When it comes to unflattering portraits of mental-health
professionals on film, Glen O. Gabbard, as they say, wrote the book.
Gabbard, a psychoanalyst and a professor of psychiatry at Baylor College of
Medicine, in Houston, is the author of “Psychiatry and the Cinema,” a study
of Hollywood’s transference issues. Gabbard’s book offers a catalogue of
pompous quacks (“Mr. Deeds Goes to Town”), swingers with Prince Valiant
hairdos (“What’s New Pussycat?”), sadistic enforcers of social conformity
(“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”), love-starved lady doctors (“The Prince
of Tides”), and serial killers who eat their patients (“Silence of the
Lambs”). “I wouldn’t say that I’m angry about it, but I sometimes feel a
little annoyed,” Gabbard said the other day. “It’s the buffoonery that gets
to me.”
Gabbard, a balding, avuncular man in his fifties, was in town for the
American Psychoanalytic Association’s Winter Meeting, at the
Waldorf-Astoria, where he moderated a symposium about the latest cinematic
assault on his profession, a comedy called “The Treatment.” The movie,
which opens in May, stars Chris Eigeman as an anxious Manhattan
private-school English teacher, and Ian Holm as his bullying and meddlesome
psychoanalyst.
The panelists included Daniel Menaker, the Random House editor and the
author of the novel on which “The Treatment” is based, and Oren Rudavsky,
its director. Menaker wrote the book after ten years in analysis. “I love
analysts—they’re the salt of the earth,” he told Gabbard. “Well, maybe the
cardamom of the earth.” Rudavsky is back on the couch after a three-year
hiatus. He optioned Menaker’s book during his first go-round, after
abandoning a plan to film actual sessions in his analyst’s office.
Gabbard opened with a joke (“I tend to start on time, because I was
toilet trained in utero, and my patients deeply resent me for it”). Then he
introduced Rudavsky, who, before screening clips from “The Treatment,”
announced that he had dedicated the film to his own analyst, Jay R.
Greenberg. “He’s probably somewhere in this hotel, but he promised that he
wouldn’t come in here,” he said.
After the clips, some of the shrinks stepped up to a microphone to offer
their thoughts. Alice Brand Bartlett said that she was moved by the film’s
“poignant depiction of neurotic suffering,” while Alan Skolnikoff
appreciated its satirical edge. He said, “I thought that was the point,
rather than any kind of veridical representation of what analysis is.”
Not everyone agreed. David Goldman, a psychiatrist, said, “The film
builds up a caricature of an analyst as someone who tries to manage and
control you using some kind of weird, altered approach.” Rhona Engels, a
psychotherapist, wondered why movies seem to offer three-dimensional
portraits of patients but not of therapists. “I think it might have
something to do with the power of what we do,” she said. “It can only be
portrayed through projection—a kind of cutting down to size.”
Gabbard said simply, “If they ever showed an actual hour of therapy, it
would be so boring that people would demand their money back.”
Afterward, Gabbard joined the panelists for dinner. At one point,
someone suggested coming up with a list of movies that portray
psychiatrists in a favorable light. Rudavsky named “Suddenly Last Summer,”
in which Montgomery Clift plays a psychiatrist who saves Elizabeth Taylor
from having a lobotomy. “Yes,” Gabbard said with a sigh. “That was from the
golden age of psychiatry in the cinema.”
“How about that Marshall Brickman comedy ‘Lovesick,’ with Dudley Moore
and Elizabeth McGovern?” Menaker said. “I thought it was quite charming.”
“True, but it’s about an analyst who sleeps with his patient,” Gabbard
said.
Gabbard’s own list included “Ordinary People,” but, he noted, “It’s the
Hollywood version of therapy, which usually involves a dramatic, cathartic
cure, brought about by a de-repressed memory of a traumatic childhood
event, followed by tears and hugging.” He also cited the 1997 film “Good
Will Hunting.” “It’s over the top, and the therapist uses methods that are
unconventional and even outrageous,” he said. “But a naïve audience member
could see it and come away with the impression that sometimes therapy
actually helps people.”
