The Clinton Impeachment: Sexuality and Power Need Different Psychoanalytic Theories

Psychoanalysts obtain the empirical basis for interpretation from the patient's material in the course of the analytic session. That is the arena for observing and analyzing the clinical facts. President Clinton is not our patient, but he set in motion a number of events that reached us as social facts. I begin with the Clinton case in order to explore the structure of power in relationships. I suggest that we live simultaneously in three different worlds that produce three kinds of facts—individual, linking, and social. Individual facts are those that we arbitrarily say happen inside the subject, in the inner world. Linking facts are those that happen in the space “between” two or more subjects, and within this category kinship relationships should be differentiated. What is special about these relationships is that they take place with a specific, differentiated other. I refer to the “other” as a subject of desire that exceeds the internal object that is projected onto it. In this sense, it is not simply an object of drive derivative or love object of the ego. Social facts are those that reach us from the social milieu formed by the undifferentiated others, defensively personified in particular characters who represent the world of politics, religion, finance, social class. These three worlds leave marks on the self that may or may not become unconscious inscriptions. It is desirable to consider that each mark has a particular and different origin. Only a part of the meaning of each mark is liable to be transferred from one world to the other. The clinical material of an individual patient, of a couple, or of a family as a patient does not have an equivalent in the social field. Our sources of information for