In a recent piece at The Daily Beast, Justin Frank, the psychiatrist who wrote Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President, spins an interesting yarn about how former New York governor Eliot Spitzer (Client #9) is more attuned to financial crimes because he's got a thing for hookers.
Seriously. That's the argument.
It's well written and worth a read if you're interested in seeing just how full of crap a psychiatrist can get (answer: very).
There's nothing wrong with the "It takes a thief to catch a thief" theme at the center of Frank's piece, but it's absurdly misapplied in this case.
The piece beings as follows:
“All the cops are criminals and all the sinners saints.” -Mick Jagger
Five years after Time magazine declared him “The Crusader of the Year,” Eliot Spitzer was known simply and infamously as “Client No. 9.” The man dedicated to public service was equally dedicated to private servicing—and the link between these two parts provided him with a leg up, as it were, on being able to spot others’ delinquent behavior far more successfully than public servants less delinquent than himself.
Aside from the slight misquote of the song (It's "every cop," not "all the cops."), the clever wording tells us what's coming: Because Spitzer is "delinquent" himself, he's better at spotting others' moral weaknesses.
But then it starts getting really weird. Frank comes up with a full-on diagnosis of a man he's presumably never met, much less interviewed in any depth.
Yet despite never having laid eyes on him, Dr. Frank assures us that Spitzer "has a sexual addiction" and "regularly succumbs to a sexual compulsion." He opines that Spitzer is "obsessed with prostitutes" and suffers from a "sexual perversion."
A tad judgmental there, doc? Unethical, maybe? An abuse of psychiatry, perhaps?
He quotes Spitzer, speaking about the need for financial regulation: "A market doesn't exist in a vacuum. Rather, a market is a product of laws, rules and enforcement. It needs transparency, capital requirements and fidelity to fiduciary duty. The alternative, as we are seeing, is anarchy.”
True enough. But then Frank writes, "Substitute the words marriage for market, emotional investment for capital requirements, and marital for fiduciary, and there you have it."
We'll save you the trouble. Here's what you get:
"A marriage doesn't exist in a vacuum. Rather, a marriage is a product of laws, rules and enforcement. It needs transparency, emotional investment and fidelity to marital duty."
Sounds great, no? What could be more romantic than two souls coming together in a product of laws, rules and enforcement? Who doesn't look forward to another chance to show fidelity to marital duty?
What do you think? Is this what marriage is to you? Is any man caught with a hooker automatically a sex addict with a sexual perversion?
