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Group-Fantasy and Its Discontents During the Clinton Administration

Dan Dervin
The Journal of Psychohistory V. 25, N. 2, Fall 1997

DEAD MAN STALKING: 1996 Electoral Politics

Psychohistorians may find themselves second-guessing the gods in accounting for how Dame Fortune turned her frown from the first two years of the Clinton presidency into a grin on the second two. Guessing aside, we may begin with the distinctive nature of this reparative presidency.1

As the child of a devastated but somehow surviving family, Clinton aligned himself with a dysfunctional country needing to be healed and offered himself as delegate for a broken nation needing to be fixed. However, instead of sacred healers, Bill and Hillary proceeded more as inspired saviors, and grandiose schemes of universal health coverage soon collapsed under their own excessess. The subsequent demonizing of Washington punctuated by attacking aircraft and rifle fire on the White House soon proved paradoxical. The vaunted angry-white-male vote of 1994 was actually a low turnout (39%) with decisive leverage from the tobacco, health, and gun lobbies, while women and minorities mostly took a pass. Exit polls showed that only 17% of voters had even heard of the "Contract with America," retroactively hyped as a blueprint for revolution.2 All the same, the message confirmed needs for national purge. Yet the Congressional leaders who emerged Gingrich and Dole were soon viewed not as heroes but as toxic villains. By an unforeseen split, the Capitol became the designated poison-container, while the White House, despite Whitewater witch-hunts (or due to their failures), was exempted. The turning point may well have been the shock therapy of the Oklahoma City bombing in the spring of 1995, which, as Mark Shields has argued, simultaneously exposed the consequences of violent anti-government rhetoric and allowed Clinton to perform as national healer.3

In various ways, the spoil-sport gridlockers squabbling in Congress enveloped Clinton in a presidential aura. He also implemented in December 1995 a military engagement that made him look strong and decisive (his virility had been under attack from the outset), which also proved congruent with his own pacifist temper and patchwork reparative style. Thus he sent an army of peacekeepers to repair and heal the fragmented and wounded country of Bosnia figured as a sort of mini-U.S.A. By enlisting armed forces into the rebuilding of Bosnia, he also enlisted them into his own reparative fantasy-system. This compromise-formation proved so effective that throughout the spring of 1996 the war in Bosnia was relegated to human-interest stories and warm-ups for war trials. With his approval-rating soaring, Clinton appeared in cartoons as a loveable oaf, an overweight adolescent, a benevolent nanny, subliminally androgynous with gratifying maternal imagery built into his flabby frame.

Anthropologist Will Roscoe contrasts Gingrich's projection of a "phallus-centered, anal-retentive, closed body," epitimizing the fantasy of a "muscular society" with Clinton's open-body imagry of "eating, jogging, or fornicating" as projecting "inexhaustible appetites like a character in Rabeleais."4 This correlates with his own self-image as "the fat boy in Big Boy jeans" none of the girls wanted to dance with, a deficit he found he could overcome as governor and apparently more than made up for.5

Although Clinton was redeemed in group-fantasy as one of the guys, his loyal and long-suffering wife did not fare so well. She would have to pay for her power-plays, and in fact would take most of the heat for Clinton's first-half setbacks.6 The Saint Hillary of early 1993 soon split into good-angel/bad-angel, then became Joan of Arc, a sacrificial scapegoat burned at the stake for her transgressions into male hegemony; also a poisonous Jew (implicated in the Rose law firm), and finally a convicted felon, among the various ways she assumed the poison-container role. William Safire's notorious and linguistically inept attack on her as a "congenital liar" carries its own message about male fears of ballsy women (i.e., Hillary is lying that she is con [with] male-genitals). In other ways as well, her power continued to break through: Carol Moseley-Braun (D. Sen. Il.) addressed her at the annual National Prayer Breakfast as "Mrs. President."7 In March, the Times of London rated her the second most powerful woman in the world.8 But her book, It Takes a Village, underscored her power trade-off into the safer spheres of momhood and baby-love.

Meanwhile, the 1996 Republican primaries resolved group-fantasy needs for a more immediate sacrificial victim in Senator Dole. The media had been consistently portraying him in negative and threatening images Darth Vader, Count Dracula, child-abuser, digger of his own grave, mortician, and most ominously as Dead Man Walking. A political deal-meister, long-since accustomed to Chinese carry-out before the TV in his Watergate flat, he has never produced any distinguishing message or vision; but as a World War II hero, he began running on the site of his wounds an almost missing shoulder, "atrophied right arm," limited use of the other.9 The media consistently captured him sending mixed messages: one hand raised thumbs-up, the other lowered and clinched menacingly around a pen. The off-putting group-fantasy message here probably has to do with threatened retaliation for his having been emasculated (castrated) in (oedipal) battle. Yet behind the imagery of angry fist, sunken cheeks, and scowling, zombie eyes, one glimpsed a hungry-child figure (like those dreadfully wistful Keane paintings), perhaps evocative of the horde of orphans Gingrich as Robespierre would sacrifice for his revolution.

The candidate's referring to himself as "Bob Dole" attempts to objectify a subjective self, an ÔI' he's no longer certain of possessing once the recovered Army vet turned political delegate. Keeping his body image from the public as well as from himself, Dole avoids mirrors or else keeps a towel draped over his shoulder: "Maybe it's kind of odd, and maybe it's kind of silly, but I don't have much of a shoulder there. That's why I'd just as soon not look at it."10 As political delegate, his preferred reflection emanates from the orchestrated admiration of partisan crowds, endorsing "Bob Dole" as a whole object. In this respect, he echoes Reagan's autobiography, Where's the Rest of Me? the answer to which resides in group-fantasy.

Dole took the negative media cues seriously in mid-May when he publicly sacrificed his refurbished Senatorial self to enhance his chances in the presidential sweepstakes. Fittingly, the announcement was bracketed in suppressed tears.11 "My time to leave this office has come," he announced plaintively as though passing sentence on himself, "and I will seek the presidency with nothing to fall back on but the judgment of the people and nowhere to go but the White House or home."12 The next day he deplaned in Chicago, wearing a casual, pale blue shirt and sports jacket, to an enthusiastic gathering. Previously, however, he had insisted, "I will stand before you without office or authority, a private citizen, a Kansan, an American, just a man. But I will be the same man I was when I walked into the room, the same man I was yesterday and the day before, and a long time ago when I arose from my hospital bed and was permitted by the grace of god to walk again in the world."13 Heartfelt words on the tele-prompter, but not his own. The source was Mark Helprin, who tailored Dole after his own resurgent fictional heroes.14 The religious aura of the risen-up body walking again in the world evoked Lazarus if not the Second Coming, but the miracle's extension was bound by the group-fantasy's inclination to delegate. "I can't resign every day," Dole complained.15 Moreover, his insistence on his fixed identity belied the aim of his self-sacrificial act to replace one persona with another. His musings about a second self assumed a schizoid character: "Before long, I won't be in Washington or a Senator. Then I can go out and define who Bob Dole really is. What his ideas are and his agenda and his so-called vision for America."16 Soon, psychohistorians inferred, he will consult the entrails of group-fantasy for a selection of sacrificial victims.

Overall, the 1996 campaign shaped up as a contest of bodies. Clinton's is a Whitmanesque "performer of epic proportions" ("So what if I contradict myself? I contain multitudes") emblematic of our national flabbiness, inconsistencies, and seemingly unlimited resources.17 He emerged in the national media as a container of contradictions, skilled at mixing and neutralizing their toxic contents.18 Cartoons showed him as a loveable hunk and a con-man; as sheriff and cattle rustler. The National Review (2 Sep 96) portrayed a blank-faced Clinton in front of a portrait gallery of former presidents with his features; and the New York Times (21 Sep 96) headline, "Clinton's Backers Perceive a Variety of Sides to Him," further validated the protean president.
By contrast, Gingrich's blabbering mouth and porky frame concealed a tight-assed agenda of cut/slash/sacrifice. Bob Dole's advocacy of hardness is belied by his own fragile reconstituted but so far lifeless body and split self-images.

Together, Bill, Hillary, and Dole comprised a sort of group-fantasy/sit-com family of their own. Bill: the fun-loving, all-American teen, often out of control but forgiven for wanting to do well and please Li'l Abner and Huck Finn; Hillary: his overbearing, scolding mom who needs to be kept in her place lest she revisit our nightmares as the phallic woman; she is also the rival for our homoerotic urges to picnic in the pleasures of Clinton's fecund body both maternal and polymorphous perverse; Dole: the grumpy old oedipal dad we distance ourselves from lest he inflict on us retribution for his debilities (castration) and forsake his designated sacrificial role; on a deeper level he is the doleful unloved and unlovable hungry-child we try to deny. (Perot similarly is the abandoned Martian midget.) On a cultural level, the Dole/Perot irrelevancy reenforced our illusions that we are better off fatherless in our brave new "Sibling Society."19

The 1996 group-fantasy message was: Keep Clinton the embodiment of our national flabbiness and potential. Get Hillary out of the way so we can have him all to ourselves. Sacrifice Dole to alleviate our guilt over aggressive urges, our shame over failing to rein in our insatiable appetites. On a deeper level, we were experiencing undefined hungers overshadowed by death-fears signaled by lost-child imagery; we need to reconnect with Hillary's life-giving strengths, but rather than engaging the accompanying oedipal conflicts we are opting for an illusory fatherless society. Clinton's complacent cartoon potato-face fosters regressive fantasies and suggests we're lazily inclined to remain a nation of couch-potatoes. Clinton's reelection in 1996 affirms passive acquiescence in the status quo over direr alternatives. If he feels delegated to sacrifice, he presents himself as a supposedly more benign and compassionate executioner than the Buchanan/Perot/Gingrich/Dole alternatives.

1997: The Reign of POTUS Clinton

Keeping astride group-fantasy during an America presidential election is like mounting a wild bull, being thrown, only to scramble onto another and yet another. The psychohistorical model I applied assigns to groups the task of conflict management by securing boundaries; externalizing negatives; safely splitting desires and objects; selecting delegates for completing the process via poison-containers, scapegoats, and victim-groups.

Through an analysis of the visual and print media, I tuned into four group-fantasy themes in a somewhat overlapping sequence:

1. stemming from the supposed white-male backlash of 1994, Newt Gingrich emerged as Scrooge/Robespierre, the ideal executioner to gratify the group's sacrificial lusts, but also as Clinton's demonic double or evil twin. Probing beyond their portly, wonkish resemblances, Frank Rich wrote that both were "favored eldest children, brought up by tough mothers who survived spouse abuse." Raised by "strong and doting mothers [in] broken homes [with] tenuous roots," neither boy "Knew his biological father and both had difficult relationships with their adoptive fathers" while as adults had "marital problems of their own."20 But twinned, either one could perform as delegate for the group, and as the country languished in gridlock, Clinton (with a little help from Dick Morris) seized an advantage by adopting his counterpart's agenda. The traditional anxiety over sameness observed by Rene Girard (which I would interpret as anxiety over boundary dissolution) was soon resolved when Gingrich was transformed into the evil twin.21 Frequently referred to as the most unpopular politician in the country, the shining hero grew so embarrassing to his followers that they had few qualms in ratifying an ethics committee reprimand.

2. As delegate for antifeminist rage as well as fall-gal for failures or successes in the 1992-96 term, Hillary became a poison-container which the group separated off from Clinton. She was "disappeared" during the '96 election campaign, and as Clinton's body expanded and grew more androgynous, one had the sense that Bill had eaten Hillary and become ambisexual in group-fantasy.

3. Clinton as POTUS (the media shorthand for President of the United States suggests Potency, Potentate) retains his larger-than-life image as the group empowers him to be their leader. In a thematic analysis of Clinton's speeches, psychologist David Winter traced a shift from "achievement-motive imagery" to "power-motive imagery."22 David Letterman voiced the fantasy of Clinton's immensity: "He's fat. He's huge. Three hundred pounds." To which, his guest Bob Dole quipped, "I never tried to lift him; I just tried to beat him."23

4. Such empowerment by the group may prepare the leader for his sacrificial role. A cartoon showing a chain gang of convicts crossing a bridge not to the 21st Century but over a crocodile-infested moat to a prison for ethics crimes suggests needs for punishment; others depict children and women being guillotined or offered on a sacrificial altar. It is true that Clinton had again preempted his opponents' sacrificial agenda by adopting a punitive brand of welfare reform.

Yet it is difficult to envision genuine gratifications of sacrificial lusts in the ensuing bureaucratic shuffles of welfare recipients among federal and state, public and private agencies. What else is there for the group to feed on? Prospects of an all-out bloody war look dim. A mostly defanged Hillary has re-emerged. The spate of alien-attacking, disaster-descending movies provides more of a mild catharsis than a fuse for detonating explosives. O. J. Simpson's trial again coincided with Clinton's State of Union, but the news was anti-climactic.24 Conspiracy theories abound but remain fluid and localized. Militia groups continue to play out anti-government agendas; anti-abortion terrorists strike periodically. Clinton's approval ratings hold steady at around 60% despite numerous reports of dubious campaign financing and ominous Asian influences no yellow peril having so far gripped the nation. All of this could change, and change overnight. It would only take some wacko to designate himself the redeemer/assassin of a suddenly coalescing cause demanding revenge/sacrifice.

Meanwhile, we may be able to learn from the limitations of the psychohistorical model accessed above. Three possible explanations for the failure to achieve sacrificial success, dating from the last major project in the unsuccessful Persian Gulf war of 1990: 1) the sacrifice model is inadequate; 2) the group-fantasy itself is not an agenda for action but a harmless safety-valve outlet for maintaining a larger homeostasis; 3) the leader's opportunistic strategems bring about a dispersal or fragmentation of group-fantasy. In fact, all three are persuasive. If, for example, the leader is the delegate for a threefold sacrifice option (external foes, domestic enemies, himself), which I believe he often is, a series of ideal candidates auditioned for this role but were rejected: first Gingrich, who was out-maneuvered by Clinton, then Buchanan, who was outmaneuvered by Dole, then Dole, who was outmaneuvered by Clinton again. In countering this pattern, one could argue that Clinton succeeded by turning himself into the fantasy-leader du jour, but he also arguably altered the fantasy.

This molding of group-fantasy within the political process reminds us that the total picture involves not just fantasy but behavior above all their interplay in a feedback system and thus leads to the most unusual aspects of the 1996 elections: Clinton's consistent margin and the precision of voting distribution. Voters had apparently made their minds up as early as December 1995, in straw polls facing off Clinton with various opponents.25 Thus neither the fading of Buchanan and Perot, the adding of Kemp to Dole's ticket nor Clinton's signing onto welfare reform significantly impacted on voter decisions. Nor did the extra millions Democrats poured into the race in the fall when they were clearly winning give Clinton the 50+% landslide he sought. The voters fine-tuned their choices to give Clinton 49%, just enough to govern but not the majority to claim a mandate. Moreover, they retained a Republican Senate and subtracted a handful from Gingrich's House, so that only a few defections could alter the majority will there.

Whether or not intended, it is what happened, and one way of making sense of it may accrue from reconsidering Freud's two models of the psyche. The earlier topography derived from his efforts to establish the role of the dynamic unconscious in mental life. The unconscious is accessed through its various mental representations, like the latent content in dreams, and is expressed in straightforward libidinal or aggressive wishes. Subsequent investigations into narcissism, object-loss, and mourning led to his revisionary structural-hypothesis in 1923. The new emphasis is on the functions of the ego defensive as well as adaptive which entail reality-testing, synthesizing, identifying, and transforming. Roughly speaking, the differences between the two models correspond to the preoedipal versus the postoedipal operations of various psychic agencies.

In conclusion, our psychohistorical models, driven by consummatory sacrifice agendas, overly adhere to the first topography; whereas the revisionary model, accommodating greater inhibition of drives, greater internalization of objects, delayed gratifications, and compromise-formations, is more adequately attuned to recent American political behavior. In other words, the group-fantasy encompasses more than preoedipal/early oedipal realms; and it isn't only them; it's also us.

Dan Dervin, Ph.D., teaches English at Mary Washington College, Fredericksburg, VA, 22401, and is author of Enactments: American Modes and Psychohistorical Models (Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 1996).

footnotes Below

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footnotes:

1. Reparative leadership was introduced into psychohistorical discourse by Vamik Volkan, and I expanded the term to Clinton's presidency in "ÔThem'd to Death': The Politics of Projective-Identification and Clinton's Reparative Presidency," Chapter 4, Enactments (Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996), pp. 87-103.

2. Gary Wills, "How the ÔRepublican Revolution' Collapsed," New York Review of Books (6 June 1996), p. 12.

3. Mark Shields, "With Foes Like These" (Washington Post, 22 May 1996).

4. Will Roscoe, "Strange Craft, Strange History, Strange Folks: Cultural Amnesia and the Case for Lesbian and Gay Studies," American Anthropologist, 97:3 (September 1995), p. 452.

5. James B. Stewat, Blood Sport: The President and His Adversaries.

6. R. H. Melton, "First Lady Bears the Brunt of Unfavorable Opinion on Whitewater" (Washington Post, 24 March 1996).

7. Washington Post (2 February 1996).

8. The Times Magazine (23 March 1996); Benazir Bhutto, Prime Minister of Pakistan, was most powerful.

9. Laura Blumenfeld, "Opening Up" (Washington Post, 12 May 96).

10. Blumenfeld, "Opening Up."

11. William Powers, "A Good Cry" (Washington Post, 17 May 1996).

12. Dan Balz (Washington Post, 16 May 1996).

13. New York Times (16 May 1996).

14. William Safire, "White House or Home" (New York Times, 16 May 1996); Laura Blumenfeld, "A Novelist's Boost to Dole's Character,"(Washington Post, 18 May 1996, C1).

15. Adam Nagourney (New York Times, 21 May 1996, A17).

16. Nagourney (21 May 1996).

17. The first quote comes from a Dole advisor (Washington Post, 19 May 1996, A7); the second from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

18. Todd S. Purdom, "Facets of Clinton: President and Paradox," New York Times Magazine (19 May 1996), pp. 34-43.

19. Robert Bly, The Sibling Society (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1996). Fantasies and facts of Fatherlessness in America, along with anxieties over reported sperm-loss, pervade the country today and play into group-fantasy (see Gail Vines, "Some of Our Sperm Are Missing," New Scientist [26 August 1996], pp. 22-25.

20. Frank Rich, "Separated at Birth," New York Times (12 Jan 95).

21. Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), p. 57.

22. Christopher Shea, "Clinton Said to Adopt New Psychological Profile," Chronicle of Higher Education (1 Nov 96), p. 18.

23. New York Times (9 Nov 96).

24. Dan Dervin, "The O.J. Simpson Trial as an Enactment of the Other State of the Union," Journal of Psychohistory (1996) 24:1:64-70.

25. "Ratings for Clinton and Dole Change Little," New York Times (5 June 96); "Fall Campaign May Have Had Little Impact on Voters' Knowledge of Presidential Issues," Washington Post (15 Nov 96).

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