer and Robert)

The emotional energy for Hillary's aggression and sadism comes from the identification with Hugh as aggressor and sadist. Not entirely because we've heard about how Passive Mother Dorothy was "tough" too. Are Hillary's frustrations with Bill, the media, the Congress and her critics justified? Of course, but the psychological question is really how and why do aggression and sadomasochism play such a prominent role in her responses?

The Rodham marriage was a straightforward model of the fifties: a dominant husband and a stay at home, repressed wife. Passive Mother Dorothy says in Judith Warner's book that this was her "...accepted role...being afraid to say what was on her mind." Hugh was called Mr. Difficult by Dorothy and biographer Morris describes Hillary's home as one of "quiet cruelty and pain...warmth and vitriol...compassion and sarcasm..." All this qualifies Hugh as a sadist and Dorothy as a masochist as their behavior is used to indicate the state of their unconscious minds.

Dorothy herself been a childhood victim of abuse by her own teenage parents. When they separated she was sent by train at eight from Chicago to Los Angeles with her three year old sister to live with her maternal grandparents. Her grandparents were themselves so rejecting that she left at fourteen to work as a babysitter with another family so she could finish high school.

I've mentioned earlier how Dorothy sent Hillary back to the street in Park Ridge after she was attacked by another toddler, normal parental behavior but perhaps also an indication of normal unconscious sadism. Daddy Hugh reassured little Hillary that although she might murder someone, he would still love her though he would disapprove of her act. The unconscious mind which emerges briefly in play and games here speaks of Hillary as the sadist and Hugh as the masochist. As noted earlier, sadomasochism in combination is the rule even though often one is overt and the other is less visible.

Is masochism characteristic of women as Freud and his followers tell us or is there another view?

Masochism as a characteristic of women is an argument between the Freudians and the feminists. Freud and his followers explained masochism and passivity in women as biologically determined with their origins in childbirth and motherhood. Today, feminist analyst Schad-Somers who rejects the instinct theory of masochism still finds that it is intrinsically female because of our culture which depreciates women while sadism is the male expression of the ubiquitous sadomasochism. But the debate goes on and feminist psychotherapist Charlotte Prozan argues against the universality of women's masochism.

•Hillary's Moral Masochism and the Monica Lewinsky Porno Flick

The issue of Hillary's masochism is reopened by James Bennet of the New York Times in "First lady backs up her man, once again" as he reports her response to the Monica Lewinsky eruption (perhaps it should be called the Bubba emission). He says that "Hillary's just fine." We are told that Hillary "clearly had no illusions about Mr. Clinton's faithfulness" and now she is "in battle mode" as she was during the Gennifer Flowers expose. The "poor Hillary" mantra resumes later as Chris Andersen reports her eyes as red and swollen from crying after Bill's grand jury testimony about Monica.

Arianna Huffington labels Hillary "enabler-in-chief" holding her responsible for Bill's eruption with Monica. It is worth clarifying that "enabler" is from the nomenclature of a Twelve Step program because columnist Arianna judges Bill to need membership in Sex Addicts Anonymous. Biographer Sheehy also finds Hillary to be an enabler.

The prototype of masochism is the need to be beaten to achieve a sexual climax with the connection between the pain and the pleasure hidden in the unconscious. Another frequent kind of masochism is moral masochism where it is humiliation and failure in life that produces the suffering and the unconscious pleasure too. These are victims who bemoan their fate as martyrs: she says she is doing it for her marriage, the family and the children and he says he can't let down his buddies, the company or the cause. The ego is besieged with guilt from a punishing superego or conscience and the solution to this dilemma is to be punished by life.

Nowadays like Arianna we are familiar with the enabler or co-dependent as a moral masochist who despairs but also facilitates the addiction of a spouse to alcohol, drugs, gambling or casual sex. Like the chords in the blues, family themes are repetitive so we recall that Bill's mother Virginia was an enabler for her husband Roger's alcoholism as Bill was growing up. So too, Mother Do \rothy was an enabler for Daddy Hugh's cruelty. Masochism including moral masochism begins during personality formation in infancy and childhood when sexuality becomes linked with pain and suffering.

The question of Hillary's moral masochism goes beyond just her defense of an erring husband by a loyal wife. This kind of masochism involves Hillary's unconscious enjoyment of Bill's misbehavior. Of course, I can't prove this but consider it.

The counterpoint of Hillary's suffering is in the innuendoes. She complains to a journalist about "only getting laid twice a year." Gennifer Flowers says Bill told her during their relationship that Hillary didn't enjoy sex and anyway Hillary was a lesbian so Bill was frustrated. Journalists report the gossip and some details about Hillary's ill-fated affair with her Little Rock law partner Vincent Foster who J committed suicide while he was a White House counsel. These emotions and events don't cause a masochism that began in infancy and childhood but they may channel its expression.

Let's look beneath the level of reality into the secret recess of Hillary's mind, into her unconscious, where bittersweet dreams and fantasies are the response to Bill's affairs with Monica and the others. Hillary first denies the events and then she sees them and next there is a kind of mental participation in them before she flashes back to real life and begins the battle to survive. This is a hypothesis but it is as plausible as a wife with an alcoholic husband who first looks the other way, then excuses him perhaps with compassion and finally picks up the pieces when he boozes again. You decide. At the least, moral masochism is there.

The question is how much pleasure is there for a serious, rational, religious woman in her husband's love affairs, some lurid and public but most only known by gossip. Her masochistic gratification is more complicated then the simple portraits in the media. Horror, anger, anxiety, dismay and fascination follow the infidelities during the Monica affair. The outward Hillary was observed by the New Yorker's Joe Klein as radiant with a roseate glow in a canary-yellow suit in the midst of the Monica affair while during the 1992 Flowers scandal she was "dressed to the nines."

Does Hillary's mind create a threesome, a porno flick with her, Monica and Bill? That's not necessary to this argument about her moral masochism but it is illuminating. Masochism is a "radical aesthetic practice," according to postmodern critic Mansfield while psychoanalyst Ross writing about The Sadomasochism of Everyday Life points out our fascination with the Bobbits, the Menendez brothers, Tonya Harding and O. J. Simpson. I'd add JonBenet Ramsey and the Clintons.

What happened to Hillary to cause the moral masochism? This complex goes back to the Oedipal guilt she feels about her desire for Daddy Hugh and her hatred for her rival, Dorothy. This traditional Freudian view is complementary to the newer feminist explanation of development where the attachment of the girl for her mother is primary and is the vehicle for her love for the father and other men. A feminist view postulates guilt both about Hillary's hate for Hugh who has rejected the demands of her childish love and her hate for Dorothy's excessive demands for control. This alternative hypothesis doesn't see Dorothy and Hillary as rivals for Hugh but the causes of moral masochism are still there.

These explanations are about Hillary's mental growth going awry and laying the groundwork for moral masochism. Onto this fertile soil falls guilt about the homosexual feelings for the teacher and also the love for Don Jones, the youth minister. Despite her powerful sublimations and active conscious outlets, her nihilistic feelings are masochistic and so are her reactions of guilt and shame to them. The most direct evidence are her predominately negative feeling about herself and the world in her own book as explained in the next section of this essay.

•Hillary's Oral and Anal Development

The formation of character begins during the first year of life with the oral stage when milk from the breast or bottle and mother's love are required for physical survival and growth. The explanations of disturbances in the oral stage involve overindulgence or deprivation.

Food is the first symbol of trust so orality, the first of the Freudian stages of development is described by Erik Erikson as producing a person's Basic Trust while an impairment during this phase leads to Basic Mistrust. These are the responses during the infant's first six months of passive incorporation or sucking followed by the second half of the first year with its more active incorporation process of biting. The predominance of Basic Trust leads to a character with oral optimism while Basic Mistrust results in oral pessimism. Erikson explains, "Whenever oral pessimism becomes dominant and exclusive, i infantile fears...can be discerned in the depressive forms of "being empty' and "being no good'...which in psychoanalysis is called "oral sadism," a cruel need to take and get in ways harmful to others."

Hillary's mind still exemplifies this lack of trust. There is a catalog of oral pessimism in the words of her Village book: bone disease, bombing, sexism, misogyny, suicide, a distraught baby, powerlessness, skid row, death, math anxiety, hurry, a frightened grandmother, delinquency, accidents, desperation, difficult children, suffering, divorce, shortcomings, sexual abuse, a sharp tongue, parental indifference, a cold house, cowardice, teen drinking and smoking and drug abuse, teen pregnancy, murder, violence, fainting and the list goes on. The list of positives is much shorter and less graphic: sports, work, opportunities, support, discipline, guidance , love, prayer, parenthood and village. The question isn't what Hillary thinks or says about children but how she says it. Yes, this is an invasive and involuntary method but it was Hillary who said, "I'm a Rorschach test."

The anal stage is described by Erikson as Autonomy versus Shame and Doubt when he discusses the consequences of bowel and bladder training and the increased muscular coordination and activity. Conflicts about elimination and self-control in two and three year-olds may lead to anal fixation resulting in a person who is stingy, stubborn, compulsive, acquisitive and controlling. Control and perfection are the keys to Hillary's character like her parents who are controlling and perfectionistic. The list of words from Hillary's book illustrate the conflicts about this phase as well. Most of the words are in the category of Shame and Doubt while only a few reflect Autonomy. Ther e is more information on Hillary's anal stage later in Hillary and Money.

The first stage of the the anal phase begins with "the half liquid evacuations of the infant (causing) the first intense excitations of the anal zone....The bowel movements and constipation, flatulence, diarrhea ...create ... a pleasurable desire at the anal zone," according to Richard Sterba who was one of Freud's inner circle. He continues, "Grown-up people, if they are honest enough to admit it, know and enjoy the sensual pleasure brought about by the passage of a large stool of a stick-like form...In the second phase of the anal period ...the chief pleasure is no longer experienced at the passage of the stool but in holding it back....the stool even when evacuated, is regarded as an enormously important and valuable object....extended to all the child's possessions..."

In a recent art show at the Whitney reviewing the Twentieth Century, a less ebullient phantasy of the anal stage appears in Kiki Smith's Tale . This is a construction in which a naked women who is crawling away from the viewer on all fours is trailed by a very long turd emerging from her anus. Contrast this to the ultra clean and orderly Martha Stewart image as a reaction-formation to the soiling of the anal stage. (Reaction-formation which involves turning an emotion into its opposite is discussed in the next section.)

•Hillary's Ego Defenses

An understanding of Hillary's behavior calls for an exploration of her ego defenses which are the way of regulating the three re alms of the developing personality. First, there is the id or the primitive force of the aggressive and lustful unconscious instincts where Freud's Pleasure Principle prevails. Here the attempt is to maximize pleasure and decrease pain. Call this realm, the libido or the sexual energy. Second, a partly conscious ego uses the Reality Principle to balance the conflicting demands of external reality such as parents and society with the pleasure seeking id and a censorious superego. This is the province of reason. Third, the conscience or superego is often in conflict with id impulses and also with the demands of reality. More about the superego later but it is here that the sense of right and wrong uses guilt to control behavior.

The similarity to Plato's portrait of a tripartite mind is striking, "...her form is like like a pair of winged steeds with their charioteer. In divine souls both steeds are good but in human souls one of them is bad..." So we have a rehearsal of ego, super ego and id from the Athens of the Fourth Century B.C.

The clash between the forces of the id, superego and reality produces anxiety. The ego makes compromises using behavior called ego defenses or just defenses to deal with the anxiety and depression from the conflict between id, the superego and reality. These defenses determine the strength of character. If they are solid, adaptable and work well, the personality is strong and healthy. If they are leaky and fragile, the person is anxious, fearful and depressed and maybe neurotic.

It is when a defense fails as a result of stress that depression and fear invade consciousness as in a neurosis. When repression is unable to control disturbing memories and impulses by keeping them in the unconscious, the result is that a person's emotions spin out of control. The defenses themselves c

Understanding Hillary's behavior leads to a study of her ego mechanisms of defense which determine her actions, style, habits and her foibles. Her physical and emotional development, intelligence, traumas, parental and adult influences, social mileau and genetics all converge in the formation of these defenses.

Some of Hillary's defenses are best described in her own words from her books, speeches and interviews. Of course, her defenses don't explain all of Hillary's behavior.

Repression, the fundamental defense of the ego is the banishing of memories, feelings and ideas from the conscious into the unconscious where they remain excluded from awareness. This is a prominent mechanism for Hillary where it is based on the exclusion from her consciousness of feelings of Oedipal love toward Daddy Hugh as a sadistic lover and also the emotions about Mother Dorothy's inability to offer protection from him. Consider these words from her book, "My strong feelings about divorce and its effects on children have caused me to bite my tongue more then a few times during my own marriage and to think about what I could do to be a better wife and partner." This is a metaphor from her adult awareness about the unconscious process of repression.

Denial is a frequent defense which affects the perception of reality so that what is happening is not seen, heard or acknowledged. Anxiety is the trigger for denial and also for the other defenses.

"She had to know," is an observation by a Little Rock local about Bi ll's long and unconcealed affair with Gennifer Flowers while he was Governor. Another example of denial is when Hillary stopped reading the newspapers in 1994 during the Whitewater accusations according to Bob Woodward. Hillary spoke of denial metaphorically when she said to a television interviewer that what she and Bill did first in the morning when they awoke in the White House was, "Pull the covers over our head." Other words of denial were, "I don't read what people mostly say about me."

Denial grows in Hillary as a child who used it to avoid recognition of the events of her family's sadomasochism and its Oedipal drama. Clinton biographer David Maraniss says, "When it comes to Clinton and sex, she knew but she didn't want to know." It was Hillary's denial that lead eventually led to Bill's impeachment when his attorneys "... favored settling with Paula Jones, but the First Lady wouldn't have it," according to Gail Sheehy. (See Hillary's Burden f or more details about this.)

Projection is an unconscious mechanism in which a person attributes to another the ideas or feelings that are unacceptable to her. Hillary says, "If someone has a female boss for the first time, maybe they can't take out their hostility on her, so they take it out on me." True enough, but this also reflects the experiences in her childhood which were formed by the projection of her father who said when she brought home a report card with all A's that it must be an awfully easy school.

Hillary is said by biographer Joyce Milton to have fired Barbara Feinman who worked on her Village book because she thought this writer had violated the secrecy about her seances with Eleanor Roosevelt and leaked the story to journalist Bob Woodward who then wrote about them. Hillary was the one who described Starr's investigation of the Lewinsky affair as part of a vast right-wing conspiracy but sometimes those who use projection are also the victims of real enemies and conspiracies. Hillary often warned Bill against trusting people. "Bill, don't be such a fucking Pollyanna. Some of these people you think are your friends aren't ," are her words quoted by Chris Anderson from Bill's 1980 Arkansas gubernatorial ca mpaign.

It was Hillary's projection and her paranoid secrecy that led White House attorney Lanny Davis to speculate, "... that the whole chain of events that led to the Whitewater investigations, then led to Ken Starr, which led to the investigation of Monica and finally to the impeachment can be traced back to the first Jeff Gerth New York Times (Whitewater) story and (Hillary's) ... first instinct - to lock down." Later Jane Sherburne, Hillary's attorney explained these events saying, "A lot of Hillary's reaction originated with that very private nature..." The tortuous path of these events allows a glimpse into Hillary's unconscious.

Hillary's love affair with secrecy affected the planning phase of her health care proposal leading to its poor reception ,by Congress and the media and so was a factor in its rejection. Hillary's approach to the obstacles of selling her health legislation was paranoid in its intensity. There is more about Hillary's failed health plan in Hillary's Burden. Her preoccupation with secrecy/privacy is described in Hillary as Mother and Chelsea as Orphan where it is called scotoptophilia.

Isolation is the splitting or the separation of emotion from an idea causing either one to be repressed into the unconscious. "Hillary can separate personal emotions from the goal and task ahead in a way few women can," her friend Betsey Wright says to author Connie Bruck. Another example is when little Hillary asked Daddy Hugh, "Do you mean if I murdered somebody, you'd still love me? And he'd say, "Yes, I would not approve of what you d id...but I will always love you," " according to biographer Radcliffe.

Intellectualization is a mechanism of defense which substitutes words and ideas for feelings as a way of controlling unacceptable impulses. Hillary explains, "The idea that I would check my brain at the White House door just doesn't make sense to me."

Sublimation is a defense in which socially unacceptable impulses from the unconscious are replaced by desirable goals. Serving the need of others and religious beliefs are solutions of the id-ego-superego conflicts. Destructive unconscious impulses are replaced by acceptable goals, compassion, religion and serving others. "I have a burning desire to do what I can, a desire to make the world around me...better for everybody," are Hillary's words.

Reaction Formation , defined as turning an unacceptable impulse into its opposite is one of Hillary's psychological defenses. Hillary's anger became manipulativeness and charm as she lunched and courted the editor of the Arkansas Democrat in Little Rock in order to deflect his "nasty" criticisms of Governor Clinton. It worked according to Connie Bruck.

Identification With the Aggressor is an ego defense involving Hillary's identification with gruff Daddy Hugh's psychological abusiveness so that she became "tough as nails" according to her brother. Hillary says, "The harder they hit, the more encouraged I get. Hillary's own staff are "...scared to death..." of her according to Connie Bruck.

"She denies rumors of throwing an ashtray, a lamp or anything at Bill but the stories persist. "She was a thrower - big time," according to an Arkansas Clinton staffer while a state trooper said, "he (Clinton) was afraid of her." They were quoted by Chris Andersen whose sources say that Hillary always initiated the fights with Bill. Aggressive/assertive An

An aggressive/ assertive Hillary appears as a Clinton White House aide, David Watkins describing Travelgate said, "...There would be hell to pay if we failed to take swift and decisive ac {tion in conformity with the First Lady's wishes." Hillary said, "We need those people out and our people in," describing the White House travel staff. .

•Frigid Hillary / Sexual Hillary /Bisexual Hillary / Lesbian Hillary

The Sister Frigidaire image from the high school newspaper opens a door on Hillary's frigid character. The formation of character is specially influenced by the forces of the sexual and aggressive unconscious instincts which press the ego for gratification. Hillary's aggressive and sexual drives were unacceptable according to her external reality and her conscience. The reaction is frigidity but this is more then just a defense because the character itself is altered in the interest of harmony within the ego. Hillary's mother who didn't have "tizzies" also repressed emotion. Hillary's solution was the development of the type of frigidity of character described in Otto Fenichel's The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis. Hillary alternates between her charisma and the icy nun image.

I watched Hillary's television biography and the l992 Inauguration video which show her smiles alternating with visible coldness when her affect is contrasted to the emotions of Tipper Gore or Barbara Bush. It's like contrasting the affect or emotional tone of Al Gore, usually rigid and distant to that of Bill Clinton, predominately cuddly and warm. Novelist Erica Jong, a Hillary admirer and feminist writing in the Nation says she is "...cold and too controlled...she g ives off an aura of discipline and ferocious tenacity..." Another feminist, Robin Lakoff who studies language finds Hillary's image in the mysterious, predatory and enigmatic Sphinx. This is a she-monster with the head of a woman and the body of a lion who silences and then consumes the men who confront her.

Hillary who dated in high school and college had her first serious romance which lasted from her junior year at Wellesley to her sophomore year at Yale Law School with a student who appears as a " handsome black Irishman" in the Sheehy book. Like her, he was an upper middle class WASP, a northerner with Christian values whom she met because they were both active in Republican student politics. They broke up after an intense relationship because he sought his future in the grass roots nonprofit world rejecting Hillary's sphere of power and politics. Hillary was already a star as a class president, pictured in Life magaz ine after her Wellesley commencement speech and then as an activist at the Yale Law School. Rupert is quoted on his physical attraction to Hillary and their satisfying sex life. This was during the era when she went from a Young Republican attending the convention that nominated Richard Nixon (she favored Nelson Rockefeller) in 1968 to an interest in Chicago radical Saul Alinsky's community organizing and the Black Panther Party. Her style had gone from pleated skirts and blouses to the bell bottoms of the counterculture and Rupert says they inhaled. Other college boyfriends are mentioned in passing but the Rupert melodrama is his kiss and tell entry into the Hillary story. Ask Hillary now and she may smile as she recalls a hunk who lacked Bill's ambition to be a Governor and then President.

Hillary's love life with Bill does not fulfill the intimacy of the sexy photos of their beach r tevel as they danced cheek to cheek in swim suits on a vacation during the Lewinsky crisis in 1998 or by their periodic hand holding. Less rather then more is Chris Andersen's view of their sex life when he says, "...the Clintons had not shared the same bedroom - much less the same bed - for at least seven years."

I believe that Hillary loves Bill and that Bill loves Hillary (see the Sadomasochistic Marriage for details) but Hillary is heard to complain that she "gets laid only twice a year." Bill's Good and Bad Women explains how Hillary went from the exciting Whore to the forbidding Madonna. Bill's failing erections are an issue too as explained later on in Walking the Dog With Bill and Monica.

The question of Hillary's love interest in women has a psychohistorical importance whether it is true or not. Her image and behavior, her persona and the stereotypes about strong women calls forth this issue, often as an accusation. There is a parallel to a rumor of Bill's homosexuality at 28 when he ran unsuccessfully for Congress in Arkansas. Hillary campaigned with him during this hard fought race and a rumor about her homosexuality also circulated during this election. In 1978 after Bill was elected Governor, there was talk that Nancy "Peach" Pietrafesa was Hillary's lover. This was a friend from her twenties in New England who went to Arkansas with her husband to work in the new Clinton administration.

Gennifer Flowers says Hillary is a lesbian in her book quoting Bill during their affair which ended in 1992. In 1996 Dick Morris, a friend of both the Clintons mentions Hillary as lesbian in a radio interview after he left the White House disgraced by his own sex scandal.