Anyone who has glanced at more than three footnotes in Kenneth Starr’s report would be moved to light a cigar and agree with Jonathan Lear that “we live in strange times.”
It’s a sentiment the University of Chicago academic uses to frame one of the most provocative–if cerebral–analyses of the Bill and Monica Show.
It would seem that everything to be written has been written. But now comes the Sept. 28 issue of the New Republic with “Freudian Slip,” namely a Freudian analysis by Lear, a professor at the prestigious Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, of our national response to the scandal.
The combination philosopher-psychoanalyst, who is a prominent (and sympathetic) scholar
of Sigmund Freud, as well as ancient Greek thinkers, delivered the article Monday as a paper to the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute.
“Everybody loved it,” said Lear, who decided to e-mail it to the Washington-based political weekly. It published the piece Friday, and “hundreds of e-mails have come in,” he said.
Relying not just on Freud but also on Lear’s analysis of newspaper editorials–he feels they are akin to Freud’s notion of the superego, telling us how life should be–he finds that the nation has generally concluded that Clinton sinned. It is angry with a recklessness which suggests Clinton doesn’t see himself constrained by normal rules.
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“Put in religious terms,” Lear writes, “his sin seems to be that he takes himself to be a god–for only a god is allowed to live beyond the rules of human behavior.”
Freud comes into Lear’s analysis this way: Freud suggested that one powerful myth about the origins of civilization involved a state in which one all-powerful leader ruled the tribe. This “primal father,” in Freud’s term, could fool around with all the women he desired while making the lives of all the men pretty miserable.
A critical moment in the formation of civilization, Freud posited, came when people just got sick and tired of the primal father’s voracious ways, gave him the boot, and decided to put in place some clear rules about men dealing with women. Those included the incest taboo, meaning you had best marry outside your family.
While Lear notes that Freud erred in mistaking that myth about society’s start for actual history, the power of the myth remains. And Clinton, “with his sexual escapades, his high office and lack of concern for getting caught, triggered a fantasy of a leader who has unrestricted access to women and can get away with it,” Lear writes.
“This is Clinton’s political failure: He has inadvertently allowed himself to become the target of a fantasy in which he is the primal father–and, as such, must be brought down if civilization itself is to survive.”
Lear, who personally finds Clinton’s behavior abysmal but our general response to be overwrought, puts many of our reactions in that context. Those include the constant refrain of nobody’s being above the law, the hounding of Clinton by a special prosecutor and our insistence for details about the most private of acts.
He picks out an editorial in The New York Times as a fitting example of the frenzy elicited by the Clinton fiasco. It claimed that a zone of privacy envisioned by First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton “may actually be enlarged for future presidents, simply because viewing her husband’s private life has been as jarring to adult eyes as getting a glimpse of the mess in an adolescent’s room.”
That line strikes Lear as nonsense, especially since we are all familiar with the mess in an adolescent’s room. And it’s weird to compare the president’s sex life to that room.
But he argues that it’s part and parcel of Clinton’s tapping into the myth of the primal father who must die after he has sinned. Lear cites critical writings about Clinton by former aides George Stephanopoulos and Dee Dee Myers, as well as attacks by other old friends, as examples of the father’s children rising up against him to “establish or re-establish civilization.”
In a phone chat late Friday, Lear elaborated on his essay, in part noting Clinton’s status as the first Baby Boomer president and his generation’s simultaneous nervousness about his role. The young president’s obvious flaws inspired a clear resentment.
At the same time, the country grapples with the pitfalls of an “idealization of leaders” since a series of traumas, namely the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the Vietnam War and Watergate. We’ve placed leaders on pedestals, then sharply attacked them, which is “two sides of the same coin. We think they’re wonderful, then are disappointed. We’ve been locked in this cycle of being suspicious of our leaders disappointing us.”
Certain suspect consequences have arisen, he said, such as “an inability to let Clinton have some privacy. As it turns out, one can be appalled by his behavior and still think the issue of privacy is a fundamental one.”
Lear is a strong supporter of the 1st Amendment and freedom of speech. But much of the time, he notes correctly, free speech as a value gets its biggest test in ugly cases, such as the Nazis marching in Skokie. He believes that the Clinton debacle should remind us, as much as his conduct frustrates or infuriates us, that leaders deserve a certain privacy.
As Lear put it, “You can’t let them be subjected to scrutiny of the penis.”
Part of Clinton’s political failure, the academic said, reflects his fumbling one part of a leader’s job, which is “to have some intuitive feel for unconscious, mythical currents running through the country at a given time.”
“To be successful, you have to make those currents run for you, not against. (Adolf) Hitler was successful, unfortunately, in tapping into powerful emotional feelings people had, forces the German people themselves didn’t understand.
“Whatever you say about Clinton, it’s a massive political failure that he got caught up in powerful currents,” Lear said. “The failure consists of a number of things. But one thing he’s failed to do is keep ahead of the tide of mythical, emotional, unconscious currents flowing through the country.”
Understand those currents, perhaps with the help of Freud, and you might have an easier time making sense of what seems weird: Americans officially claiming their disinterest in Clinton’s sex life but being fascinated by it, being unhappy with Clinton’s conduct but blaming Starr, and in the name of truth feeling we must have an explanation of Clinton’s whole sex life.
“When things became strange,” Lear repeated, “Freud would look for deeper explanation.”
If only he could have seen the video of Clinton’s grand jury testimony. The legendary Austrian might have been quickly booked by Geraldo Rivera, perhaps to opine on “The American Dilemma: Whitewater and the Oedipus Complex.”
Democrat praises Hyde
Commerce Secretary William Daley was traveling in Africa last week but still felt moved to issue a press release from Nairobi, Kenya:
“Henry Hyde is one of America’s most respected legislators and public servants. I was honored to have Chairman Hyde introduce me to the Senate Commerce Committee for my confirmation hearing. He is a man of exemplary character and the highest personal integrity. I consider Chairman Hyde to be one of the finest human beings I have known and I am proud to call him my friend.”
Unless we missed it, there has never been a similar release concerning Daley’s boss.
Esprit de waffle
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It must have been a coincidence, given questions surrounding our commander in chief.
Gen. Charles Krulak, the leader of the Marines, was scheduled to speak on the subject of terrorism and the military Thursday night at American University.
Then, a notice went out that the subject had been changed to “Character, Morals and Courage.”
But at the last moment, he switched back to terrorism.