CNN - 'The Clinton Syndrome'

(CNN) -- Author Jerome D. Levin, Ph.D., a therapist with over 20 years experience in identifying and treating addictive behavior, explores the nature and psychology of sexual addiction, drawing parallels to President Bill Clinton's own life. He analyzes the events of 1998 and explores Clinton's personal history, revealing a tawdry pattern of destructive behavior consistent with classic sexual addiction. He explains why Clinton has been mired in scandal and why he doesn't 'just admit' that he suffers sexual addiction.

Introduction

This is a book about a man and a problem, a president and a syndrome. The man is Bill Clinton, President of the United States, and the problem is sexual addiction. I attempt to determine, without personally knowing the man, the degree to which the president suffers from this condition. This is a risky endeavor at best but one that I believe is worth doing. The public domain contains an enormous amount of information from which I have drawn to try to reach a balanced appraisal of what demons drive this man. Those same demons drive every one of us. Sometimes we harness them more successfully than at other times, and some of us do a better job of it than others, but all human beings struggle with mastering their drives, including their sexual drive.

Sexual addiction affects a large number of people. It ruins family life, destroys careers, spreads disease, and makes those who suffer from it miserable, yet it is the one addiction that has not come out of the closet, because there is too much shame attached to it. Aside from examining the addictive behaviors of President Clinton, I hope that this book will also contribute to public awareness and reach sex addicts and their families.

Sexual addictions are not about sex. They are about insecurity, low self-esteem, and the need for affirmation and reassurance. At the bottom, the sex addict feels unloved and unlovable and so looks obsessively for proof that this is not so. This is the case regardless of how skillfully the addict disguises his feelings of worthlessness from himself and from the world. Sexual addiction is an illness, and its sufferers deserve our compassion and empathy.

No one doubts that Bill Clinton has had an active extramarital sex life. In various ways, he himself has admitted as much. The question is: Is this "normal" human behavior in a powerful, high-energy, handsome male? Is it a character defect? Is it an addiction? This book attempts to answer these difficult questions.

Both the man and the problem are extraordinarily complex. President Clinton is brilliant, well educated, and informed; a voracious reader who forgets nothing that he has read; a consummate politician; a superb communicator; and a man of vast charm. Yet, for all these impressive assets, he is perceived as devious and dishonest and as having integrity, character, and zipper problems. Is President Clinton all of these, none of these, or, as is probable, a bewildering mix of assets and liabilities, of strengths and weaknesses? As difficult as it is for some of us, the citizens who twice elected him to the highest office in the land, to integrate the two Clintons, imagine what it must be like for the president himself to try to integrate these conflicting aspects of who he is.

REVIEW

Read an interview with author Jerome Levin

All human beings are complex. Few function consistently in different situations, in different roles, in different areas of life, and at different periods in life. The degree to which people can make any sense to themselves or to others varies widely. In Clinton's case, the inner conflict and inconsistency appear to be extreme, but even more extreme is the conflict between his public presentation in the various masks he assumes and his inner being.

As we will see, the problem is also very complex. Sexuality is a mystery. Its dark yet wonderful power provides some of the best moments in life while confusing, compelling, conflicting, and tormenting. Human beings, everywhere and at all times, have struggled to define their sexual selves and their culture's standards of sexual behavior. Such efforts have not been entirely successful, regardless of culture, religion, or the individual. Sex is baffling. It is too powerful, too wonderful, too strongly driven, and too tinged with shame and guilt for most of us to be entirely comfortable with our sexual selves.

Writing about sex is tricky. It is all too easy to be puritanical, and it is just as easy to be preachy. I wish to be neither. Nor do I want to be judgmental under the guise of being scientific, using the notion of sexual addiction as a stick to whip Clinton. In trying to avoid these dangers, I have kept in mind the great psychoanalyst Eric Erikson's distinction between the moral and the ethical as written in Gandhi's Truth, a magnificent study of the Indian leader. For Erikson, the moral is the unconscious, driven, harsh judgmental part of us that condemns self and others. It is the voice of the past within us�automatic and unthinking. It seeks to blame and is essentially irrational. As a psychoanalyst would say, it is the stuff of the superego (the unconscious judge within). It is what the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche spoke of when he said, "Morality is resentment."

The ethical, on the other hand, comes from that part of us that tries to find a just, sane, balanced way of living together harmoniously. It is conscious, it tries to be rational, and it seeks to find understanding and make behavioral choices in full knowledge of the complexity of reality. It does not condemn self or others. A psychoanalyst would say that it is the stuff of the ego (the rational part of the mind). In this book, I have tried to approach the issue from the standpoint of the ethical, not the moral, and to make this a work of the ego, not the superego.

President Clinton is no different from the rest of us in having to struggle throughout his life to find sexual satisfaction, to renounce some sexual desires, and to control his sexual appetite. Yes, Clinton is a man, a human being like all of us, but he is also a president, so he is both the same and different. His sexual conflicts and what he does with them matter more in the sense that they affect the destiny of a nation and indeed the entire world in a way in which most of our sexual choices, behaviors, conflicts, and joys simply do not.

The notion that Clinton is a sex addict and that his extramarital activities have been intense, numerous, and varied is not new. Commentators as ideologically different as Pulitzer Prize-winning Clinton biographer David Maraniss, New York Times columnist A. M. Rosenthal, Stanford University professor of psychiatry Alvin Cooper, feminist Gloria Steinem, best-selling author Wendy Kaminer, and the Reverend Jerry Falwell have suggested that if the allegations are true, Bill Clinton is a sex addict.

This book does not attempt to answer what Clinton did. In fact, the picture of Clinton and the psychological hypotheses about him that I draw are based on the assumption that the sexual allegations are true. This assumption is one that every poll shows is shared by the majority of my fellow citizens and has a great deal of evidence to support it. Of course, the president has denied the allegations, but he has done so in such a way that most commentators have thought his denial equivocal. The vast majority of these commentators have believed that these allegations are true.

In this book, I will argue that Clinton's background as a child of addiction predisposed him biologically and socially to an addiction of his own. I will demonstrate that his sexual proclivities over a lifetime were expansive and developed the strength and persistence of a habit. Finally, I will illustrate that there were specific stresses in the president's life shortly before his alleged involvement with Monica Lewinsky that made him highly vulnerable to acting out once again his sexually addictive behavior.

I ask you to try to identify with Bill Clinton, not in the particulars of his addictive behavior but in your own addictive behaviors and activities, those that sometimes cause you to feel out of control. We all have them. Try to feel how dangerous it is to be out of control and then speculate about why you might be out of control. You will learn a lot.

The Monica Lewinsky story and all of its spin-offs is a rapidly unfolding drama. Each day brings new revelations and new speculations. I am sure that more rumors, spins, and hard facts will continue to emerge. However, I do not believe that future public details of the president's sex life will change my theory about Clinton and his sexual problem.

The conclusion of all of this is that you, the reader of this book, are going to know and to note things that I, the writer, cannot as they surface over the ensuing months. Regardless, I will maintain my thesis that the president's sexual proclivities not only serve as a paradigm of sexually addictive behavior but also have profound ramifications for the well-being of our nation.