Now that three of Jian Ghomeshi’s accusers have come forward to Toronto police with allegations of physical assault, and the CBC has claimed it saw “graphic evidence” of “physical injury to a woman” in a video offered by their employee as evidence of consensual sex, the former host of Q has more to worry about than trial by social media.
Navigator, a firm that handles the PR equivalent of toxic waste, dropped its client faster than a spent fuel rod from Fukushima. Rock-it Promotions, Ghomeshi’s publicist, quickly followed. The guy’s safest employment option now is probably inside a store mascot suit with extra padding.
That said, you can’t completely rule out a media-mediated resurrection a few years down the road: a tell-all exchange with Peter Mansbridge on CBC before trekking the cable stations of the cross with an Oprah-blurbed memoir.
In context with claims that he treated some dates like sports equipment, Ghomeshi’s sentiments about his “fluffy, dutiful travelling companion, BigEars” — a teddy bear — seems less quirky than creepy. Armchair psychologists have been quick to diagnose his condition: pathological narcissism, dissociative identity disorder, psychopathy, galloping douchebaggery, you name it.
Ghomeshi himself owned up to being “neurotic” to an adoring audience in Stratford, adding that “successful, talented creative people, in my experience I’ve discovered, are all either neurotic or insecure or freaked out in some way or another.”
For various reasons, the tales involving Ghomeshi didn’t surprise me as much as claims some years back that pegged the late Hungarian author Arthur Koestler as a violent sexaholic. The author of Darkness at Noon — one of the great novels of the 20th century — was a polymath and public intellectual who fought for human rights in both word and deed.
I still find it difficult to reconcile Koestler’s luminous prose with tales uncovered by two separate biographers, David Cesarini and Michael Scammell. Both recite a sorry record of physical violence and forced abortions, but unlike Cesarini, Scammell stops short of the one charge of rape.
Reports of the brilliant author’s lifelong bad behaviour have relocated his posthumous profile somewhere between a cad and an unconvicted criminal. A physician would have dealt him differently than a magistrate, however. One of Koestler’s contemporaries, the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung, argued that a therapist’s role is not to judge sick people, but to help heal them.
“Unprejudiced objectivity” was the “moral achievement on the part of the doctor, who ought not to be repelled by sickness and corruption,” Jung wrote in Psychology and Religion: West and East. “We cannot change anything unless we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses and I am the oppressor of the person I condemn...”
Bear in mind Jung was communicating as a therapist, not as a jurist, journalist, or 21st century blogger. He would not have condoned nonconsensual, violent acts. However, he recognized the danger in dismissing another human being as a monster, however repellent their behaviour. It may shut the door on understanding the developmental conditions that bend and twist human beings, while blinding us to the “shadow” side of our own psyches.
There’s a different kind of risk in casually attaching labels drawn from the DSM-V. Their scientific-sounding caché may lead us to mistake a culture-bound diagnostic manual for a microscope into someone’s soul.
Koestler appeared to have at least one thing in common with Ghomeshi: an industrial-sized ego. For some New Age thinkers, extinguishing the ego is the highest and noblest goal of adult development, but Jung had a different take:
“I must even help the patient to prevail in his egoism. If he succeeds in this he estranges himself from other people, he drives them away, and they come to themselves as they should, for they were seeking to rob him of his ‘sacred’ egoism... which sometimes drives him into complete isolation. However wretched this state may be, it also stands him in good stead, for in this way alone can he get to know himself and learn what an invaluable treasure is the love of his fellow beings. It is, moreover, only in the state of complete abandonment and loneliness that we experience the helpful powers of our own natures.”
I’m sure Ghomeshi must feel very alone right now. And in sharing their accusations publicly, his named accusers rather less so.
geoffolson.com
