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There's also the possibility that Monica Lewinsky was fantasizing the events that she recounted to Linda Tripp, but which she now denies ever happened.

Klein: Maybe she's nuts. Here's a person who appeared on the front page of my paper today, alongside claims that she was sleeping with the president. Frankly if we lived in a different culture, she wouldn't be on the front page. In grown-up countries, we know that people sleep with other people and we don't get so worked up about it.

Morin: There is a phenomenon -- mostly among women but I've seen some men with it -- that's sometimes called erotomania, but really there's no accepted name for it. The person becomes so obsessed with someone erotically that they have a one-sided relationship, all on their own. Usually that requires some stimulation from the person they're obsessed with, some friendly contact, even flirtation, but then they take it from there. This is not an everyday occurrence like the stuff I was talking about earlier. Usually it's a person hungering for the love of that special person to lift them out of feeling bad. Their sense of self-worth skyrockets, and it gives them a boost. And you can imagine a 21-year-old intern being very, very dazzled even to have the president pay you a little attention or flirt with you. Even if something happened that wasn't a big deal for Clinton, imagine how big a deal it would be for her. I can understand why she would need to confide in someone. I could also imagine that the intense need for public secrecy could make her private disclosures even more involved and detailed, energized and charged, as a counterbalance.

How might such a person react to having her private conversations with a friend made into national news?

Morin: Part of that kind of intimate talk between women is that you can tell everything without losing your friend's respect or suffering negative repercussions. Women place a much higher value on that bond than men do, generally. Talk about a violation! It may have been a violation for Clinton to hit on an intern, but for a close confidant to record those conversations and hand them over to someone else, that's horrible. That's emotional rape.

If you were treating a man in Clinton's position, someone who was having trouble controlling his sexual desires, what would you suggest?

Morin: I work with people who have similar problems, often religious or spiritual leaders. I tell them that to regain control of their behavioral decisions, it helps most to accept those impulses within yourself. If you want to make your problems with impulses worse, the best thing to do is fight them. And I tell them that if you're in a fight with your eroticism, you will lose. Fighting it makes it more intense, and that hampers your ability to make rational decisions about what to do. When people get into that fight, they do weird things -- look at Jimmy Swaggart. If they can accept and come to terms with their human impulses, embrace and stop fighting them, they will have more choices about what to do. But the thing is, when I bring that up, and my clients start to experiment with self-acceptance, the intensity does go down -- and they don't like it! It's not as hot. Keeping those impulses forbidden makes it hotter.
SALON | Jan. 23, 1998

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