·Hillary's Burden

What are the consequences of this evaluation of Hillary's psychology?

First, that she isn't in full control when she is angry, cold and isolated. At times, the opposite is true, that her control is excessive and she lacks flexibility. Her anger and her withdrawal, justified or not are determined by her Basic Mistrust and her Shame and Doubt which result in sadomasochism and a frigid character. Hillary explains this during the New York senate campaign saying to interviewer Michael Tomsky, "I ... believe that it is just more difficult for women candidates to express their strong feelings about things affecting them...I don't want anything I say to feed into the kind of, ah, climate in which people engage in insults."

Second, we need to know more about how these trends developed. Neither she nor her mother have written their stories but we know from Hillary's book that her mother Dorothy was eight when her parents separated and divorced. Hillary's biographers call Dorothy' parents, Della and Edwin immature and neglectful parents. After the divorce Dorothy, age eight and her three year old sister were sent to live with their paternal grandparents traveling alone by train from Chicago to Los Angeles. Her grandfather ignored Dorothy and her grandmother was verbally and physically abusive so she left when she was fourteen to do child care for a family so she could finish high school. Sometimes such events are reflected in a later generation with Chelsea saying to the school nurse, "Call my dad, my mom is too busy."

Third, there is a public meaning to Hillary's image makeovers from a successful professional career woman using her own name to a cookie- baking- tea-serving hostess using Bill's name. The first makeover was during Bill's campaign for reelection as Governor after his defeat in 1980 at the end of his first term and there were other makeovers later. These periodic events reflect more then just political expediency. They are attempts to escape the public consequences of her anger, coldness and isolation, real or perceived. Hillary is an energetic and magnetic leader who offers a public policy for children but despite these qualities her anger, pessimism and coldness are not lovable. Is this reasonable or fair? Would this judgment be made about a man? No is the answer to both questions. Still it's not entirely politics, misogyny or anti-feminist bias. They are there but that's not all.

Fourth, the defeat of the Clinton health care reform, planned by Hillary involved the complementary sadomasochism of both Hillary and Bill. Hillary's health plan had failed by February 1994, early in the first term without even a vote as Congress including many Democrats became increasingly resistant to it. Bill had delivered a health care message in September 1993 but there were no arm-twisting presidential phone calls to the Hill for Hillary's health bill.

Journalist David Gergen, a White House presidential counselor for eighteen months during the first term tells the story of the health plan as a White House imbroglio pitting Hillary on the Left against a Right led by Treasury Secretary Bentsen, Secretary of State Christopher and Gergen himself. This was the time when the North American Free Trade Agreement known as NAFTA was on the table and Hillary and her advisors, Carville, Stephanopoulos and Begala believed that "...NAFTA was a disaster...and... would once again postpone health care reform, their number- one priority health care reform for his (Bill's) first term." Then in December 1993 the stories about the Arkansas state troopers' procurement of women for Governor Bill began to appear and soon the First Couple were barely speaking to each other. Bill's political muscle went into the passage of NAFTA . Hillary's team was told to "shut up on health care...it was NAFTA time," Connie Bruck explains.

Neither Washington nor Vienna is simple and linear so it was also the assignment itself of health care to Hillary that was a " Ômission impossible, Ô " according to David Gergen. His book asks, "Might he (Bill) have passed a bipartisan reform plan if the shadow of his past had not hung over his relationship with his wife?" Gergen's explanation is that "...the relationship between the President and the First Lady...operates like a seesaw. If he goes down in the relationship, she goes up." This particular arc of the seesaw refers to the Flowers revelations that almost derailed the 1992 campaign followed by the Paula Jones accusation. The reason for Bill's mistake, the assignment of a doomed mission to Hillary lies in Bill's Sadism and Masochism to be explained in a later section. Even FDR's New Deal couldn't pass its comprehensive health care plan, the Wagner-Murray-Dingell Bill.

It was the masochistic Hillary who withdrew her failed health plan from Congress as NAFTA passed in November 1994 with the support of some of the same members of Congress who opposed to Hillary's health proposal. Gergen speaks of the health plan when he says that "...he (Bill) did not...personally marshal the resources of the administration for its success." Then a sadistic Hillary said no to the settlement of the Jones case. Sometimes even the pragmatic Hillary makes mistakes under the control of her unconscious.

Fifth, it was Hillary's opposition to a settlement of the Paula Jones lawsuit against Bill in 1994 that led to his impeachment. Four years later it was settled for $850,000. Her decision not to allow a settlement of the Jones case which had been recommended by President Bill's legal advisors is mentioned by several of her biographers and by Bob Woodward in Shadow. This was an almost fatal mistake but what was going on in Hillary's unconscious?

The Paula Jones case was about her alleged harassment while she was an Arkansas state employee after she said she refused oral sex for Governor Bill in 1991. It was the legal discovery process in the Jones case about Bill's sex life which led to a deposition by Monica Lewinsky when her affair with President Bill was leaked to Jones' attorneys. Monica denied having sex with Bill but it was President Bill's false statement about not having a sexual relationship with Monica that led to his impeachment for perjury.

Hillary's unwillingness to settle the Jones case reflected three of her ego defenses. Her Identification With the Aggressor revived the combativeness of Daddy Hugh. She used Denial about Bill's behavior like Mother Dorothy used denial and passivity in the face of the curmudgeon, Daddy Hugh. Her Projection was like Daddy Hugh's paranoid attitudes toward a hostile world and her secrecy was a part of this paranoia. It was Hillary's excessive secrecy amounting to stonewalling about the Whitewater events that led to the appointment of the Special Prosecutor, first Edward Fiske and then Kenneth Starr.

In the White House, Hillary seeks self-understanding and inspiration from feminists, therapists, theologians and scholars like Jean Houston, Mary Catherine Bateson, Doris Kearns Goodwin and Michael Lerner. (There is more about this in Hillary and Bill's Psychotherapy.) Whether these White House visitors have been psychotherapists for Hillary is speculative. Hillary and Bill had marital counseling in Arkansas in 1989 and also during the Monica events according to Bob Woodward. But a prescient note from Hillary's law school experience is that one of the teachers at the Yale Child Study Center where she studied for a year was Anna Freud.

WILLIAM JEFFERSON CLINTON

· Bill as Psychohistory

"I remember, as a small child, watching my mother on a railway platform... sobbing and waving goodbye to me...she sank to her knees..," Bill Clinton writes as if from an analyst's couch. Little Bill stayed in Arkansas with his grandparents from the age of two to four while his mother went to New Orleans for two years of training to become a nurse-anesthetist. His mother describes this scene in virtually the same words in her autobiography leading us to wonder about whether Bill cribbed the lines and so underlined their salience.

Bill's separation from his mother has a great deal to do with his character and his Presidency. How does the turmoil of his early years affect the paradoxical picture offered by his biographers? He is described as hesitant, indecisive and passive in the face of opposition; cowardly; desiring to please; chameleon-like in reinventing himself; deceptive; often late; unreasonably angry; sexually profligate and addicted to food and exercise. Yet he is also described as having strong religious beliefs, a need to help, great energy, many accomplishments, intellectual, ambitious, perfectionistic, understanding, courageous and charismatic. These are the contradictions of his "personal psychodrama" which Bob Woodward says are baffling in The Agenda, his book about Clinton as president.

The information about William Jefferson Clinton, whom I often refer to as Bill or Clinton, comes from a variety of sources with varying authenticity. The accuracy of the personal details and the events in the books by his mother, brother, friends, journalist-biographers, muckrakers and former lovers are less important then the story itself, the emotional climate and the mythos of Clinton's life. The sources including his own words present an affective unity even when their facts and viewpoints diverge. Leading With My Heart, the book by his mother, Virginia Kelley is a unique opportunity for a psychohistorian who almost never has a mother's story about a national leader.

·Bill as Oedipus

The psychohistory of Bill Clinton must deal with his Oedipus complex as the primary determinant of his emotional life and behavior. The Clinton image arouses powerful love and sexual dreams in women and disguised ones in men that have been collected in a book by Judith Anderson-Miller, Dreams of Bill. His sexual attractiveness is often cast in the Elvis model leavened by the power of the Oval Office. This identity pleased his mother, an Elvis fan who includes a picture of teenage Bill as Elvis in her autobiography. It resonates with women voters and affects men too as they identify with the bad boy of Jailhouse Rock. Here is Saxophone Bill from the high school band whose paramour was to be Gennifer Flowers , a pop singer like his mother Virginia who often spontaneously joined the vocalist in the Hot Springs clubs that she loved.

Oedipus, the complex that defines the path of love in the family and in national life, also identifies the converse, the route of hate and so we have the "Clinton crazies." They attack Clinton as a cocaine cartel leader, a drug smuggler and a Satanic murderer in books, magazines, on videos, radio and the internet according to Philip Weiss' survey in the New York Times Magazine. The hate-Bill reaction was heard largely from the hard right of national politics but in 1999, I heard author Christopher Hitchens, socialist and Nation columnist, call Bill a serial rapist, a pathological liar and a war criminal.

The emotions about President Bill are an irrational and excessive transference as though all America is in therapy with Psychoanalyst Bill. The surplus of love and hate here exceeds the quantity which can be attributed to Bill either as a political force or as a symbol. Of course, Political Bill affects all our lives with peace or war, the economy and the list goes on. Ikon Bill is a role model and ego ideal so we ask, "What will the children think?" Nonetheless the surfeit of emotion about Analyst Bill as president-father-mother is from the national unconscious. Here resides an unconscious reservoir of the unresolved infantile love and hate reactions that we have about our own parents. Other presidents like Reagan, Nixon and JFK elicited similar over reactions.

Transference is the emotional reaction of the patient to the analyst based on the patient's unresolved emotions about her or his parents. This is separate from the patient's reaction to the analyst as a real person. Transference as resistance slows therapy and has to be worked through but it is this very transference that allows the patient's problems to be mobilized , understood and resolved during an analysis. Transference was one of Freud's main discoveries as he encountered strong emotions of love and hate toward him in his earliest patients based on their unresolved emotions about their own parents. It was the intensity of the love and hate of the transference that caused Josef Breuer, Freud's first collaborator to end his study of neurosis during the 1890's and leave the field to Freud.

What does it mean to describe Clinton as Oedipal? It refers to the role of Oedipus in the family drama of King Laius, the father murdered by the ill-fated son who then marries his mother, Queen Jocasta. The son, who is destined for this role by the Gods is punished by self-inflicted blindness. After wandering in lifelong exile, he enters a sacred grove from which he goes to a consecrated afterlife. A sacred Greek legend was the basis for Sophocles' Oedipus Rex which Freud read as a map of personality formation. The universality of this explanation of development is still debated but its power in the life of President Clinton is beyond any clinical doubt. The evidence is in the story written by his mother who describes the childhood traumas and intimate details of the President's development, including even the location of the parental bedroom in relation to that of the son.

Clinton's Oedipal story is in the portents, expectations and cues of his mother Virginia as Jocasta. The ill-fated queen is the surrogate for the citizens who wanted the magical economic benefits of the Gods denied them by Bush in 1992 who represents another aspect of the murdered King Laius. Virginia describes herself as a workaholic nurse-anesthetist, colorfully costumed, vividly made-up, hard drinking, flirtatious, assertive, impulsive and controversial. Her self-portrait is similar to the one in the biography of Bill Clinton by Arkansas journalist Meredith Oakley who adds that Virginia was "not a pretty woman" but she was a "striking figure."

The final event in which Clinton vanquished his King Laius was a struggle at age fourteen when he told his stepfather, Roger Clinton never again to hit his mother. He was now taller and stronger then this alcoholic man who was argumentative and paranoid. Virginia tells us that Bill was already "father, brother and son" in the family where he "took care" of his mother and his younger brother. Husband Roger often wasn't available so Bill as a teen was Virginia's "date" in the Hot Springs night clubs where he danced with her and listened as she spontaneously sang with the band according to biographer Chris Andersen. Bill's powers as "special, sensitive and mature" were amplified as an only child until the age of ten.

The unconscious fantasies of a son who possesses the mother after killing the father produces a reservoir of guilt and anxiety in the son especially if this drama is confirmed by family events. Clinton's mother was married to his father, William Jefferson Blythe while he was serving in World War II and Bill Clinton was born three months after his father's death in an auto accident in 1946. Oedipus killed his traveling father at the crossroads in an encounter fated by the Gods while Bill Blythe died alone from an accidental tire blowout in a speeding car on a lonely highway. Bill Clinton's father was en route to Arkansas to meet Virginia, Bill's mother so they could travel to the new home that Bill Blythe had found in Chicago. Bill often heard the story of his father's death while traveling from Chicago to Arkansas and he tells us, "I had to live for myself and for him too...that...shaped my childhood - that great memory."

Was Bill Blythe's death on that urgent and fateful trip a consequence of Virginia's pregnancy with Bill? Are Virginia and Bill guilty of Father Bill Blythe's death? Of course that isn't rational but neither is the mind of the child as he learns of his role in his father's death. As Virginia mourns, she is embarrassed or maybe ashamed because her new baby named William Jefferson Blythe III is fatherless. She has a vision of herself as a disgraced unwed mother and this is when Bill's care passes to his grandmother for the first four years of his life.

Presidential biographer Maraniss tells us that Bill's birth August 16, 1946, eight months after William Blythe and Virginia were reunited December 10, 1945 "spawned rumors" because of Virginia's "flirtatious nature." Virginia explained that Bill's birth had been induced weeks ahead of schedule by the doctor because of concerns about her condition. Author Sheehy disputes the story of Bill's induced delivery based on an interview of the nurse who delivered Bill. His birth weight of 8.6 pound ruled out prematurity so the question is unresolved. Unknown to Virginia, Bill's father, William Jefferson Blythe was still married when he married Bill's mother in 1943 so that their marriage wasn't legal.

Clinton's mother influenced his Oedipus complex but what does this mean? In Sophocles' drama, there was no initiative by Jocasta toward her son Oedipus but Virginia's seductive behavior influenced little Bill's unconscious mind and so affected his Oedipus complex. This goes beyond the Virginia of his childhood image as a musical, caring and sexy woman. The overtly seductive parent of the opposite sex who figured in Freud's first Oedipus theory in 1895 was replaced in the early years of the next century by a parent whose eroticism was unconscious but equally powerful for the child.

A sculptural view of the Oedipus Complex was made by Michaelangelo's PiŽtas which portray the Virgin and the Son at the same age as their naked bodies merge into a tender physical and a mystical union. Psychoanalyst Oremland says that this is an aging Michaelangelo's statement about his reunion with his own mother.

Virginia was unconsciously seductive toward her son who was her romantic or sexual object, a successor for her real loves, Bill's dead father and her own father. Her words about her son point to this but more importantly her own unresolved Oedipal experience can be best understood this way. Virginia's mother, Edith who was called Mawmaw in the family was "...vindictive, manipulative...(with) ...nightly screaming fits..." of jealousy when she lunged at Eldridge, Virginia's father who was called Pawpaw. He invoked Virginia futility pleading, "Please, the baby has to go to school tomorrow. Please."

The Oedipal rage between Mother Edith and Daughter Virginia exceeded even harsh discipline as Edith's sharp switches bloodied Virginia's legs. The contrast was with the kind and good Father Eldridge about whom Daughter Virginia said, " I loved my father as much as it's possible for a daughter to love her father." As Father Eldridge was attacked by Mother Edith's harsh words, Virginia wondered, "Why don't you stand up to her, maybe even strike her...that might teach her a lesson." Virginia decided about the time she got to high school that she "wasn't going to cater to my mother's bullying" but she didn't announce it, "I was gutsy, but not crazy." Her rebellious behavior in nursing school was a deferred attack on her mother after she left home and is described in Bill's Sadism and Masochism.

Virginia's own Oedipal frustration in attempting to possess her good father and destroy her bad mother was revived in her mother-son relationship and this fulfills Freud's meaning. She possessed her son and so won a victory in the Oedipal struggle with her mother about her father. After Bill's Presidential inauguration, Virginia muses in the Queen's Bedroom of the White House, "I wish my daddy could have been there to see his daughter... on the Queen's bed." Like mother, like son, the Oedipus complex is hard to resolve.

We see Virginia's Oedipal anger too when author James Stewart shows us Mother Virginia with first term Governor Bill, "With her skunk-stripe hair, thick makeup, and eyeliner, she would charge through the office...bumping Rudy Moore (chief of staff) out of the way. 'Get the hell out of here, Dwire (Virginia's name then) said. 'I want to talk to this little brat.' From behind the closed office door, the staff could hear her yell at her son, 'I'll be god-damned if you can pull this shit on me." No matter what her immediate annoyance, Virginia was expressing Queen Jocasta's reaction to her role in Oedipus' tragic actions. The Queen had allowed her newborn baby to be taken away to the forest by King Laius' servant to be put to death after a prophesy that Oedipus would kill him. Oedipus was spared this fate by being given to a peasant family however he returned as a young man to kill King Laius and marry Queen Jocasta as the new king. In the play, the Queen committed suicide when it was revealed that Oedipus was her son.

Is the Oedipus complex universal? It appears to be present in some form in most societies studied by anthropologists and psychoanalysts although agreement about this is lacking. Frantz Fanon , psychoanalyst and Third World liberationist questions its universality in Africa. The best argument for some kind of Oedipus everywhere seems to be a universal prohibition against incest . The superego, the location of cultural rules and standards is thought to be an heir of the Oedipus complex. Incidentally, Freud never argued that the Oedipus complex was universal although other psychoanalysts did. All this and more is explained by Andreas Bernoldi from South Africa. Meanwhile, Alan Roland reports that psychoanalysts in Japan propose an Ajase complex that focuses directly on the mother as a substitute for the Oedipus complex with dependency relationships that are called amae which are the center of Japanese psychological functioning.

You don't have to be a believing Freudian to enjoy Bill's psychohistory. Just suspend your disbelief as you do for Agatha Christie or Bill Clinton's favorite mystery writer, Walter Mosley.

·Bill's Primal Scene

Virginia is unusually revealing about the family's psychosexual panorama when she says that Bill's childhood bedroom was directly across the hall from the one she occupied with her second husband, Roger. The primal scene is a psychoanalytic dictum about the effect on the small child who sees parental sex as an attack of an aggressive male on a passive female. The emotion of the coupling and the mystery of adult sexual organs excite and confuse the child. We are told that the parental bedroom was the source of noisy accusations of infidelity and attacks on Virginia by a drunken Roger. A curious and precocious Bill could hardly have avoided this kind of primal scene as it was combined with Virginia's frustration and parental conflict.

We learn more about the sexual problems of this family when Virginia tells us about Roger's lack of in sexual interest in her. She complains about her husband's inability to impregnate her more then once in 17 years of marriage although she wanted very much to have another child. She says, "I don't recall ever using any kind of birth control ...a husband's nightly alcoholic tantrums can work wonders in that regard." In addition to the effect of alcohol on reducing the sperm count, Roger may have been periodically impotent which is not rare among alcoholics. Virginia tells us that he spent time with other women and says that Roger was found at a lady friend's house after a search by the family when his father was on his deathbed.

The other side of this equation was Virginia's sexual disinterest in Roger. "I'm a single mother," Virginia thought in 1960 when husband Roger's drunken rage had led to the confrontation with fourteen year old Bill that stopped the abuse. By the time Bill graduates from high school, Virginia says of Roger, "...our marriage was basically over...I hardly even looked at him." Virginia's frustrated marriage was the kind of family secret that made a traumatic impact on Bill's immature psyche.

We know a good deal about Bill Clinton's sexuality from his promiscuous reputation as reported by his biographers. Gennifer Flowers wrote a book about their twelve year affair. Dolly Kyle Browning wrote a "thinly disguised" novel "loosely based on a true story" about their thirty-three year love affair which she said began when she was eleven and Bill was thirteen. Later she confirmed that this affair became an "extramarital relationship" in a lawsuit she filed against President Clinton. The Monica Lewinsky affair is documented by Ken Starr's report and Monica's own book.

Maybe as one observer says, there are similarities to his role model, Jack Kennedy who needed sex at least once a day with a variety of mistresses, lovers, secretaries and prostitutes to avoid headaches. Sexuality is a drive based on biology but its individual expression varies so the usual list of the adulterous Presidents since World War II would include Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Bush and Clinton. Reagan and Nixon are added to this roster in Cawthorne's lively book but Truman, Ford and Carter still escape.

Does Bill Clinton's reputation for sexual promiscuity increase his voter appeal? I haven't seen any polls on this question but I believe this is probably true and so Gary Hart is the only presidential candidate to be punished for sexual indiscretions. Social critic Camille Paglia speaks to this when she says, "I'm for a high libido President." The Paula Jones and Kathleen Willey episodes titillate and disgust. The Gennifer Flowers and Monica Lewinsky affairs, the denials by Bill and Hillary and then the apologies by Bill attest to the libidos of the Nineties' voters. Prurience and resolution outweigh disapproval.

·Bill as a Bisexual in Love With His Stepfather

Bill's primary Oedipal struggle about his sexual love for his mother and his death wishes toward his stepfather are accompanied by a secondary or negative Oedipal reaction as he identifies with his beloved stepfather against his errant mother. Virginia says she flirted openly with men in the night clubs because her husband preferred to spend the evenings gambling in the club's back rooms. At least once, Roger attacked a man because she danced with him. She spent much of her free time with men at the race track. She tells us that she was was innocent of her husband's constant accusations of infidelity but Dolly Kyle Browning says Virginia had an affair with Dolly's father when they were both married. Gossip perhaps, but it carries the same emotional valence as Dolly's affair with Bill Clinton in her novel, narrative-fiction based on her true story. Author David Brock says Virginia "slept around" without giving us any details. I heard the same comment in 1998 from Virginia's friend in Little Rock who said, "You have to remember that she was single for many years."

When Bill was four or five, Virginia was the rival of Roger, the stepfather for Bill's love in a family conflict between the parents. The original positive Oedipus complex is followed by the negative one which helps to neutralize it but both are active in the child's dreams, fantasies, imagination and games which substitute other objects of love and hate for the original Oedipal figures.

Little Bill and his stepfather had a close relationship especially when Roger dated Bill's mother and Virginia tells us that this was one of the reasons that she married him. Bill was three during their courtship and four when they married. Despite Roger's alcoholism, abusiveness and their confrontation, Bill and Roger remained close until his death from cancer when Bill was 21. Bill's negative Oedipus complex was fostered by his emotional response to Roger's noisy accusations of Virginia so their truthfulness is less important then their sexual and emotional content. A contributing factor is Bill's jealousy on hearing that his mother preferred other men not just to husband Roger but also to son Bill.

A strong and persistent reverse Oedipus complex can create homosexual feelings for men who are father surrogates although we don't see this with Bill. I am not offering a psychoanalytic theory for the development of homosexuality which is as far as we know mainly bi

ological or constitutional but simply looking at the psychosocial and family issues of normal bisexuality. Bill isn't gay or actively bisexual but the negative Oedipal complex may have provided him with an empathy for homosexuality that led him to give more government help in the AIDS crisis. He is the first President who had a direct relationship with an openly gay friend and activist, David Mixner, who raised money and organized gay voters for Bill in both his presidential campaigns. Although Bill made an unsuccessful attempt at equality for gays in the military early in his first term, he later opposed gay marriage.

Rumors accused Bill as a 28 year old bachelor of being gay during his unsuccessful 1974 Congressional campaign against the incumbent Republican, although Hillary had just arrived in Arkansas and Bill was said to have a girlfriend in each county. In 1998 during the Lewinsky scandal, listeners on KSFO, hate-Clinton radio in San Francisco, were asked to imagine Clinton playing " bear and otter," gay argot for a large hairy man cavorting with a slim hairless one like George Stephanopoulos. Bisexuality has a role in the Dionysian persona of Bill Clinton at least for some members of the Radical Right.

·Bill's Good and Bad Women

The role of Hillary Rodham Clinton in Bill's life as his wife and the mother of his child is described in some detail by his mistress, Gennifer Flowers. Again the veracity and narcissism of her memoir concern us, but her words and those she heard from Bill during their relationship are part of the psychohistorical climate of Clinton's gubernatorial sexuality. Flowers recalls Bill describing Hillary as Hilla the Hun or Sarge and saying that she preferred women to men, but that he really "admired" her mind and the things she tried to accomplish. Author Gary Wills quotes Clinton as saying, "I was born at sixteen and I'll always feel sixteen. And Hillary was born at the age of forty."

This is the classic psychoanalytic dilemma of the Madonna (not the pop performer) and the Whore for a man who is impotent with his wife but potent with a mistress. His wife represents the mother, a tabooed sexual object, while the bad woman is permitted sexually. Bill's mother image is split by the power of the the Oedipal prohibition into a good mother-wife who becomes forbidden as a sexual object and a witch or bad mother who is allowed because she is degraded by the sexuality denied to the wife. But there was an earlier Oedipal obstacle to be surmounted. Bill's first solution to his Oedipal dilemma was to escape from the taboo against Mother Virginia's steamy Southern sexuality into Hillary's cooler Yankee persona.

In an Oedipal confession, Virginia says she wanted him to choose an Arkansas beauty queen like her self-image rather then Hillary, the hippie intellectual Chicagoan with coke bottle glasses. Virginia casts herself as a Freudian Queen Jocasta when she speaks of the "...the young ladies in his (Roger's but also Bill's) life...all beauties in the classic Hot Springs beauty-pageant mold...the image of womanhood my boys grew up with starting at home with their coifed and painted mother." She recalls "... my first meeting with Hillary...electrifying...I ...had never...any dealings with ...Yankees." Bill spoke up to Virginia about his love for Hillary but she says that "...emotionally we had a long, long road ahead of us." Later Virginia has a "biblical conversion" at Arkadelphia driving between Hot Springs and Hope and writes a letter asking Hillary's forgiveness which goes unanswered but sending it lets Virginia "live again."

But after a few years of marriage Bill's libido returns to the Arkansas beauty queens and groupies like Gennifer, Dolly and Monica. Why? The Madonna/Whore dilemma was back with a new cast and now Hillary was the taboo Oedipal good mother. Hillary had blended with Virginia and had gone from Whore to Madonna in the unconscious of Bill Clinton.

·Bill's Castration Anxiety and Masturbation Guilt

A boy's sexual impulses toward his mother are terminated by castration anxiety, the response to real or imagined threats of genital mutilation like, "If you play with yourself, it will fall off." When I was twelve, more knowledgeable boys threatened that if you masturbated, hair would grow on the palm of your hand. Castration anxiety is often linked to masturbation guilt. The defenses against this anxiety are crucial to the newly forming personality and their form is influenced by the specific threats and the style of the parents.

Bill Clinton's masturbation guilt is visible when he fires Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders because she suggests teaching about masturbation in schools as part of sex education. Despite this physician's distinguished career and service in Clinton's Arkansas and Federal administrations, she was asked to resign because she spoke permissively about masturbation!

Bill Clinton's castration fears include his learning early in his life about the danger of love when his real father Bill Blythe was killed in a car wreck as he was driving from Chicago to Arkansas so he could take Virginia who was pregnant with Bill to their new home in a suburb of Chicago. Hillary explains this by saying, "(He)...viewed his father's death as so irrational - so out of the blue - that it set a tone for his own sense of mortality...an intense sense of ...what he might miss at any moment."

Castration anxiety is often experienced as both a verbal and a physical attack on bodily integrity. Joe Purvis, a kindergarten contemporary recalls that five year old Bill was jumping rope in cowboy boots when he was tripped by a classmate who tightened the rope so Bill fell, breaking his leg in three places. The five year olds shouted at tearful Bill to get up and when he didn't, they hooted, "Bill's a sissy." When the teacher saw what happened, she sent for Bill's grandmother who took him to the hospital where he stayed for two weeks.

This was at a time when Bill was called a "sissy" because he was fat and clumsy. These are the words and the image of failed masculinity and then the accident actualizes the fear of the loss of the penis. Soon the emotions of this trauma if not the memory itself is repressed into the unconscious but it doesn't go away. The omission of this episode from Virginia's tell-all book also suggests that it may have a special emotional significance.

Another physical assault was at seven when Bill was attacked by a "big ram" who had him down in a pasture on the family farm, Virginia remembers. He was rescued and then fled to his mother's arms. Later Bill recalls this experience for a reporter, "...a ram butted me cutting my head open. I was too young, fat and slow to run even after he knocked me down the second time. He must have butted me ten times. It was the awfullest beating I ever took and I had to go to the hospital for stitches." This was another likely renewal of castration fears and perhaps anxiety dreams too. Bill blames himself for being unable to escape the attack of the castrating father as ram. His low self esteem is accompanied by self-blame. We'll talk later on about how Bill's blaming conscience (also known as the superego) works and also how seven year old Bill who had a persona as a leader according to some of his classmates also had strong inferiority feelings.

Virginia tells us the attack by the ram happened on a 400 acre farm near Hot Springs to which Roger, the alcoholic stepfather had moved the family after he failed as an automobile dealer in Hope. Virginia says they soon moved into Hot Springs because Roger didn't know anything about farming. She undoubtedly told Bill this too.

·Bill's Separation Anxiety

Separation anxiety following the loss of a parent or a parent's love is another character forming experience. It is akin to anxiety about castration so it may reinforce Oedipal fears. Age seven was a time of separation anxiety when Bill's mother had to be away from home more often because of the increasing demands of her work as an anesthetist. This wasn't Bill Clinton's first episode of separation anxiety as will be explained later but its coincidence at seven with the castration anxiety of the ram's attack helps us understand the consolidation of his ego defenses especially repression and denial, a topic we'll spell out in detail in Bill's Ego Defenses.

Virginia who was on 24 hour call to give anesthesia was working more by the time Bill was seven so she needed to find a substitute mother. Virginia explains in her book that a neighbor, Mrs. Walters, an older white woman came along then and she is the one who who taught Bill the Golden Rule. Is this just a Southern lady's appreciation for a good nanny or are we also learning that embattled Virginia's rule was that of the Old Testament, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth?

The mother image which was split earlier between grandmother Edith and Virginia is split again. Mrs. Walter is at home, benign and religious while Virginia, aggressive and mobile is in conflict with stepfather Roger. The stepfather's constant accusations of infidelity against Bill's mother were another threat to the security of Bill who may have believed that something was wrong with his mother. This was in contrast to the kind housekeeper who was always available and exemplified the local Bible Belt morality in contrast to his racy mother Virginia who smoked, drank and gambled. According to Virginia, Mrs. Walter stayed for eleven years and then her daughter Maye took over as housekeeper.

Another version from Roger Morris' book is that the surrogate mom was Earline White, an African American. Her husband worked at Ray Clinton's Buick dealership where brother-in-law Roger also worked.

I talked to Earline in 1998 and she says she began work for Virginia when Bill was seven and stayed until he was eighteen when he went off to college. Earline told me that little Bill and Roger always minded and were never difficult. If they needed a reminder, she swished a little switch. Bill told her she could find a better paying job in town and she did. Virginia was said to have been mad at Bill.

There was also more then one nanny in the story written by Bill's younger brother, Roger Clinton, Jr. in his Growing Up Clinton. He says a black woman, Earline White took care of him from an early age but Miss Walters, another housekeeper whom he called Waffers was also there from his early years so that they "really raised me." Virginia's remembrance of only a white nanny, Mrs. Walters as Bill's example of living Christianity may be Arkansas elegant or just plain racism but Jimmy Carter's influential nanny in Georgia was an African American woman. Of course Hot Springs was a largely white town while Plains, Georgia is mostly African American. Ms. Walters is the only one in both Virginia's book and Roger Junior's book without a first name so perhaps here is a place where the fact checking by their coauthors fell short.

Like a good and bad mother, Bill also had a good and a bad father. Bill Blythe was dead and an idealized symbol while Roger, the live stepfather was an abusive alcoholic. The biography by Allen and Portis quotes Bill, "It's a very difficult thing to be raised with a myth...I felt...in a hurry in life because it gave me a real sense of mortality...I thought about it all the time because my father died at 29..."

Despite his later flaws as a husband and father, Roger was a handsome older adventurous businessman who arrived in toddler Bill Clinton's life when Virginia began her romance with him. He was interested in Bill and helped pay for little Bill's travel to New Orleans with his grandmother so he could see his mother Virginia while she was away studying anesthesia. Roger helped in the the resolution of Bill's Oedipus complex but one of the results was a lifelong ambivalence about the good father Bill Blythe versus the bad stepfather Roger Clinton. There is also ambivalence about the early attractive Roger versus his later negative persona. Ambivalence produces the frequent indecision in Bill as Governor and President and more will be said later about how this ambivalence began at home even before Roger entered Bill's life.

A year after fending off Stepfather Roger's attack on Mother Virginia, Bill now 15 wanted to help his weakened stepfather so he legally changed his name from Blythe to Clinton. Bill's conscious motive was to support his stepfather who was depressed about Bill's mother divorcing him but he also wanted to help his half brother who at age five was starting in school. Bill felt he and younger brother Roger should have the same name legally although Bill had already used the Clinton name during school. Virginia who had remarried her divorced husband Roger after three months of separation was pleased at this gesture which she thought might help Roger's morale. But at an unconscious level 15-year-old Bill is announcing that he is the father of five year old Roger Clinton and the husband of Virginia since his name is now legally Clinton.

The first and crucial separation episode for Bill was when his mother went to New Orleans for two years to study anesthesia leaving him as a two year old with his grandparents in Arkansas. Virginia says she was only gone a year but most of Bill's biographers say it was two years. "It almost killed me to be away from Bill," she said and cried after their visits.

Bill Clinton writes about his memories of separation at two from his mother who went to New Orleans to study anesthesia for two years. "I remember my mother crying and actually falling down by the railbed. And my grandmother saying, ÔShe's doing it for you.' " This separation was necessary to assure Bill's future according to his mother since her earning potential as a nurse was limited and also it became "life saving" by giving her a focus that helped her shut out her later marital problems.

Bill's maternal grandmother Edith wanted Bill's mother out of town so she could take over the baby, her only grandchild and she really did come to hold "sway" over Bill. Grandmother Edith disliked Roger, Virginia's new beau and it was when Bill was four that Virginia's decision to marry Roger led to a crisis. Edith announced she would take Bill's custody away from Virginia even though Eldridge, Virginia's father opposed the plan. After Edith consulted an attorney, the plan was abandoned but Bill was the object of an emotional struggle between his grandmother and his mother. His grandmother had taken care of him during his first four years including the years when his mother was in New Orleans and then after her return to Arkansas when she worked different shifts in local hospitals and was often out of town on weekend parties with Roger.

The struggle for Bill was finally resolved when Virginia's seventeen year marriage to Roger began but the tension continued. Neither Virginia's nor Roger's parents attended the wedding. We are told that Bill's grandmother Edith hated Roger because he was a gambler and alcoholic while his family disapproved since he was still married and behind in child support payments while he courted Virginia. Virginia says that the emotional struggle over four year old Bill between her and her mother was one that he probably remembered years later. Hillary calls this struggle "abusive" during her interview in Talk in 1999.

The second separation took Bill away from his grandmother's home when Virginia married Roger. His compensation for this emotional loss was the new house on 13th street where he lived with mother and his new stepfather Roger who bought him a Lionel train. Little Bill was loved by his new father but events were to interfere with this idyll.

Separation anxiety in a child is usually resolved at the time with tension, irritability and insomnia, hardly earth shaking events. But not all separations are innocuous or brief and it is the adult's later behavior that tells us retrospectively what happened in the mind of the child. The unconscious residual of such events is often a lifelong cautiousness or inhibition about sudden change, or just the opposite, risk taking and daring or Bill Clinton's combination of both. Clinton dared to promise gays full integration in the military but the fear of the political consequences of this change frightened him so he withdrew his promise. Bill had received support from gay voters whose concerns included the harassment of gays and lesbians in the service and the discharge of career military men and women who were gay. Bill's risk taking was there but his fear of the loss of Congressional support was overwhelming.

When Bill's initiative in appointing Lani Guinier to head the Justice Department's civil rights division in 1993 was threatened, his separation anxiety again took control and he canceled her nomination. She was a law professor and a former NAACP attorney who was called a "Quota Queen" because of her law journal articles about how to make voting more democratic using a kind of proportional representation called cumulative voting. She was denied an opportunity to defend her views before a Senate committee but finally had an emotional ninety minutes in the Oval Office with the President whose eyes were moist while her nomination hung in the balance as she explained her writings. He seemed satisfied then but twenty minutes later Bill phoned her to tell her he had withdrawn her name. When Lani recalls the experience in her 1998 book, she questions the President's leadership, integrity and motivation but I wonder about his separation anxiety.

Bill's fear of abandonment is resolved by being the abandoner. The psychic and political costs of gay liberation and an African American political initiative are too scary even for America's first rock and roll president.

·Slick Willie and the Genes

What about the Slick Willie image? This appellation was popularized by Arkansas journalist Paul Greenberg in the Pine Bluff newspaper but it was already in the local folk culture with a pre-Clinton Slick Willy bar and restaurant near the state capitol in Little Rock.

Bill Clinton's character problems are mentioned by the Washington Post's Bob Woodward in The Agenda and by his other biographers too. The use of deception in promises, manipulation, self indulgence, and addiction to food, casual sex and exercise, the failure to take and hold a position in the face of criticism and a lack of a dominant focus to his politics are offered as evidence of Clinton's character disorder.

Hillary entered the pop diagnostic quiz in 1999 with the Lucinda Franks interview in Talk saying that the struggle over four year old Bill between Mother Virginia and Grandmother Edith is the cause of his promiscuity because the worst situation for a boy is to be in the middle of a conflict between two women.

Journalists like Edith Efrom conclude that Clinton has "no 'self' " while Harper editor Lewis Lapham says that Clinton has "...the emptiness of a soul that knows itself only by the names of what it seizes or consumes." Hillary biographer Gail Sheehy says that Bill has a multiple personality using its recent diagnostic synonym, dissociative disorder and attributes this opinion to a White House doctor. Of course, such character defects are common in life and politics and among the Presidents, Kennedy, LBJ and Nixon come to mind.

The mental health professionals who make one shot diagnoses of Clinton in their books are Doctor Paul Fick who calls him an adult child of an alcoholic and Doctor Jerome Levin who says he's a sex addict. A psychiatric diagnosis may be of value in coding patients for health insurance reimbursement or for the selection of a medication but it doesn't offer a theory of behavior or thought. The rigidity of this nomenclature offers little room for personal or presidential individuality.

Like a child in a candy store, I found the temptation to sound bites hard to resist, so here goes. Clinton has a borderline character disorder with an underlying sadomasochism as will be explained later in this essay. Bush is cyclothymic with a mood which swings from normal to periods of depression and torpor. Reagan, the president who couldn't remember during the Iran Contra investigation had Alzheimer's disease. Carter was an obsessive compulsive who micromanaged his presidency. Ford who was appointed vice president by Nixon and succeeded him was the passive president. Nixon was a paranoid president which is confirmed by his words on the White House tapes. Kennedy was a speed freak, the substance abusing president who injected amphetamines. Lyndon Johnson was both manic as he promised the Great Society and depressed as he selected the targets for bombs in Vietnam and sometimes these symptoms ran together. I was able to resist the temptation to diagnose the First Ladies but you get the idea.

Clinton's personal characteristics translated into psychiatric jargon are an addiction to exercise, food and casual sex, the lack of a central identity, narcissism, unstable interpersonal relationships that are used exploitively, inappropriate anger and a distortion of his superego or conscience. These are the symptoms of a borderline personality disorder which The Harvard Mental Health Letter says affects 2.5 % of the population, six million people.

Borderline originally meant a condition between neurosis and schizophrenia but now borderline often refers to the border between a neurosis with its anxiety, fears or obsessions and a grossly disordered character with a defective conscience, a criminal or an alcoholic. Borderline is a diagnosis which began to be used by psychoanalysts and their psychoanalytically trained colleagues in the Fifties to replace the older and pejorative mental hospital labels: asocial or sociopathic personality, constitutional psychopathic inferiority and character or personality disorder. These terms in the frequently changing nomenclature of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) are all part of a debate. It's confusing and psychiatrist Fritz Redlich who wrote about Hitler says that anyone using the term borderline needs to define it so we know what it means to the writer. The definition of narcissistic personality appears later in my section on Narcissism. It overlaps with the definition of borderline although the APA attempts to distinguish them.

Borderline and narcissistic as diagnoses don't tell us too much about Bill but they do point to underlying genetic and biochemical factors in addition to the psychodynamic and family issues. (Yes, I know that Thomas Szasz, the psychoanalyst who has written on the myth of mental illness would be outraged at a psychiatric diagnosis being applied to Bill or anyone else.)

Behavioral genetics is a new field described by Dean Hamer and Peter Copeland with preliminary results suggesting genetic influences on risk taking or novelty seeking behavior. Virginia tells us that Roger was attractive for her when they met in Hope because he seemed "dangerous," a gambler, a drinker, and an older divorced man from glamorous Hot Springs with its nightclubs, gambling and gangsters. (Like Roger, Mother Virginia was also a drinker, a nightclubber and a gambler.) These tendencies in his mother and Father Bill Blythe's frequent liaisons and marriages and unacknowledged children suggest a genetic factor in Bill's addiction to risky activities such as casual sex.

Novelty seeking behavior is accompanied by frequent casual sex and a preference for the less common varieties of intercourse like oral sex. The behavioral geneticists believe that the frequency and kind of sexual activity as well as a preference for a variety of partners is the role of a gene which also determines either high or low risk behavior. Genes are not destiny even for behavioral geneticists who accept other influence in personality including biological, developmental, environmental and psychosocial events. A footnote is that during the fifties, the Kinsey report had already said that it was likely that there was a genetic influence on the number of orgasms in males whose weekly median was one or two but who varied from none to 29 a week .

Bill Clinton's borderline personality is related to genetic inheritance and here we have some data from his mother's book. She was a steady drinker and a gambler. Bill's maternal grandmother, Edith became addicted to morphine after she had a stroke so that she had to enter a state hospital for detox and rehabilitation. Bill's maternal grandfather Eldridge was a bootlegger during Prohibition who "drank too much" according to one of Bill's Arkansas biographers. He died of bleeding esophageal varices (enlarged veins) which are caused by liver disease, often the result of alcoholism. Bill's father, a traveling salesman had personal problems about responsibility and identity that led him to conceal his three previous marriages and two children from Bill's mother. This family pattern continued with Bill's half brother, Roger becoming addicted to cocaine and serving prison time for drug sales.

Genetic influences in the family patterns of alcoholism are well documented and are similar to those in the families affected by pathological gambling and drug abuse. These genetic profiles are not necessarily the same as the ones thought to be present in narcissistic and borderline personalities but they may reinforce each other in their effects on behavior. A heredity predisposing to substance dependence, pathological gambling and social dysfunction may be expressed in a variety of ways including Bill Clinton's narcissistic and borderline traits.

Clinton's powerful intelligence, Elvis physicality and his overall high energy derive to a considerable extent from his genetic heritage. An observation about Bill's energy level is that he seems to need only four hours of sleep a night like his father William Jefferson Blythe so maybe a poorly understood genetic factor is operating here. Bill was reading at three and he has a photographic memory, both markers for intelligence which psychologists agree is strongly influenced by heredity. Bill's high school band director, Virgil Spurlin is quoted by Allen and Portis on Bill's intelligence and his musical ability, "I haven't seen anything quite like him in my teaching experience." Musical ability is another kind of intelligence which also has hereditary influences.

Developmental influences on Bill's brain play a role in his clumsiness which was noted by during childhood and adolescence and later during college. Clumsiness is recognized as a problem in child development and is the subject of a book by Daniel Arnheim, The Clumsy Child which says, "Physical awkwardness can...be caused by...stress. It is often difficult to ascertain whether or not the clumsiness stems from some neurological dysfunction or whether it is a reflection of emotion and self-concept."

Bill was so clumsy as a child that he couldn't catch a ball and he was thought too awkward for piano lessons. In his seventh grade shop class, Bill couldn't learn to square a wooden block while the other boys went on to build bread boxes and tables, Maraniss says. During college ROTC, he couldn't learn to march. At Oxford, he often tackled the wrong players in recreational rugby games. Nonetheless, he played the saxophone with distinction as a teen in the band and became a golfer. Bill's clumsiness diminished and disappeared as an adult suggesting that stress and a low self esteem were the primary factors in his childhood clumsiness rather then a neurological condition. Bill certainly was stressed as a child in a dysfunctional home and he had low self esteem as described in the section on Bill's Castration Anxiety and Masturbation Guilt.

Bill's mental and physical constitution are from his unique DNA and from the prenatal and postnatal influences on his developing brain. His heredity affects his behavior both directly and through its influence on his psychology.

·Bill's Oral and Anal Development

Bill's infancy is not as well described as his childhood but what we learn is consistent with his adult character. His grandmother's feeding compulsion is mentioned by his mother, "Bill jokes that he can attribute his weight problem to the fact that he'd still be sitting in his high chair on Hervey Street if he hadn't cleaned his plate." Bill was overweight as a child and a teen according to the biography of Allen and Portis. Bill's addiction to junk food is well known but by 1995, he was in detox eating soy burgers under the direction of a new White House physician, cardiologist Dean Ornish who emphasizes weight control and a low fat, vegetarian diet.

Bill's self confidence and communicative charisma begins with his mother and grandmother who competed with each other to fill his oral needs. Bill's need to help or to give to people which Erik Erikson, the Freudian developmental psychologist calls oral optimism is a hopefulness or faith. The opposite is oral pessimism, emptiness and taking. Freud explains, "People who know they are preferred or favored by their mother give evidence in their lives of a peculiar self-reliance and an unshakable optimism which often seem like heroic attributes and bring actual success to their possessors."

Bill Clinton is orally fixated, a visible optimist whose emotional faith is palpable along with compulsive eating, a near addictive dependence on jogging and a repetitive need for new sexual partners. A hidden or nether side of Bill's orality is his "emptiness" and lack of a "self" mentioned in the Slick Willie section. The powerful control by Bill's grandmother and mother was experienced as a deprivation of autonomy as the oral stage overlaps with the next phase, anality.

Anal eroticism is a stage in the infant's development of personality according to an orderly psychosexual scheme: the mouth first, then the anus and finally, the genitals. It is called psychosexual because although two of the three zones are nonsexual, they are all erogenous, that is they generate pleasure, sensual and sexual during the process of maturation.

During the anal phase in the second year, bowel and bladder mastery are the goals of parental training and the toddler's reaction influences future habits of work. Virginia calls his grandmother's schedule of Bill's bowel training "unrelenting" and says the same about his eating, napping, playing and burping schedules. Using derision more then irony, Virginia compares grandmother Edith to God. Bill's recalls this era when he says, "I lived with my grandparents until I was four, and they had a lot to do with my early commitment to learning...They taught me to count and read - I was reading little books when I was three...My grandfather was the kindest person I knew." Bill's strict toilet training resulted in orderliness and even compulsivity about study and work. His mother says, "He kept himself incredibly busy during his high school career." The pattern continued as a college student and later as Governor and then as President. His struggle as a two year old against strict and perhaps premature toilet training was followed by his assent. Like a tiny convert, he then became a control freak himself. This was expressed later on by Bill as the good child, his adolescent conformity and his adult obsessiveness. This may have influenced his choice of the law as a career and then politics, both professions that are ultimately responsible for social control.

Not everything about the struggle for toilet training is hidden from us. Chronic lateness, mentioned by nearly all Clinton's biographers is often a sign of rebellion against strict toilet training. Virginia explains, "After being bound to my mother's strict regimen for so long, I don't doubt the man sometimes feels a need to dawdle."

Ambivalence is another aspect of conflicted toilet training that often emerges in adult life as indecision. First the infant controls the pleasure of expulsion of the feces and then the pleasure of the retention of feces. Holding on and letting go become part of a power struggle between child and mother so the child's ego builds a defense or coping mechanism involving compromise or ambivalence, a continuing pattern of indecision. The approaching Oedipal developments about the good father versus the bad father and the good mother versus the bad mother reinforce this paradoxical and conflicted behavior of holding on and letting go, retention versus expulsion.

·Bill's Ego Defenses

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

We need to understand these ego mechanisms to explain Clinton's hesitancy , indecision and passivity in the face of opposition, desire to please, deceptiveness, sexual profligacy, food and exercise dependence, cowardice, risk taking, interest in study and music, fluidity in reinventing himself as well as his religious beliefs, intellectuality, charisma, ambition, perfectionism, need to help, misplaced anger, lateness, energy, courage and achievements. During the Monica crisis in 1999 George Stephanopoulos, the former Clinton advisor asks, "How could a president so intelligent, so compassionate, so public-spirited, and so conscious of his place in history act in such a stupid, selfish, and self-destructive manner," in an of echo Bob Woodward's list of Clinton's paradoxes. Of course we are not going to explain everything but some of the questions can be answered by the way his ego defenses protect him against the castration threats, guilt and separation anxiety which swirl around in his id, ego and superego.

Repression is the banishing or expulsion of events, feelings and ideas from the conscious into the unconscious where they remain excluded from awareness. This is a response to signals of anxiety originating from threats of separation and castration. Clinton may remember the move at four from his grandmother's house to his mother's new home with stepfather Roger but likely the emotions of this separation were repressed. Repression also affects the style of his response to later dangers like the threat of the draft during the Vietnam War. He repressed or "forgot" the memory of this experience so he had trouble recalling what had actually happened and when it surfaced later during the 92 presidential campaign, it took him a while to remember and respond.

Denial is a defense which affects the perception of reality so that what happens is not seen, heard or acknowledged. This lack of awareness of a painful reality is common among the children of alcoholics who don't recognize the alcohol-affected behavior in the home. Clinton mostly denied the experiences of Stepfather Roger's continuing abuse of his mother. More striking is the belief of some biographers that Bill was also abused and this was denied too. It was Clinton's denial of the criticisms by the voters and the press during his first term as Arkansas governor which led to his defeat at the polls after two years. There is more about Bill's use of denial later on in the section on Monica.

Another common defense is Reaction Formation which means turning an unacceptable impulse into its opposite so that anger and rage become charm, ingratiation and manipulativeness. This learned from his mother and his grandmother and reinforced by his stepfather. Of course they were each skilled at maneuvering and captivating and dissimulating, we're told by Bill's mother but they were often openly angry at each other so Bill's adaptation is his own.

Somatization is the psychosomatic realm for Bill's conditions like gastrointestinal reflux, obesity, hearing loss, a damaged knee, low back pain and allergies. They have a biological and often a genetic basis as well as emotional meanings. This defense channels conflicts into the physical realm away from the emotions. Clinton's gastrointestinal reflux often called heartburn is the periodic regurgitation of stomach contents for which he takes medication according to his 1996 physical examination. Another example is the psychological origin of Clinton's obesity from his oral fixation, the overindulgence of the infant who continues to use this pattern as a defense against the fear of oral deprivation or starvation. Clinton's excessive food intake is an Elvis-like addiction which reduces his stress from guilt, depression and anxiety. The reflux is another response to this same oral overindulgence.

Acting Out is exemplified by the bimbo eruptions (maybe they should be called Bubba eruptions) during his Governorship and Presidency. The expression of the impulse is more pleasurable and less painful then its control despite the consequences. The Bubba eruptions which chose Paula Jones in Arkansas and Monica Lewinsky in the White House were the results of poor impulse control as well as Bill's penchant for risk taking. Gennifer Flowers tells us in a 1997 interview that she had to dissuade Bill from sex with her in a bathroom in the Governor's mansion during a reception with Hillary nearby.

Clinton's frequent rages are another kind of acting out. Woodward talks about Clinton's anger as outbursts and blowups and journalist Jeffrey Birnbaum speaks of "Clinton's fiery temper." These tantrums are classified by George Stephanopoulos in order of their seriousness as the morning roar, the nightcap, the slow boil, the show and the last gasp with the silent scream as the most virulent. Narcissism to be explained in a later section also contributes to Bill's patterns of acting out. Acting out includes

Clinton's alleged rape of Juanita Broaddrick with her lip injury and his widely reported and denied knock down punch directed at Dick Morris.

Passive-Aggressive Behavior is a defense when aggression is expressed through inappropriate passivity. Bill Clinton often fails to exercise leadership according to Bob Woodward who says, "Clinton did not project a sense of command," or even that "...he diminished the weight of his office." His periodic retreat from activity into Presidential passivity is described when Bill speaks of his fears as the captain of an old ship, " ... the people...can refuse to row...I can steer it, but a storm can come up and sink it..." When Clinton's castration anxiety becomes intense in a confrontation with the media and Congress, he retreats from activity into passivity because of his unconscious fear of the loss of the penis.

Passive-aggressive behavior may also involve its opposite, inappropriate aggression by Clinton as a defense against his passivity when his anxiety signals. Bombing Iraq and Yugoslavia, burning the Branch Davidians at Waco, raining revenge missiles locations in the Sudan and Afghanistan aimed at Osuma bin Landan and even the war on drugs are examples of the choice of aggression rather then non-violent and passive solutions. Policy considerations aside, Cabinet officers and advisors take their cues from passive-aggressive Bill.

Ambivalence is a defense taking the form of indecision, reversal of policies and uncertainty. These mark Bill Clinton's Presidency according to Bob Woodward who wrote about economic policy during his first two years in the White House. Stephanopoulos says, "The worst thing about him is that he never makes a decision." Another associate, Paul Begala says that the most perplexing question about Clinton is his "...two sides... a Southern, populist, religious...connected to the average hard working middle class and a Northern, elitist, Yale Law School side..."

Ambivalence was also a part of the Clinton trademark when he governed Arkansas. He waited until the last minute to veto a tax bill affecting education so he had to slide it under the locked door of the House clerk's office and then he had to retrieve it later that night with a coat hanger. He had changed his mind again after a phone call to a college president according to John Brummett, a Clinton biographer in Highwire. Ambivalence as a defense has its origin in the anal phase of development with infant Bill's conflict about expulsion versus withholding.

Ambivalence remained central at the end of the second term as the New York Times article, "Clinton Seeks to Avoid Acting on Missile Defense System" describes how this plan would be started but nearly all the decisions to build and deploy it in Alaska would be left for 2001 and 2003.

Intellectualization is a defense mechanism which refers to the use of ideas and language as a substitute for emotions. An excess of thinking is used to control the unacceptable impulses that signal the danger of castration and separation. In The Agenda Woodward says, "Clinton spoke so often, said so much on so many subjects, that he further confused people about him and about his goals as President."

Sublimation is a defense in which unacceptable lustful and violent impulses from the unconscious are replaced by desirable goals. Serving the need of others and religious belief are solutions of the id-ego-superego conflicts. Arkansas biographer Brummett describes Clinton as a "...person demonstrating compassion, emotionalism, and an uncanny ability to connect and empathize with all kinds of people..."

Hysterical spells or attacks are another defense which affect Bill and also his family of White House advisors. "Chaos, absolute chaos," was Bob Woodward's summary of Clinton's behavior during his first two years in the White House described in The Agenda. This is different then previous presidents according to journalist Jeffrey Birnbaum who says, "The (Clinton) White House is a madhouse almost all the time." Chaos was also the word applied to Clinton's campaign for Congress in 1974 by Hillary who began to turn things right side up when she arrived in Arkansas.

Well-ordered Bill doesn't have any visible hysterical spells so they are not seen directly although they are akin to his temper tantrums described earlier under the Acting Out defense. The chaos in Bill's White House is analogous to the patient who screams, faints and flails aimlessly for awhile but on recovery is calm and may not recall the attack. The physical events of the hysterical attack are often accompanied by a flight of ideas like a dream that defies conventional logic. Not all chaos is a hysterical spell so we enjoy the planned confusion of the Marx Brothers in A Night at the Opera, Abbott and Costello and Animal House.

·Bill as Coward

Is Clinton a coward? Clinton's unwillingness to serve in the Vietnam military called draft dodging by some was a part of his concern about violence and death in a war he saw as unjust. Of course some baby boomers who supported the Vietnam War like Independent Counsel Ken Starr, 1996 Presidential candidate Phil Gramm, Speaker Newt Gingrich and 2000 Vice Presidential Candidates Joe Lieberman and Dick Cheney didn't serve either while others like Vice President Al Gore did.

Fear of their own death and of killing others motivated the men who sought draft exemption as well as those who went to Canada and to prison. Some of these men of Clinton's generation who didn't serve were conscientious objectors, pacifists or antiwar draft resisters while others were primarily pursuing career goals. Social class, family tradition, ideology, religion, politics and a raging national debate also played major roles about service in Vietnam. Still every personal and political position has a psychological face so Bill's stance and that of the others also involved their individual response to their unconscious castration fears. \

Clinton's avoidance of teen age combative sports was an earlier manifestation of his fear of violence. It was fostered by his mother, a nurse who encountered athletic injuries in her work at the hospital. Bill was uncoordinated and clumsy so he had another reason to avoid sports. He made a pacific choice for band as his extracurricular activity in high school and was successful on the saxophone. Still, Clinton was very competitive, a winning contestant for high school class offices and many awards. The pop psychologists often blame Clinton's loss of his father and the presence of the strong women raising him for his failures of leadership, ambivalence, indecisiveness and fear. This ignores the Hamlet-like indecision of presidents with powerful fathers like Woodrow Wilson whose failure to take the initiative about the Treaty of Versailles was both a political and a psychological disaster according to the study by Freud and Bullitt. Nixon and JFK, presidents with dominant fathers also had major flaws in their decision making and leadership. The other side of the coin is FDR, a remarkable leader with a dominant mother.

·Bill As Narcissus

The role of narcissism in personality development is explained in Hillary and Narcissism. Hillary has a normal share of narcissism but Bill's personality is disordered by his narcissism. Recall the definition of narcissistic disorder: strong feelings of grandiosity and entitlement, self-centeredness, a need to control others, difficulties in love relationships and a diffusion of identity. Bill who has these characteristics also has both conscious and unconscious mechanisms that hide many of them.

The contradictions of narcissism can be explained by the idea of Bill as a changeling. A changeling is a child that folklore tells us has two personae, one is good and beautiful and the other is evil and ugly. Bill's childhood story tells us about his two aspects, one a fat, clumsy five year old who was a sissy and the other an attractive, active, popular and bright boy. Bill's companions from kindergarten recall both boys. So does President Bill as he describes himself to an interviewer as "a loner" when he was a child.

No one chooses the changeling role; Bill's contradictions are at the center of his paradoxical personality. Norman Mailer calls him a "a celestial oxymoron - part rogue, part god." Bill's narcissistic wound is expressed in his passive-aggression, his deceptiveness, manipulation and the bimbo eruptions but his normal narcissism reflects his flexibility, initiative, ambition, self confidence, empathy and charisma.