The Long View

The week that Eliot Spitzer came clean (pun intended) about his creative financing of sessions with a high-end sex worker, my students in the second semester of a survey of world literature course were looking at Freud’s account of his patient “Dora.”

I’ve configured the world lit course as an exploration (I just typed and corrected “sexploration”) of modernity, so we discuss Freud as an instance of what Paul Ricoeur called the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” a critical analysis that takes nothing at face value (see also Marx, Nietzche). And I situate Freud in a long Western tradition of critical suspicion going back to Plato. For me Freud is a kind of ne0-Platonist who proposes that, instead of your being saved by a philosopher who shows you that the shadows on the wall of the cave are not real, you are saved from the psychic unreal by the psychoanalyst (who guides you out of the cave of your neuroses).

I used Spitzer as an exemplar of the conflicting desires and the competing parts of the Self posited by Freud. Spitzer’s Super-Ego losing control over his Id. But Spitzer is also exemplary of that Freudian concept of “reaction formation”: Methinks the laddy doth protest too much. We most vigorously and publicly condemn those messy recesses of our own secret selves. So it doesn’t surprise me to see in today’s New York Times, a headline reading “A Leader Recalled as Focused but Unable to Bend.” What did we expect from a crusader on behalf of financial and sexual rectitude?

Sometimes there’s little difference between being rigid and being turgid.

The trick is not to let the hermeneutics of suspicion descend into cynicism.