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The spectacle of Bill Clinton's personal and political self-destructiveness in 1998 has provoked outpourings on politics and morality not seen since Watergate. Not since Nixon has a President's private life been so unmercifully scrutinized. It has left us with precious few insights into the troubled mind of Bill Clinton, reminding us that inner needs and conflicts, so crucial to the understanding of life, are still the bailiwick and the burden of psychoanalysis.
Although a depth psychological portrait of Clinton has not emerged in the media, Roger Rosenblatt of Time magazine, in an insightful and moving essay, writes:
Clinton does not want sex; he wants love. He never got enough as a kid (dead father, abusive stepfather, absent mother), and he cannot get enough of it now. Anyone who is not given sufficient love as a child will spend the rest of his life looking for it, and so he has. Yet because of that childhood deficit, he doesn't believe in love, either; he doesn't trust it. He probably loves Hillary Clinton as much as he is able to love any woman, but he is essentially faithless. She, I believe, understands this and, in a brave and practical way, has become the manager of his predicament. (Rosenblatt, 1998, p. 61)
Speaking of Clinton's shocking recklessness in risking an entire political future for a few moments of exciting and dangerous sex, Rosenblatt states, “Whatever wildness he tries, he may feel that he is fact risking very little, since the worst has already happened to him” (Rosenblatt, 1998, p. 61). He ends the essay by telling the reader that he asked an eminent psychoanalyst to “verify or shoot down the above hypothesis. She (the analyst) refused to do either, explaining that a trained psychoanalyst ought only to speculate about a person's vulnerabilities in a context of care …” (Rosenblatt, 1998, p. 61). Perhaps this is the most compelling argument against psychobiography, where a “context of care” is hard to achieve in the clinical sense. A responsible