Is Spitzer Already Working on His Comeback?

Why are we Americans such suckers for stories of redemption? Will Eliot Spitzer follow the lead of my home state’s disgraced ex-Governor John Rowland (who also resigned) and take to the lecture tour, saying “I made mistakes,” while ending up with a lucrative lobbying or consultant job? If so, the answer lies in our cultural weakness for the happy ending.

If you are feeling cynical at this moment about the chance that this could happen or if you don’t believe that the wheels to make this happen have not already started to turn, look at how Spitzer ended his speech, “As human beings our greatest glory consists not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.” He has already planted the seed; he has already primed those redemption juices to start flowing. If I did not think that so much wonderful research and scholarship in psychology was ignored, I might even believe he had read my colleague, Dan McAdams’s book, The Redemptive Self, in which he traces themes of redemption across all the historical periods of American society from Puritans to the present. It is prevalent in our religious doctrine, literature, politics, social philosophy, and marketing.

In his and other studies of the effects of structuring one’s life stories in redemptive terms, it turns out that people who rely on redemption stories (where things start out good, then go crashingly bad, and then get better again) score higher on all kinds of measures of health, well-being and adjustment than individuals who do not incline toward telling stories with this uplifting pattern. In my own laboratory, in research conducted my former student, Jenna Baddeley (now at the University of Texas-Austin), and soon to appear in the Journal of Research in Personality, she found that listeners to redemption stories are much more receptive to the narrator of such stories and more likely to see that person as similar to them and more desirable to have as a friend than narrators who tell stories that end in a negative place. So the dice are clearly loaded for us to find the silver lining in every negative experience, both for our own good and for the social goods that we can accrue.

And why should it not be that way? We want people to rebound from adversity. We want them to make their lives better. We want to be able to forgive, if only to know that we might be forgiven too at some point. But here is my concern. Public figures are on to this inclination that exists in virtually all of our hearts. They rely on publicists, P.R. firms, marketing companies, talk shows, and magazines, among others, to exploit our love for redemption. They use book deals, confessional articles, “before and after” celebrity photo shoots, and every available form of media to let the general public travel along with them on their “journey back from hell.” In the worst possible way, such attention to the fallen reinforces their sense of having a “calling” or a “unique destiny.” But in the end the wounded narcissist is still a narcissist.

To me the true sign of Eliot Spitzer’s rise from his ignominy will be not if he writes a best seller book, not if he becomes a high profile lawyer whose cases capture press headlines again, not even if eventually he heads an important non-profit agency that does good for the world. To me the true sign of redemption will be if we never hear of him again – that he goes on and lives a private, ethical and quiet life in which he is respectful to his family and sensitive to the moral weight of the various choices that he makes. True redemption is an inner victory, not one measured by how bright the lights of fame and fortune can shine again on our fallen heroes.