Why Someone Would Risk It All
Science offers good new clues about the reasons certain people are reckless
Let us assume, as polls say most Americans do, that President Clinton endangered his career for the sake of a sexual encounter. That would put him in the company of John Kennedy, Gary Hart, Robert Packwood, and many, many others. And the question is why does a man who has so much to lose risk it all for a few moments of illicit pleasure?
Psychiatry studies pathology. When we try to make sense of the ordinary behavior, like the yearning for sexual affairs, we are extrapolating from nuggets of research or theory that arise incidentally in the study of mental illness.
Still, those nuggets are suggestive.
For instance, there is increasing evidence for a biology of risk taking. Some people seem to be "novelty seekers"--predisposed to a willingness to take risks in pursuit of stimulating sensations. Novelty seekers have distinctive strengths--they tend to be innovative thinkers--and characteristic weaknesses, such as gambling and addiction.
From "behavioral endocrinology," we know that on a hormonal basis some people are more sexually driven than others. Women with high levels of testosterone tend to be especially active sexually. Correlations for men are less consistent, but it seems likely that there are physiological reasons for, say, Victor Hugo's need and ability (described in Graham Robb's recent biography) to have sex nine times a day.
Personality researchers have noted that "hyperthymic" men--those with a constant upbeat mood, two steps short of mania--have high sexual appetites. Hyperthymia is a personality style thought to have strong biological roots, perhaps related to the biology of manic-depressive illness. Certainly, a number of politicians look hyperthymic. They are energetic, optimistic, and decisive, and they require little sleep.
Freud not. Turning to psychotherapy, Freud had a good deal to say about why for men love and lust are so hard to unite and why compulsions are so, well, compelling. But recently, theorists have moved away from Freud's explanation--unconscious conflict among constituents of the mind, like id and ego--and focused on the difficult concept of the self.
Self is the aspect of a person that he experiences as containing his history, performing his actions, constituting his identity. In some people the self is especially fragmented or incomplete.
Adults who were injured early in life seem capable of compartmentalizing the self. In childhood this skill is turned outward, so that the child can ignore, say, a neglectful parent's weaknesses and continue to find security at home. In time, the person's own self is experienced in this divided way, so that immature or self-destructive impulses become walled off from his sense of who he is. A corresponding tendency is useful in politics--the ability to hold contradictory positions.
Modern psychotherapy is especially interested in what happens to the self in adults who as children received inadequate parental empathy. Often they become "narcissistic"--with a distorted or conflicted sense of self-worth (narcissists are said to have problems with "grandiosity") and a tendency to use other people to supplement damaged aspects of the self. Self psychologists define three areas of difficulty: The narcissist needs others to admire him; he needs others to provide ideals and values he did not integrate in childhood; and he needs others to act as chums, to create a sense that he fits into a community. Everyone has these needs; the issue is how they are satisfied, whether through substantial relationships or superficial ones. Narcissists do best if they are charming--which is why they often make fine politicians.
However imperfect the perspectives of psychiatry, they help structure a possible account of what goes wrong when a man in the public eye takes foolish risks. What you get when you mix propensities for risk taking, hyperthymia, and narcissism in the right proportions is a damn good politician--creative, energetic, able to use others well. At the same time, you get a man for whom the sex act is a compulsion and a constant gamble: What is at stake is precisely his grandiosity--if his naughtiness escapes punishment, the fates still adore him.
Of course, this line of thought may be unnecessarily complicated. To a Darwinist, that a powerful male should seek frequent sex hardly requires explanation. When I spoke to the evolutionary psychiatrist, John K. Pearce, he said that the real psychiatric angle is the way everyone "understands" the Clinton case. Sexually driven men "understand" how a president might indulge an impulse. Insecure women "understand" how a young intern might gossip about her conquests. Pearce noted how likely people are to believe that others are just like them. That limitation has its own evolutionary function. It allows the needy older man to believe that, deep down, the young woman is also in it for the sex; and it allows the needy acolyte to believe that, deep down, the seductive leader cares for her.
This story appears in the February 9, 1998 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.