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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Perhaps if Gail Sheehy listened better, she'd find that Hillary doesn't suppress emotion -- she just doesn't get it.
Dec 20, 1999 | The difficulty with Gail Sheehy's biography of Hillary is right there in the opening sentence: "When under siege she rises early, dresses quickly, and cauterizes her emotions."
Forget that the metaphor is infelicitous. (I suspect the idea is that emotions are like blood; but then to block them the cautery should be applied to their source, perhaps the limbic system.) Set aside that the chapter is about an appearance on "Today" in January of 1998, when, according to Sheehy, Hillary still disbelieved the Monica allegations and so could express affect freely, namely anger at Bill's enemies. Ignore that much of the rest of the book draws on psychoanalytic concepts (splitting, dissociation, denial) that presume unacceptable feelings are unconscious and so do not need willful stanching.
The insuperable problem in that first sentence, as in the rest of the book, concerns the sort of knowledge required for one person to be sure that on a given morning -- or characteristically, on many mornings -- another person has shut off disturbing emotions. Sheehy promises the reader a close, personal, highly particular understanding of the first lady's emotional life, and then (thankfully, one might add) she cannot deliver.
Sheehy's intent in "Hillary's Choice" is to write psychobiography. She never focuses for long on politics. The question that interests her regards the first marriage: Why did Hillary pick Bill and why has she stayed with him? The answer Sheehy proposes is at the level of the hypotheses of a psychotherapy: Because in childhood her father did not give her enough praise, in adulthood Hillary became addicted to an emotionally abusive relationship. To satisfy that addiction, Hillary has had to ignore the obvious -- her husband's character flaws and his philandering. The choice referred to in the book's title is "not to know what she knew."
For this analysis to be credible, it would need to be buttressed by evidence of a most intimate sort. Yes, it is a commonplace of pop psychology that empathic failures between parent and child, even ones that fall far short of outright abuse, create in the child an inner emptiness often filled in later life by addiction. But that belief is not an unquestioned truth; it is a distortion of theories largely traceable to a variant of psychoanalysis called self psychology.
The central concept of self psychology is "mirroring," an exact resonance between mother (usually) and child. The theory has it that imperfect mirroring causes deficits in the child's self. Treatment, under this model, requires an effort at exquisite attunement on the part of the therapist. The self psychologist wonders not how most people might have experienced an event but how this patient did in fact experience it. The empathic stance requires openness to idiosyncrasy. What might seem an insult to most people may go unnoticed by this patient, and what conventionally seems supportive may cause outrage. Surprise is a common experience in the practice of self psychology -- the constant rediscovery of difference.
Of course, biography is about idiosyncrasy and difference. Like psychotherapy carefully done, skillful biography will show evidence of the most subtle listening. Sometimes a writer will have access to a subject's diary or (as in the case of Diane Middlebrook's study of Anne Sexton) even tapes of a subject's psychoanalysis; like a therapist, the biographer sits with this intimate testimony until it gives forth an impression of ways in which the subject's character or choices reflect her development. But despite hundreds of interviews, Sheehy has failed, with a single exception, to find anyone able or willing to give convincing evidence about how Hillary's mind works.
"Hillary's Choice" is very much biography from the outside in, a method that is especially unsatisfying in the case of a modern political figure whose public appearances are scripted. The sort of context Sheehy provides is immediate and journalistic. A typical sentence relies on irrelevant local color to lend verisimilitude: "An hour after giving Bill his slap on the wrist, Hillary -- soft and feminine -- entered the Pork Producers Rib Feed in Pierre." "Hillary's Choice" often has the feel, and the substance, of an extended women's magazine article, a just-between-us-girls dishing about Hillary's strengths and foibles, in which continual references to what Hillary wore are meant to signal truths about psychic change. When the "First Bosom," as Sheehy calls it, is revealed by dicolletage, we are to understand that Hillary is at last in touch with her femininity or that she has become carefree and assertive -- in brief, ready to reclaim her man and have a run at the Senate.
