Oedipus or Icarus: Spitzer’s Complaint or The Two Analyses of Mr. E
Psychoanalytic Symposium 2009
Jeffrey Stern, Ph.D.
The Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis
February 21, 2009
1
I need to say at the outset that talking psychoanalytically about Eliot Spitzer as I
do in this paper is--as Freud wrote of our profession itself--impossible. This is because
Eliot Spitzer has never been my patient. What this means is that in addition to lacking
highly detailed information about his current and early life, as well as his dreams,
fantasies, fears and obsessions, I have no transference-countertransference relation to
orient my understanding of him or to provide my interpretations with the sense of
conviction that only being in the room with someone can make possible. What I have
instead are published accounts that I have stitched together to create as whole a portrait of
his personality as I can, despite the fact that what is said of his psychological life isn’t
much. He is thus to me more like a literary character than what is called a “real person,”
and not a literary character richly drawn like Hamlet or Roskolnikov, but rather a
character from a made for tv movie or pulp fiction or a comic book. But when I was
asked if I would write about him, I assumed the point wasn’t to get the real Eliot Spitzer
right--I could hardly be expected to do that from Chicago where as you know we have
been occupied lately with the defrocking of a governor of our own, one whose clownish
crimes had nothing to do with sex but everything to do with greed and money in
accordance with our hallowed if prosaic Midwestern political traditions.
Of course we haven’t only the ridiculous to think about these days in Chicago
There’s also the sublime, new President, Barack Obama. And the almost President and
current Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. She was your senator, New York, but
she’s another one of our homies!...Actually, if you think of it, Chicago is on a roll these
days...Still, I can’t believe Arnie Richards, the King of Psychoanalysis, invited me to
speak at this Symposium in New York! Its like being summoned to court! Me, in New
2
York! If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere, bah bup bah bup New York, New
York!…But, it makes sense he’d want a Chicago guy. Let’s be honest. New York is a
disaster these days now that Wall Street’s become the national sink-hole. That’s why the
country elected Obama, a Chicago guy, to fix things. You need something done, you go
to the City that Works. Arnie Richards wants a Symposium to succeed, he puts a
Chicago guy on the program. Actually, I think he signed three of us! It was the same
thing when New York ego psychology started to get stale. Where did Psychoanalysis turn
for new ideas? To another one of the Boyz in the Hyde Park Hood--Heinz Kohut, that’s
where! Who’s the Second City now New York? I think its time for you to take down
your Ptolemaic maps of Manhattan with the teeny weenie rest of the world orbiting
around you before someone starts spreading the news that your Big Apple chauvinism
might really be a sign of a big fat inferiority complex. You want to look like you know
where it’s at? Tape a Chicago Transit Authority Map to the walls of your over priced
apartments!...I have to say, with Barack in the White House its like the dawning of the
Age of Michael Jordan all over again. Remember sticking it to Patrick Ewing and the
Knicks year after year? How cool was that?
--Hey! Jeff! Snap out of it! What in the world are you talking about? People are waiting
to hear about Eliot Sptizer! Not Barack Obama, not Rob Blagojevich, not Michael
Jordan, and certainly not you!
--Uh Oh! Its my Reality Ego! And he sounds pissed! Well, so what? Why should I listen
to him?
--You’d better listen, Big Shot, before they throw us both out of here!
3
--He’s right. I have gotten side tracked. But its because this is so exciting. I’m not used
to feeling so important. I’m about to lose control, and I think I like it!
--No, I’m taking Jeffrey’s psyche back again, and I’m going to explain that I let you,
Split-off Grandiosity, carry on in this way to make a point. There’s actually a method to
this madness, because becoming overstimulated and grandiose after being elected to high
office, or after being handed billions of dollars of investor’s money or for that matter
after being invited to give a lecture and as a result losing track of one’s mission is what
this paper and I think what this Symposium is all about. And it doesn’t just happen to the
Eliot Spitzers and Bernard Madoffs of the world, it can happen to any of us when the
moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter aligns with Mars.
--Anyway, what I was saying before beginning this lengthy digression was that
when I agreed to talk about Eliot Spitzer, I assmed the point wasn’t to get the real Eliot
Spitzer right so much as to shed light upon the man he might be, because the man he
might be might be enough like people we actually know and treat to make playing this
game of imagining the personality of the former governor of New York worthwhile.
So now having said all of this, “vee may,” in the words of Dr. Spielvogel on the
final page of Portnoy’s Complaint, “perhaps to begin.”
Until his collapse last March, there appeared to be a single Eliot Spitzer: the
righteous crusader for truth, justice and the American way. He was brilliant, aggressive,
successful, perfect. He had a distinguished family, an Ivy League education, a southern
belle for a wife and three lovely daughters. And then suddenly he was named in a sex
scandal, his career flamed out like a meteor, and there were two Eliot Spitzers: the one
4
we knew, and the one we didn't, who as it turned out had secretly flown for at least ten
years under even his family's radar.
Spitzer’s rise and fall is the story of a boy overstimulated in childhood by the
powerful father who dreamed he would become The First Jewish President of The United
States and drove him relentlessly in pursuit of this goal, a boy who feared his father,
thinking that if he went into the real estate business Bernard Spitzer had built from
nothing into a mighty empire, he would only screw things up. Nonetheless Eliot shared
his father’s dream of becoming a great man, as did his English professor mother.
The standard approach to such a story would follow Freud's line in his essay
"Those Wrecked by Success,” which would view Spitzer’s fall as an effect of
unconscious guilt resulting from his attainment of the office of governor, an achievement
he would unconsciously regard as an oedipal victory over his father. Freud would see
Spitzer’s use of prostitutes as compounding his oedipal crime by unconsciously
representing the fulfillment of his desire to possess his forbidden mother. He would
argue that Spitzer’s vigorous effort to jail prostitution ring leaders while he was attorney
general was his way of managing the guilt he felt over his own whoring. Katha Pollitt,,
writing in The Nation, compares Spitzer to Shakespeare’s hypocritical Angelo in
Measure for Measure, who is charged with cleaning up Vienna’s licentiousness until he
is discovered indulging in the very activities he is supposed to be abolishing. Freud
would say that when Spitzer became governor his oedipal guilt became unendurable and
to relieve it he set about purposefully if unconsciously to give up the new office by
getting himself busted in precisely the sort of prostitution sting he’d designed himself
while Attorney General. He is thus his own worst enemy, hoist as it were on his own
5
petard and brought to justice by his own super ego, the real sheriff of his own private
Wall Street.
There may be another--doubtless there is more than one other--way to think about
the rise and fall of Eliot Spitzer. If Mr. E were Mr. Z--and Heinz Kohut were analyzing
him according to the model we have been discussing--the model of Mr. Z’s classical first
analysis--E would work through his oedipal wishes and fears until as a result of making
the unconscious conscious, he would let go of them and as it were “grow up.”
Renouncing his whores he would return to his wife and play the part of the dutiful
husband he had always pretended to be, working hard to make people forget that he had
ever misbehaved. But after four or five years he would contact Kohut and say that he
wasn’t getting much pleasure out of his work--he had become an online journalist--and
that although he had been faithful to his wife he was feeling the pull of his old impulses
and feared that he would be unable to prevent himself from acting on them. Kohut would
suggest that he return for more analysis and a different and perhaps more sympathetic
picture of his life and personality would begin to emerge.
Of course this could never happen because Spitzer we are told has a Bush-like
distrust of psychological thinking and would have avoided analysts like the plague. But
as that very Bush has taught us never to let facts deter us, we shall soldier on with our
fantasy nonetheless. In a long profile in The New Yorker, Nick Paumgarten sees Spitzer
as brilliant but shallow, which shouldn’t be all that surprising given that people who act
out sexually tend--as Slavoj Zizac has it--to “enjoy their symptom[s]” too much to
explore their deep meanings and risk having to give them up. Paumgarten remembers
Spitzer disdainfully asking him when they first met if he was going to write about his
6
childhood. Indeed in the articles I’ve read it isn’t Spitzer who remembers his childhood
but other family members and friends. William Taylor, his roommate at Princeton,
recalls the famous Spitzer family dinners in which the children--Eliot is the youngest, he
has an older sister who is a lawyer, and a brother who is a neurosurgeon--were compelled
by their tycoon father to debate the social issues of the day as if they were arguing before
the Supreme Court. Taylor remembers worrying that he would make a fool of himself
before Bernard Spitzer whom he describes as “terrifying.” Paumgarten notes that Eliot
was an outstanding athlete excelling at tennis and soccer but that his parents recall only
once ever attending one of his games or matches while he was in high school. Taylor
further remembers Spitzer’s mother saying on an occasion when he and Eliot had played
tennis together that she hoped he’d kicked her son’s ass. This doesn’t sound like the sort
of thing oedipal mothers are supposed to say even in jest. Evidently she could see that
Eliot’s grandiosity--something she doubtless had much to do with engendering in him-needed taming. Perhaps she also realized at some level that her son’s arrogance may
have masked a deep childhood depression.
Indeed, we might imagine that although he was privileged, and cherished, he was
nonetheless something of an unmirrored child. This seems absurd on its face given that
he was constantly in the spotlight at home, but the impression one gets reading the
accounts of these early years is that he was always in training to be the GREAT MAN his
father needed him to become, but that he was never encouraged simply to feel that his
parents loved him for himself rather than because he was the apotheosis of their
narcissistic dreams. Chez Spitzer, Paumgarten dryly notes “was not an emotionally
indulgent household.”
7
Of course Eliot was nothing if not compliant. He got spectacular grades at
Horace Man Preparatory School and was student body president at Princeton, where he is
remembered not for leading sit-ins but for playing squash with the University President.
But there was always a quality of bullying aggressiveness about Spitzer, an insistence
that people not lead nor even follow but simply get out of his way. Indeed when he
became State’s Attorney General he famously characterized himself as a “steam roller”
who would flatten his enemies like cartoon pancakes. He was loud, impatient, impetuous
and easily angered, temperamentally more Shakespeare’s Hotspur than the bloodless
Angelo, because always teetering on the edge of control. Perhaps there had long been a
part of him that was frustrated and angry at the way he had been required to perform for
the parents who had little interest in responding to what Winnicott would have called his
early omnipotent gestures.
Arnold Goldberg would see Spitzer’s frustration as having given rise to a vertical
split in his psyche which would have walled off his wounded infantile grandiosity from
his “reality ego” making it impervious to the kind of taming or annealing that Ann
Spitzer thought would improve him. Goldberg sees people with vertical splits as “being
of two minds,” the split-off sector often completely antithetical morally to that of the
every day reality ego. A person under the moon-lit sway of this split-off “other self” is
aware that he may be living in utter disregard for the values he holds by day, but he
seems at least temporarily not to care. These people know their acting out self is part of
them--they aren’t consciously Dr. Jekyll and unconsciously Mr. Hyde--but it somehow
feels to them nevertheless that the being who violates their cherished values is someone
else.
8
Split off grandiosity is the sort of thing that gets politicians--and the rest of us for
that matter--into trouble, because there is something slightly psychotic about it. This is
because it retains its primitive, infantile quality of absolute omnipotence. What this
means is that when this aspect of the personality is in charge, we imagine ourselves more
or less invulnerable and hence above the law. This is why someone as bright as Eliot
Spitzer might do something as stupid as allowing himself to be trapped in a prostitution
drag net. Or why for that matter Bill Clinton might think he could carry on an affair with
a White House intern in the Oval Office and no one would notice. From the KohutianGoldbergian perspective they weren’t trying unconsciously to get caught to assuage their
punitive super egos, they were simply unable to engage their ordinary discretion when
acting out. But why did they act out? The answer is that acting out wards-off depression,
or quiets the overstimulation that in a vulnerable self may follow success.
Goldberg’s idea is that the child’s frustrated early need for maternal
responsiveness leads to an inability to regulate self esteem in the face of narcissistic
injuries. When derivatives of these early needs go unmet, they may be erotized and give
rise to sexual acting out--which would explain Spitzer’s reliance on prostitutes, a subject,
that has generated a great deal of heated speculation in the ranks of the talking heads and
pundits. Dr. Laura shocked Meredith Viera on “The Today Show” by suggesting that
Spitzer’s whoring was traceable to his wife’s failure to make him feel like a man in the
bedroom, an opinion echoed by a number of blogging working girls, while a writer for
Slate judged that Spitzer simply had too much libido for one woman to satisfy, adding
that any married man worth his salt shares the frustration of Spitzer’s complaint.
9
. I’ve not been able to find much out about Silda Spitzer. She is proud of the fact
that her name is a shortened version of Serilda, Teutonic for Warrior Goddess, and is
described as gracious, southern and beautiful, a wife perfectly suited to smooth out her
husband’s rough edges. Their friends like her very much and were shocked to learn of
Eliot’s philandering given their view of the soundness of the marriage. Silda has said that
she liked out earning Eliot when she was a partner at Scadden Arps and he was laboring
in the public sector and that she was reluctant to give up her career to help him manage
his. After doing so she started a foundation to encourage rich kids her own to stop having
outrageously expensive birthday parties and to give some of their or their parents’ money
to children who might actually need it. In this public spiritedness she recalls her motherin-law who strove to instill in Eliot and his siblings the importance of giving back to
society.
We all probably remember her impersonation of Hillary Clinton’s impersonation
of Tammy Wynette and standing by her man on the day that Eliot announced he was
stepping down from his post in Albany. But was she a bad wife, as Dr. Laura suggests,
or was the problem Eliot’s unmanageable libido? Or was it something else? We have no
reason to think Silda Spitzer wasn’t a good wife. Her husband describes her as a person
whose judgment he absolutely relied on and trusted, but of course Bill Clinton respected
Hillary’s intellect and judgment, which were evidently insufficient to keep him in her
bed. The fact is we simply have no idea how gratifying a conjugal life the Spitzers
enjoyed, or how much libido either partner was blessed or cursed with or without. What
we know is that Eliot Spitzer began using prostitutes ten years before he was discovered
to be Kristin’s Client Number 9. At that time the couple had three small daughters. If
10
they were like other couples with small children, they probably had less time than they
had before for lovemaking. Which might or might not have anything to do with Eliot’s
whoring. That there are records of his using prostitutes that date from this time doesn’t
obviate the possibility that he had been seeing prostitutes before the children were born or
even before he and Silda met.
We also know that Client Nine required Kristen to cope with what Goldberg
refers to as “the problem of perversion,” meaning that he didn’t simply want missionary
sex, he wanted something he may have been ashamed to ask for at home. Something the
capable Kristen has said she in fact didn’t think a problem at all. I don’t know whether
Spitzer and Silda engaged in whatever it was he did with Kristen--who wasn’t one to
kiss and tell--actually she probably didn’t kiss and evidently did tell a reporter that Client
Nine might have liked bondage. But even if Eliot and Silda did engage in the whateverit-was he surely couldn’t have demanded that she do it whenever he may have needed to
to salve his wounded narcissism after a defeat or quiet his exultation after a victory. But
even if she was willing to do the “whatever” whenever, she still might have failed to
provide what he needed, because Silda the Warrior Goddess was his partner, a
companion for the parts of his personality capable of engaging another with wants and
needs, likes and dislikes of her own. Given her pleasure in her name, we might be
tempted--completely unfairly but remember this is make-believe--to imagine that she was
as wonderful a dominatrix as she seems to have been lawyer, mother and friend, but what
she wasn’t one assumes, is someone who might have been dominated into dominating or
for that matter being dominated.
11
The rules are different, however, for sex with prostitutes. A prostitute, no matter
how refined or how highly paid, is from the vantage point of her customer the sort of
primitive self-object Kohut says the small child expects to control as absolutely as an
adult expects to control a limb. Her satisfaction isn’t the concern of her client: she is
presumably satisfied the moment she collects her fee--rather like Freud’s prescription for
psychoanalysts, come to think of it. This suggests that what Spitzer may have needed for
the temporarily corrective emotional experience he sought may have been impossible for
his wife to provide, because what he may have needed was a self object he could in
fantasy absolutely control. Think of the compliant little boy always striving--perhaps
unconsciously sadly and angrily--to do his father’s and doubtless before that his mother’s
bidding, for which the antidote may have been a self object completely antithetical to the
accomplished Silda, whom Kohut would have called an “independent center of
initiative,” but identical to Kristen, that is, a self object that would be his to command
because his to buy. Indeed, Kristen has said that Spitzer had no interest in getting to know
her like some of her other Johns but was instead all business, so much so that while they
had sex he never took off his gartered socks.
By contrast consider Bill Clinton, a man similarly driven by a need to act out
sexually and undone by his carelessness, but unlike Spitzer--who wanted ritualized sex
from an anonymous stranger whose real name he never knew and who knew him only by
a number--Clinton wanted a relationship. He didn’t pay Monica Lewinsky, he wooed
her, bought her presents and evidently craved her admiration. Indeed, it seems that what
he needed from Monica wasn’t primitive control, but something akin to what Kohut calls
“the gleam in the mother’s eye.” But although Clinton’s split-off erotic needs seem more
12
relational than those of Spitzer, and thus perhaps further advanced along a Kohutian
developmental line, it isn’t clear that the Clintons had a better marriage. We don’t know
whether Silda Spitzer felt comforted to think the women her husband slept with meant
nothing to him or how Hillary felt knowing that Bill thought he was in love with Monica.
In any event Bill Clinton seems less split than Eliot Spitzer, less unable to acknowledge
his misbehavior. He never pretended to be a puritan and when his affair became public,
he didn’t resign from office, he fought through an impeachment trial that splashed every
nuance of his illicit sex life on the world’s front pages as if he’d been born with an
immunity to shame.
Given that Eliot Spitzer used prostitutes for at least ten years before being found out,
it may be tempting to think that what led to his fall was precisely his becoming governor,
perhaps not, however, because becoming governor represented an oedipal victory so
much as it was, to use Paumgarten’s term, humbling. And this I suspect had much to do
with the fact that Spitzer’s abrasive personality--a personality well suited to the job of
prosecuting mobsters, Wall Street cheats and corrupt politicians--didn’t work in an office
that required him to be comfortable with bedfellows of the political rather than the sexual
sort, bedfellows who didn’t want a steamroller so much as someone who could roll with
a punch and would be willing to go along to get along, things the uncompromising
Spitzer found all but impossible to do.
But if he was abrasive, we might think it was to defend against early experiences
that left him feeling bruised and damaged because lovable only when he was flattening
whoever stood in the way of his father’s ambitions. Silda says that she left her law firm to
help him campaign because she thought he was too fragile to manage without her, a
13
surprising assessment given that fragility is probably the last thing most people think of
when they think of Eliot Spitzer. It seems then that wounded narcissism, or to put it more
familiarly, pride and not guilt is what comes before Eliot Spitzer’s fall.
Another factor that any psychoanalyst would find hard not to notice is the
nearness in age of Kristen and Spitzer’s daughters. Kristen was 22 when she was seeing
Spitzer, his oldest daughter about 18. Freud would say that Spitzer’s unconscious
incestuous desires were awakened by living in a household with three teenage girls and
that to keep these impulses at bay he saw a young prostitute. Kohut might counter that
the wounds to Spitzer’s narcissism that his trials in office would have brought him every
day would have been exacerbated by his exclusion from the intense feminine world of
these girls and their mother. However true it may be that no man is a hero to his valet, it
is surely truer that no man is a hero to his teenage daughters. The days of father knowing
best have long since flown. To Kristen, however, Client Nine was a big shot. And,
ironically, although unlike his daughters she had no idea he was in fact the most
important man in New York, he was paying her a fortune to make him feel like he was.
I suspect that Silda is right about her husband’s emotional fragility and that if he
were my patient during this second imaginary analysis, I would come to see him as
someone subject to depression in the face of narcissistic injuries and or to overstimulation
in the face of triumphs and who sought to ward off these painful affects by sexualizing
his early unmet narcissistic needs in reparative erotic rituals. Treatment for sexual
addictions like that for most behavior disorders usually follows the lead of twelve step
programs that seek to strengthen the ego’s ability to resist temptation by siding with the
superego and urging restraint. The problem with such treatments, however, is that they
14
ignore the split-off depression at the heart of sexual acting out and fail to recognize that
such errant behavior represents the subject’s misbegotten efforts attempt to self medicate.
Goldberg has taught that cure for these conditions is possible only when the occulted
depression is brought into the transference relation and made available for a working
through process that can heal the split and make the divided self whole.
Spitzer was careless about protecting himself from the dangers that his expensive
and reckless behavior exposed him to because sexualization carries with it an
efflorescence of split-off and thus unrealistic grandiosity. I doubt that his unconscious
intent in spending money lavishly on prostitutes was to fail, so much as it was to defend
both his career and his marriage from the vulnerabilities within himself that he knew
threatened them. Indeed, he may have thought that by seeing prostitutes he was
protecting his marriage in part by making it impossible for Silda to refuse him and thus
locking his potential for rage outside of their bedroom. But as is so often the case with
defenses in behavior disorders, the price he had to pay for acting out sexually with
Kristen wasn’t exacted crucially in dollars, it was exacted crucially in blindness.
We have been seeing repetitions of such blindness among the rich and powerful
everywhere lately: from the automobile industry CEO’S who came to Washington to beg
for money in their corporate jets, to the Wall Street bankers who paid themselves 18
billion dollars in bonuses out of the TARP money we gave them, to John Thaine of
Merrill Lynch--something perhaps of a latter day Thane of Cawdor--you remember, the
traitor whose title Duncan awards to Macbeth and of whom it is said that nothing in his
life became him like the leaving it--this loathsome Thaine who spent 1.2 million dollars
of our money to redecorate his office most famously on a $35000 antique commode
15
perhaps in the infantile certitude that whatever he might deposit there we would consider
a treasure. These idiots--as Missouri senator Claire McCaskill has called them--have
made everyone from Barack Obama on down ask what in the world they were thinking.
And of course what these scum bag millionaires were thinking is that they deserved
everything they took because they were in effect driving under the influence of vertically
split-off grandiosity.
Kohut has no name for the Tragic Man who opposes Freud’s guilt ridden
Oedipus: but I think if we were to give him one we might consider Icarus, the son in
Greek mythology of the great Maze Maker Daedalus, who didn’t fear his child would
destroy him, as does Oedipus’s father Laius, but rather that Icarus would destroy himself
should he be unable to control the wings he--Daedalus--had given him to soar above all
mankind. Daedalus used his art to launch his son into the sky even as Bernard Spitzer
used his money to launch his son’s quest to become the first Jewish President of the
United States. But Icarus became overstimulated and flew too close to the sun which
melted his wings and sent him plummeting into the sea. Spitzer became overstimulated
and illegally spent five million dollars of his father’s money to get elected attorney
general and only narrowly escaped political ruin years before his relation to Kristen
brought him down. I think he fell not because he unconsciously feared his father needed
him to fail, but rather because he unconsciously understood how much his father needed
him to succeed.
16