Don Imus Was Wrecked by Success

I enjoyed Dan Dervin’s essay, “Probing the Don Imus Media Event” (pages 24-25 of the last issue), on Imus and the sudden collapse of his radio career. Dr. Dervin provided us with his usual unique perspective on this story by referencing Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, Eldridge Cleaver, and teen ghetto fashion as he talked about white efforts to “look cool” by emulating black lingo and looks. But, as a psychoanalyst watching the Imus scandal unfold, I was struck by how self-defeating and very sad it was. The comedian Dennis Miller put it best when he remarked, “Imus loves handguns … it gives him a chance to shoot himself in the foot.”

Freud wrote his famous essay entitled “Those Wrecked by Success,” where he first described the existence of what we now call the harsh superego and individual guilt. Freud described a character type who achieves greatness only to sabotage it out of shame and feelings of undeservingness.

The public record of Don Imus is there for all to see. He had a wildly popular radio and television show on three hours a day, five days a week, for thirty-one years. His show attracted presidential candidates like John McCain, journalists like Thomas Friedman, and authors like Kurt Vonnegut. They loved the show because Imus gave them an open forum listened to by millions and all the time they needed. In addition, Imus played good music and his comedy sidekicks would present very funny and creative skits each day. This was radio at its best. I can’t imagine what he was paid each year but my guess is it was well over ten million dollars.

An interesting side story on Imus is his charity work. He raised well over forty million dollars on his radiothon alone. His charity work included the Imus Kids for Cancer Camp, the Hackensack Hospital Pediatric Oncology Unit, the SIDS research fund, autism research funding, and injured GI charity work. All this philanthropy may be a clue as to his inner dynamics. One can surmise that he has extremely high moral character.

His racial slur that the girls looked like “nappy haired hos” got the immediate attention of Rev. Al Sharpton and Rev. Jesse Jackson, two very articulate, very powerful, and very angry politicians. When they got onto this story, the advertisers soon followed, and all this culminated in Steve Capos, President of NBC News, firing Imus. Capos claims that his employees demanded this of him and he had an ethical standard to uphold. Fair enough.

In its simplest form the story is this: we have an extremely talented and successful guy who relentlessly pushed the envelope in order to finally find punishment for his success. We often see this in professional golfers who achieve great success by winning a major only to disappear afterwards. This holds for Ian Baker Finch, Corey Pavin, and Ben Curtis. More recently, we see the actor Owen Wilson self-implode after reaching great heights of fame with his film career.

It was interesting to watch Imus try to explain all this by saying it was in a comedy context. On a deeper level it is all about self-sabotage and a need to undo success with shameful defeat. Notwithstanding Professor Dervin’s always brilliant analysis, I think the real issue here was the conflicted unconscious position Mr. Imus found himself trapped in. Big losing must always follow big winning if there is guilt on the inside. Too bad he didn’t have a good analyst to talk to every week; it could have saved him a fortune, to say nothing of all that heartache and shame.

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NB: Don Imus is reported to be returning to the airwaves in the morning on WABC on December 3rd. Thus his punishment is short-lived.