[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on The Bill Clinton Syndrome
Author Jerome D. Levin, Ph.D., a psychoanalyst with over 20 years understanding in identifying and treating addictive manners, 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. Sexual obsession affects a great number of people. It ruins family life, destroys careers, spreads disease, and makes those who go through it miserably, however it is the one compulsion that has not come out of the clandestine, for the reason that there is too much shame attached to it. (Daily Record (1998)
Sexual addictions are not about sexual characteristics. They are concerning lack of confidence, low self-respect, and the need for assertion and comfort. At the base, the sex fanatic feels reviled and unlovable and so looks zealously for evidence that this is not so. This is the case in spite of how competently 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 sympathy. No one qualm that Bill Clinton has had an active extramarital sex life.
In a variety of ways, he himself has admitted as much. Mutually the man and the problem are particularly multifarious. President Clinton is radiant, well cultured, and educated; an insatiable 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.............
