Finally, disgraced former-Congressman Anthony Weiner will be getting the help he needs — medical assistance for his compulsive need to send the ladies pictures of his junk. According to a leaked conversation with a friend, Weiner is set to redeem himself the postmodern way: through the moral cleansing power of voluntary admittance. From the Post:

Weiner’s pal told The Post that although it took a while, the fallen former New York congressman recently finally hit rock bottom and is getting therapy for his compulsion to electronically send strange women obscene messages and photos of his body.

Up until now, Weiner “didn’t fully comprehend” how destructive his online exhibitionistic tendencies were, the friend said.

“He was totally in denial. He was saying he may be able to write a book. But to think that he’s in a position to write a book, there has to be a redemption.

“Finally, he did get it. He understood it,” the friend said. “He understood why there was no line of people waiting to hire him. “At that point he said, ‘I know I need help,'” the pal recalled.

I think that last part speaks enough to his motivations without additional commentary, but what interests me is the role “medicine” plays in the whole charade. There’s a totally bizarre confluence of discourses every time this happens (which seems to be a lot): on one hand, Weiner (or Tiger Woods, or whoever) needs moral “redemption” from his sins, on the other, he needs medical treatment for an “addiction,” which everyone knows is a disease. But besides making it a whole lot easier to prevent illness, Louis Pasteur supposedly convinced the general public of the “germ theory of disease” — the crazy idea that sickness is caused by wholly indifferent bacteria rather than being a manifestation of the infected’s flaws. “Medicalization” is the name science-studies folks give this phenomenon, whereby first illness and then just about everything else became A. Not your fault and B. Curable. Weiner and co. have medicalized his peccadilloes to a certain degree, but completely stripped of its moral element, the recovery dance can’t offer the third act he wants.