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For sheer gratuitous detail in confession, for self-revelation that slips across the border into self-abasement, few can compete with former South Carolina Congressman John W. Jenrette Jr. and his wife Rita. Charged with taking bribes in the Abscam case, Jenrette denied his guilt. But then his life and marriage began to unravel. The Jenrettes went in for full public disclosure — and then some. Rita appeared in a spread of nude photographs for Playboy. She revealed how the Jenrettes, the most fun couple in town, had copulated on the steps of the U.S. Capitol one night. It was ultimately sad, a spectacle of self-destruction that seemed almost ceremonial, like a samorai's hara-kiri after a public shame.
In the somewhat sleazy pathology of their case, the Jenrettes forgot the mam purpose of confession for public figures: to get the truth out, to have the embarrassment aired and cleared away as soon as possible, and then to begin repairs on one's dignity. Once privacy has been invaded, confession is very often the only means to control the way that the truth emerges, to script and stage-manage it.
But as Roman priests and Viennese psychoanalysts know, confession is also good for the soul. It purifies the conscience, discharges guilt and enables new beginnings. Psychiatrist Theodor Reik explained the clinical mechanics this way: "To suffer the anxiety of confession and the act of confession, which itself is felt to be painful, is that partial gratification of the need for punishment which we claim for the confession." Most confessions are privately made — to friends, priests, bartenders, spouses, psychiatrists. When they are publicly done, the penitent must pay the price of being a temporary entertainment to the world; that is the punishment, the penance of indignity. But all confession is a drama of accounting, a settling of disturbances, a way of making peace. Sometimes, as with Billie Jean King, it implies an odd and sidelong kind of redemption and even a curious assertion of our community with one another.
—By Lance Morrow