The Erotic Leader

In a nutshell, my proposal is that the strong collective and individual reactions to the trials and tribulations of President Clinton, leading to his survival in office, show that he has functioned in a good-enough way as an “erotic leader.”

From my point of view, a truly erotic leader is not a leader who simply hops in and out of bed with people. Clinton may actually be an inferior, degenerated, partial version of an erotic leader. But public obsession in many countries with the sex lives of leaders suggests that there is something about the actual, physical, corporeal eroticism of leadership that is worth exploring further. The concern of the media with the sexuality of leading figures in society generally, not just political leaders, suggests that, as in so many cases, mass consciousness has discovered something of interest. I think that the populace, in its obsession with the sexuality of leaders, is on to something important.

I see the good-enough erotic leader as using her or his sexuality to convey to citizens that they are exciting, creative, and autonomous people who can work together cooperatively. Ordinary admiration and warmth are extremely potent parts of psychological evolution and the establishment of self-esteem. Whether the leader communicates, in an almost physically warm way, that the leader admires the people is an interesting and neglected aspect of the political process.

My model for this notion is the work I have done on parenting and on clinical process—work focusing on what I have called erotic playback. In the family, this is the way in which the parent communicates to children of both sexes that they are admirable, physically desirable, and erotically viable creatures. Of course, in a family or in an analysis, I am referring only to incest fantasy and not to the physical enactment of such fantasy (which, by analogy, is what Clinton has done). Western polities and societies seem to mirror