Some people have theorized that Eliot Spitzer’s career-ending interest in prostitutes was about the thrill.

But according to several prominent psychologists, neuroscientists and political science professors, the soon to be ex-governor’s transgressions may have been simply about sex.

Howard Lavine, a professor of political science at SUNY-Stony Brook and trained psychologist, said the easiest explanation may be the most apt.
“He wants sex, like all men,” Lavine said. “And men in positions of power have greater access to sex.”

Lavine theorized that Spitzer’s 24-hour, exhausting daily schedule could have led him to seek out less socially acceptable means to satisfy his cravings.
“This is an efficient way for a guy who probably doesn’t have a great deal of downtime to satisfy a particularly strong need,” he said.

Sex may be an obvious answer for many seeking insight into Spitzer’s bewildering habits. A less obvious underpinning may be an addiction to adrenaline, said Mark Goulston, a California-based clinical psychologist and neuroscientist who said he has treated numerous powerful people with self-destructive tendencies.  
 
“Here he was, the Defender of Right,” Goulston said. “He was taking down all the corporate people. But he didn’t have the same traction in that regard as a governor as he did as this crime fighter.”

Spitzer rocky first year as governor, which left him with few allies and a low approval rating, may have left him asking, “What’s going to cause me to get my adrenaline back?” Goulston postulated.

“Doing something that’s more daring tends to increase adrenaline,” he said. “The more forbidden it is, the more daring.”

Goulston, who noted he could not completely know what the former governor was thinking without making a clinical diagnosis through his own examination, did offer an additional theory as to Spitzer’s actions, based in his gender.

“Men’s left and right brains are less well connected than women’s,” he said. “The fiber connection between them, called corpus callusum, is thicker in women.”

Could the thinness of Spitzer’s corpus callusum, causing the left and right-side of the governor’s brain to occasionally act independently of one another, have ultimately led to one of the most scandalous, shocking events in New York political history?

Again, Goulston said, without putting Spitzer through a CAT-scan machine, or without at least laying him out on a therapist couch, the public may never know.

From the neurological to the Freudian, explanations into Spitzer’s behavior are many. His childhood as the son of a hard-scrabbled immigrant-turned-wealthy real estate mogul could have led to his reckless disregard for his own actions.

The Spitzer family dinner table was once described by a childhood friend as a “Darwinian” experience. His father, Bernard Spitzer, whose wealth is estimated at around $500 million and who was found to have improperly bankrolled his son’s 1998 campaign for attorney general, would preside over hyper-competitive dinnertime debates, according to a profile from last summer.

One friend observed that the elder Spitzer demanded his offspring simply “compete, achieve and observe,” according to the piece which appeared in New York magazine.

Goulston said that immigrant parents have what can be described as a “fierce determination on steroids” that can lead their children stumbling, professionally and personally, later in life.

“Often that can trigger a certain agitation inside their children,” Goulston said, “and probably make them more prone to making mistakes.” 

Spitzer’s life of power and privilege could have factored into his precipitous fall as well, said Stanley Renshon, coordinator of the Interdisciplinary Program in the Psychology of Social and Political behavior at the CUNY Graduate Center.

“He was a brash, arrogant young man who became a brash, arrogant middle-aged man,” Renshon said. “He essentially threw it away because he couldn’t stifle either his impulses or his sense that he was above and beyond ordinary rules.”

While giving in to the temptation of sex and glamour may be an occupational hazard for some politicians, Renshon cautioned against assuming the former governor’s enormous gaffe was a symptom of life in the executive mansion.

“Some people succumb to the temptation and a great many others understandably do not,” he said. “I don’t think you can say, ‘Well gee, the man has a lot going on and therefore he has to hire a prostitute.’”

From Princeton to Harvard to the Manhattan district attorney’s office to the attorney general’s office to the governor’s mansion, Spitzer’s rise to prominence may have fed a growing sense of entitlement and infallibility, Renshon said. A sense that, in the end, unraveled everything he worked to achieve.

“The sense of entitlement is one of the key ways people have of derailing rationality,” Renshon said. “They know better but they literally can’t help themselves because they come to feel that they shouldn’t have to help themselves.”

But for millions of New Yorkers left staring at the headlines and wondering how the man who promised to clean up Albany now stands disgraced, Spitzer’s psychological motivations may never be known.

Kevin Williams, the social-personality program director at the University of Albany, said the reasons behind Spitzer’s actions may fall anywhere in between a host of possibilities.

“We rush to say there’s some pathology here and it has something to do with the politician,” Williams said. “Realize it could be something as mundane as a habit or compulsion, or it could be something that comes with the position. Whether that’s hubris or the perception of vulnerability that comes from being a strong political figure, I don’t know.”