Clinton: Surviving a Death in Life (article)

Recent work on the psychology of artists who were victims of traumas as children, suffered “deaths in life” at a very early age, and came to resolve the resulting conflicts in their artistic imagery, have led me to notice similarities in President Clinton’s current plight and resultant public repentance. At the National Prayer Breakfast on September 11, 1998, the President made the following statement:

First, I will instruct my lawyers to mount a vigorous defense, using all available appropriate arguments, but legal language must not obscure the fact that I have done wrong. Second, I will continue on the path of repentance, seeking pastoral support and that of other caring people, so that they can hold me accountable for my own commitment. Third, I will intensify my efforts to lead our country and the world toward peace and freedom, prosperity and harmony, in the hope that, with a broken spirit and a still-strong heart, I can be used for greater good.

I would suggest that Clinton is undergoing psychologically what can be called a “death in life.” While the human life course ends in literal death, the path to that finality is often marked by figurative deaths, when things get so bad, one’s old life must be abandoned and a new one—whether inner or exterior—invented. Whatever the circumstances, the death is mourned and it is to this process of mourning that I will now turn.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross has provided a psychodynamic model for mourning one’s own demise, and historians, psychologists, and religious counselors have adjusted that model to understand not only the stages of dying, but the process through which refugees, victims of natural disasters, and repentant sinners proceed in resolving their figuratively fatal traumata. That process involves five overlapping stages of varying length: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. For those displaced or disgraced in life, the fourth may be presumed passim; the fifth, to be more or less provisional.

William Jefferson Clinton is not an introspective man, inclined to see his actions in psychological terms. He is a man of the polis—a political genius at analyzing its psychology—and by all accounts not a little amoral, which fits in with his electoral success being based on his appearing to be all things to all people who vote. Furthermore, no politician dares to wear his psyche on his sleeve, let alone seek therapy. Clinton seems rather to see himself in terms of religious dichotomies: good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and sin—and seeks what counsel he can from the clergy (who cannot be subpoenaed and rarely keep notes), but who are exceptionally well informed about the human dynamics of mourning fate—or sin.

If you are mourning the loss of your homeland or of all your possessions in a flood, or if—like Clinton—you mourn having been caught in flagrantly lying to the country and hairsplitting

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with a jury about an adulterous affair, denial comes first. That the precinct of your privacy has been violated, that your last vestige of probity has been destroyed, that you are now potentially naked to your enemies, is totally unacceptable and thus cannot be happening. For Clinton, his notorious finger-pointing statement that he never had a “sexual relationship” with “that woman,” and his subsequent public and private reiterations of a misleading if legal “term of art” as to what sexual relations meant for him, constituted his long drawn out denial phase.

Certainly his capacity for both anger and bargaining, can be seen in the testimony before the grand jury on August 17, 1998, when he finally admitted what he publicly denied. While studiously self-controlled on camera, his withering criticism of the motives of Paula Jones’ lawyers, not to mention those of Kenneth Starr’s investigators, came across clearly and forcefully. His capacity to turn denial into bargaining was displayed by explaining the legalisms used to deflect or deny perjury. Another aspect of his bargaining was his apparently successful attempt, knowing that the videotape would ultimately be leaked and seen by everyone, to sell his national audience on his plight, pain, and penitence over the heads of Starr and the grand jury. Here one finds the overvaluing of new circumstances that follows the denial phase of exiles. They at first mourn for and rage at the loss of familiar ground—then, often unrealistically, accept a new terrain—just as Clinton accepted the legal, if politically untenable, verbalisms as a way out of an otherwise impossible perjury trap.

The evening of his grand jury testimony, his brief remarks admitting his relationship “inappropriate” and “wrong,” and his having lied to the people, were more an angry expression of his not unjustified hatred for his political tormentors than a humble confession of fault. That anger had built up during the denial and bargaining phase, and was now out for the world to see—and deplore. The expected abject apology turned out to be a tirade deemed not sufficiently contrite.

Yet, contrition comes in two stages. One is first contrite out of profound self-interest, and that can be seen as its bargaining stage: convincing others of one’s sorrow at having been caught and made subject to punishment—hell here being impeachment or resignation; purgatory, censure. The second stage consists in sorrowfully realizing one’s predicament to be the result of flagrantly breaking accepted standards of morality and decorum that cause serious injury to others: family, one’s immature lover, colleagues—and uniquely with Clinton: his high office and the country he governs.

This second stage of Clinton’s contrition was articulated, if not manifestly achieved, in his talk to the National Prayer Breakfast. Contrite, in its root meaning of “broken in spirit” and seeking atonement, he declared himself to have repented: resolved to sin no more, to seek help toward that goal, and to retain a spiritual refuge, an inner paradise, even if the earthly one must be surrendered.

Clinton admitted that he had sinned, he accepted his responsibility, he abjured further failings, he asked God for a “clean heart.” Listening to him deliver this talk, one was convinced of his sincerity, if only because his journey to this point seemed psychologically right. Whether it was a permanent resolve, or of the moment, remains to be seen.

The difference between literal death, and a figurative death in life, is that finality is exchanged for potentiality. Depression, resignation, and final acceptance in the face of extinction are instead superseded by the hope of the displaced: the place of exile offers hope (he’s in the White House and the Senate doesn’t have the votes for impeachment); the insurance company offers hope (his reassuring approval rating in the polls stays the same); and God offers hope for absolution and renewal (three ministers mend his broken spirit). Better still, the mid-term election offers some hope of a political sea change.

Death in life thus offers potential new life—and for a repentant politician of Clinton’s ilk, that is the main chance. He is on the verge of losing in disgrace what his life has been about. The key to his survival of this figurative death is in the hope-fueled strength with which he manages its renewal. As one commentator put it: Clinton has embarked on his last campaign. That compulsion to repeat old victories may save everything—or nothing.

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