PTypes - Personality Types
PTypes A Correspondence of Psychiatric, Keirsey, and Enneagram Typologies Adventurous



Self-Confident personality type (continued)



Reel People: Cinema's Psychological Personalities



President Bill Clinton



Eros the Killer

In 1998, President Clinton was impeached for actions he allegedly either took or ordered in an attempt to keep secret certain sexual improprieties he had committed with a White House intern. In the reams of analysis that attended the daily drama unfolding in the House of Representatives and then in the Senate trial, our culture's received wisdom and unspoken assumptions about sexuality were readily apparent. Defenders of the president dismissed the sexual activity as a private matter of no concern to the citizenry, with no implications for his political ability to lead the most powerful nation on earth. They dismissed Clinton's critics as repressed Puritans whose morbid fascination with his private behavior revealed their own unresolved sexual conflicts and fears. No one interpreted the affair the way an ancient Greek would have: as an example of the destructive power of Eros, a turbulent and potentially pernicious force that overthrows the mind and judgment and threatens the social and political orders that make human life possible (Thornton, 15).

We have come a long way from the Greek view of sex as a force of nature, volatile and destructive if left uncontrolled. Plato's idealization of sexuality is the distant starting point for the West's long fascination with sexual idealism, a debased version of which permeates our culture today in film, advertisement, supermarket romance, pop lyric, and television show. The Greeks knew better. They realized that the powerful beauty and pleasure of sex were dangerous, in need of controls and prohibitions. To them, sex could never be a "private" affair, of no concern to the larger political community; nor was it a mere "social construct" reflecting the structures of power and privilege, a contingent phenomenon to be restructured at will by social engineers. Rather, it was one of those absolute limits on human identity and aspiration, a powerful force of nature--and like all such forces, necessary for human survival yet requiring rational and social limitations. They would never have imagined undertaking the experiment we have embarked on: trivializing the power of Aphrodite--who, as she warns in the Hippolytus, destroys those who "think big" against her--by loosening and weakening those controls, such as marriage and shame. The results are all to obvious today, from talk-show sexual freaks to the sordid spectacle of casual sex and unleashed narcissism in the White House. Whether we can survive this novel experiment remains to be seen; but whatever its outcome, we cannot say the Greeks didn't warn us (15).

Thornton, Bruce (2000). Eros the Killer. Greek ways: how the Greeks created Western Civilization. San Francisco: Encounter Books.



I wouldn't ascribe a personality disorder, or any mental disorder, to the President (or any other famous person). But the folks below do have him typed right.

  • "The Clinton Chronicle" reprinted from _Symposium_ - "Diary of a Political Psychologist."

    Healthy narcissism includes many traits related to effective leadership, including ambition, self-confidence, and persistence in the face of adversity – and Bill Clinton is amply endowed with all of these.
  • Salon | Can this marriage be saved? - Salon Magazine.

    "If I were to diagnose him, I would say he has a quintessential narcissistic personality disorder -- he swings from the grandiose to a little boy incapable of protecting his mother and himself. He also shows many of the worst qualities of the child of an alcoholic. In clinical practice, you see that male children of alcoholic families seem unable to fully commit to any woman, they are often very ambivalent about their relationships with women."
  • Open Letters to Celebrities: Bill Clinton - Dr. Steve. [Internet Archive]

    Dear President Clinton,

    Several people have asked me to comment on your presumed "sexual addiction." Based on what I have been reading about you lately, your inability to restrain yourself sexually appears to be a symptom of a much larger problem: You suffer from a full blown Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

  • Shrinking Clinton: Professionals put the President on the couch - New York Daily News Online.

    I do not presume to "analyze" someone I've not examined, but the psychiatric literature is replete with examples of such behavior, under the rubrics of "narcissism," "masochism," even "sociopathy."
  • The Mental Disorder Quiz

    The President responded that the harassment allegation was ludicrous, because he would never approach a small-breasted woman like Ms. Willey.

President Clinton is a textbook example of the shameless, womanizing narcissist. Here's a man from very humble beginnings (like Elvis) who has the attitude of a "star" or king! His sense of entitlement, healthy ambition, political abilities, competitiveness, pomposity, and insouciance mark him as the Self-Confident type.



Murderers



Jeffrey Masson

  • Opinion -- Masson v. New Yorker Magazine, Inc.

    Malcolm's work received complimentary reviews. But this gave little joy to Masson, for the book portrays him in a most unflattering light. According to one reviewer, "Masson the promising psychoanalytic scholar emerges gradually, as a grandiose egotist -- mean-spirited, selfserving, full of braggadocio, impossibly arrogant and, in the end, a self-destructive fool. But it is not Janet Malcolm who calls him such: his own words reveal this psychological profile -- a self-portrait offered to us through the efforts of an observer and listener who is, surely, as wise as any in the psychoanalytic profession." Coles, Freudianism Confronts Its Malcontents, Boston Globe, May 27, 1984, pp. 58, 60.


  • Salon People | Janet Malcolm

    The case hinged on five quotations that Masson claimed were fabrications and that Malcolm, embarrassingly, couldn't produce on tape -- although, as David Gates pointed out in Newsweek, "what Malcolm does have on tape -- only a few lines are in dispute -- is more than enough to make Masson look silly." The suit threaded byzantinely up and down through the courts for years before a jury finally found against Masson in 1994. But for Malcolm the victory was a Pyrrhic one. The public spectacle had been huge and humiliating, her reporting widely criticized and mocked. The lawsuit gained her more notoriety than any of her books ever had; thenceforward everything she wrote would be a target (pg. 2).


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