(Ben)Jamin' with Dr. Phil: part 1?

Today is Christmas, a holiday with strong Messianic overtones. It seems only fitting, therefore, that we celebrate with an exegesis of Walter Benjamin, the Jewish philosopher who points out that “like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power.” (“Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations, 254). Benjamin writes that “there is a secret agreement between the past generations and the present one” wherein the past asserts a claim that “cannot be settled cheaply.” (Ibid.) Benjamin’s philosophy of time is probably best expressed through his conception of “the angel of history.” (257). Benjamin’s description is worth a closer examination:

“His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.” (257-258).

In fact, we call this storm the t.v. schedule. One of the particularly interesting aspects of Benjamin’s portrayal of history is what it does to the viewer. Besides the approximate deification, the viewer is actually flummoxed. For one, the angel of history cannot see where he or she is going. If it is being blown away from Paradise with such force, it also seems that it will not be able to return, at least not any time soon. Perhaps most importantly, the angel is in a constant state of parallax and vertigo as it continually sees history building as a giant trail of self-created refuse and wreckage. This can all be easily adapted to the small scale temporal world that exists on and around television. Somewhat recent inventions and industry changes such as Tivo or DVDs of popular shows do, in some ways, alleviated the pain and chaos felt by the angel. In its most basic sense, however, watching television forces the viewer to take the position of the angel. Television cannot, of course, show the future. The viewer is placated and distracted with elaborate (often trashy) images of the past in lieu of control and awareness which must remain, if anywhere, in the spontaneous blackness and snow of dead air and lost signals. It is probably no secret that sitcoms and dramas are filmed months in advance. So are many “reality” shows. Even live sports and news events are broadcast with a standard 7 second delay. This is not to say that the television universe is entirely without order. We, the angelic viewers, know when the shows we like are usually on. We’re aided by guides and advertisements, and even within programs we are introduced to motifs, patterns, and limits. If each generation places a “weak Messianic power” in the generations that it expects to follow, we might also say that we found our television viewing habits on an überweak Messianic power. As a simple thought experiment, imagine your favorite show being cancelled, perhaps inexplicably, mid-season. Would it not cause one to mourn for that which was supposed to come while losing at least some faith in what is left? But, in television, as with all things containing an important temporal component, there are far more überweak Messianic powers at stake. With relatively little leeway, we expect the tone, format, and style of our favorite shows to continue unchanged. In short, we expected to see new—and yet oddly familiar—wreckage dumped in front of us as we travel, blindly, through time. As Dr. Phil said in yesterday’s episode: “video doesn’t lie.” However, Benjamin’s model makes one question in what way video could ever tell the truth. As he writes: “every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably” and “even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.” (255). Yet there is a very interesting added element, one which is partially unique to television, or at least modern communication and art: the repeat. While this might appear to offer a loophole, since the wreckage is returning, for a moment allowing one to see a small portion of the future, this is, in fact, not entirely the case. We will have to look backwards yet again, to Benjamin’s previous and most famous essay: “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."

Deconstructing Phil. Is Back; Believe It or Not

In the urban, industrialized northern hemisphere it is winter. The days are cloudy, and short. Darkness—both metaphorical and meteorological—prevails as final exams force the most well-intentioned students into an inescapable abyss of anxiety and incomprehension. In short, the time is perfect for reading Kafka, that fun-loving lawyer who teaches that man cannot know the Law, though the Law knows a man better than himself. Today’s episode of Dr. Phil brought 5 (later 4, when 1 quit) judgmental people into the Dr. Phil house. Unfortunately, Dr. P.’s characterization and theory about what constitutes a judgmental person is, as usual, vapificialess (which is my new portmanteau for vapid, superficial, and some other “random” word such as: useless, meaningless, senseless, or reckless). Kafka, on the other hand, provides an elaborate schema of different meanings and meta-meanings of judgment in his aptly named short story, “The Judgment” (which can be read here, though all citations come from The Complete Stories). The judgmental people in the Dr. P. house all fit into easily stereotyped categories, there was the “chauvinist,” the “anti-social,” “the bitch,” and my two favorites, a poor excuse for an “elitist” and a holier-than-thou Christian Right revivalist who is, according to the Dr. P. show, a “moralist.” Such cliché caricatures of judge-mentality do exist in Kafka’s work, as they do in P.’s. Like so many of P.’s guests, the unseen, but oft talked about friend of Georg, who lives in the distant and alien land of Russia is described as “dissatisfied with his prospects,” “embittered,” and “estranged”(77, 78). Georg, the proto-protagonist, is preoccupied with passively keeping various people in his life (his father, his friend, his fiancé, his friends) separate in easily classifiable groups under his defensive control, again similar to many of the guests. Even confined to the trite and shallow characterization put forward by P of what judgmental means, Georg’s father would take the whole bakery along with the cake. Having come to the decision that his son is a deceitful, bad person (read: actually inhuman), the father takes judgmental action. He purports to have spent years secretly corresponding with Georg’s friend telling him truths Georg was ashamed to admit to gain an advantage and, in turn, reveal these truths to Georg, screaming “till now, you’ve known only about yourself…you have been a devilish human being!” The next line is the key: “And therefore take note: I sentence you now to death by drowning!” This is interesting because it is, in effect, the most extreme statement and manifestation of Dr. P.’s conception of being judgmental: I don’t like you, I want you to die. At the same time, it shows how trivial and flawed it is. After all, no reasonable person would think, just because someone says they want you to die, you have to, or even should. There’s no judicial-political, economic, or social authority here. The father may carry familial authority, but in modern times that is hardly enough to make such a judgment binding. Except, of course, for the fact that Georg’s last name is Bendemann, German for boundman. This is one of the higher levels of judgment at play, one with deep and far ranging effects, one which, if Dr. P. has any inkling or notion of it, he’s been more preoccupied with showing that he knows how to keep a secret. This does not mean it does not exist on the Dr. P. show; like in Kafka’s work, there are deeper, more insidious examples of ideological interplay at stake in every judgment. While Kafka is quite cognizant of these deeper truths to acts of judgments, focusing about them in the story, to Dr. P. they remain only latent and subtle, if they appear at all. What he does say, though, is that being judgmental is about “get them, before they get you.” In the same show, he said “you are responsible to your own creations, you did this to yourself.” These phrases seem incongruous, if not utterly contradictory. Kafka it seems, rejects the first, or rather subsumes it beneath the second. How does “The Judgment” end? Simply put, in Georg’s suicide. But the fact that it is suicide—one killing one’s self—is very important here. The father suddenly seems to disappear. Kafka writes: “George felt himself urged from the room…he swung himself over” a bridge (87-88). This is Dr. P’s idea that “you are responsible for your own creations,” but all judgments, including those made to get someone “before they get me” are also subject to this ambivalent, Existential test. Slavoj Žižek theorizes this counter-intuitive causality quite well in his essay on another one of Kafka’s notable works, The Trial. He writes:

“The necessary structural illusion which drives people to believe that truth can be found in laws describes precisely the mechanism of transference: transference is this supposition of a Truth, of a Meaning behind the stupid, traumatic, inconsistent fact of the Law. In other words, ‘transference’ names the vicious circle of belief: the reasons why we should believe are persuasive only to those who already believe.” (The Sublime Object of Ideology, 38)

Replace Kafka’s sweeping, metaphorical idea of Law with his more specific idea of judgments, and you learn that, to follow any authority’s judgment is, in fact, only to follow one’s own judgment, the pre-existing belief in the authoritativeness. Of course this is true of the judgmental people who fit Dr. P.’s more provincial model, but, more subversively, it is true of everyone. Dr. P. equates a judgmental nature as constantly looking down at people, but one could just as easily say that listening to a judgment, no matter the source, is looking up at someone without any real justification. There seems to be one final form of judge-mentality that even Kafka does not appear to be fully conscious of—forget Dr. P. In his diary entries, Kafka writes of the one night when he wrote “The Judgment” by saying that it came out of his head “like a real birth.” (Diaries, 214). He adds that: “only I have the hand that can reach to the body itself” (Ibid.) At first glance, this seems like the way a visceral, relieved writer would boast of his work. But one needs to remember how closely the story involves not just the father and son relationship, but the importance of spawning something versus causing death, including one’s own. In addition to these ever-present motifs, the story’s famous last sentence, in its original German, carries a deep sexual, progenitive implication that it loses in translation. The “unending stream of traffic” that is going over the bridge is the societal materialization of violent ejaculation, where jouissance, where pain and pleasure, life and death, and authority and belief meet, the source and site of the ultimate judgment.

Dr. Phil Drives Me Crazy (And Drives 41 People into Trees)

This news was brought to my attention by my brother. No time for theory, but enjoy.

Dr. Phil bus crash

Will This Message Self-Deconstruct?

For the next three weeks, Deconstructing Phil. is going on a writer's strike. However, Dr. Phil is continuing on, so we hope that our patrons will bravely assume the role of thesis to Dr. Phil's antithesis by sending in guest blogs. If not, we'll be back in three weeks. Now you know what's happening; but why don't you watch the video below to see if Brecht is right that it's more fun to watch how something happens?

Murder He Wrote

Today’s episode of Dr. Phil showed that, even with the ongoing writers’ strike, fiction and humor are far from extinct on the airwaves. Yesterday’s episode focused on Wade, who was brought to the Phil by Michelle, his wife. She had recently started to suspect that her husband was a compulsive liar and, as per usual, cheating on her. The standard schema of accusations, phil plashbacks, yelling, lie detector results, crying, and excuses resulted. No big surprises, until the last 5 minutes or so, where we learned that the next episode (today’s) would reveal how Wade admits not only to a long list of affairs and marital transgressions, but also multiple rapes and murders. Apparently, after the show, when heading back to Iowa (to get their divorce) Wade told Michelle that he had vague memories of raping his ex-wife and a co-worker, as well as a time where he picked up a hitchhiker who refused to have sexual intercourse, leading him to a violent outrage, murdering and dumping the woman’s body on the side of the road. Adding to the intrigue, the audience learns of restraining orders, fruitless FBI investigations, death threats, stalkings, and suicide attempts from basically all the parties involved except Phil. While adding a certain dimension of excitement, and, perhaps most importantly, providing reason to extend the show for 2 more days, it’s also extremely unbelievable. After all, as Dr. Phil actually made clear on the first show, Wade is a compulsive liar, fibbing about little inconsequential things and distorting big, important matters. Considering Wade’s modus operandi, it seems far more likely that this new story of murder is a different, albeit perhaps more intense and perverse, outlet for his persistently compulsive lying. The ethical complications, therefore, are not so apparent. One interesting authority to consult would be St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, particularly question 110, “the vices opposed to truth.” Aquinas writes of Wade’s condition, calling it “the lie which is told ‘out of mere lust of lying and deceiving.’ This proceeds from a habit, wherefore the Philosopher [Aristotle] says (Ethic. iv, 7) that ‘the liar, when he lies from habit, delights in lying.’” (article 2). Perhaps more importantly, in terms of ethical consequences, Aquinas argues that this type of lie has its “own measure of gravity without addition or diminution.” (article 2). Aquinas believes that lies, by their very nature are sinful and bad—though some are worse than others depending on the nature of the lie, its end, and its nature as a sin. The compulsive lie is only unique in that the nature (as a lie and sin) and end can provide neither mitigation nor further condemnation. This should call attention to Aquinas’ notion that all lies are intrinsically wrong. Why does he say this? Following Aristotle, and more directly Augustine, Aquinas justifies this claim by writing: “words are naturally signs of intellectual acts, it is unnatural and undue for anyone to signify by words something that is not in his mind.” (article 3). This is a startling discovery in the modern age and is a drastic contrast with any poststructuralist idea, since the latter philosophy is founded upon the concept that words do not (and can not) truthfully express intellectual ideas in a natural way. If we take poststructuralists’ model of language and signs as accurate, while simultaneously following Aquinas’ moral code as complete and true, then we are left with no choice but to conclude that all communication is a lie. This isn’t that difficult to imagine, especially considering today’s episode of Dr. Phil, where, in just 20 minutes we learned that Wade is a serial killer, Michelle enjoys cutting herself, and Dr. Phil kept huge secrets from his loyal fan-base. At the same time, these accusations must all be accompanied by words like: “potentially,” “appear,” or “according to…” Is everyone, including Dr. Phil, a liar? If we take Aquinas’ words literally—that it is “unnatural and undue for anyone to signify by words something that is not in his mind”—then the most innocent and well-meant thought-experiment, hypothetical, or act of subjective thinking could be construed as unethical whereas an objectively false accusation, if honestly believed, is completely moral and blameless. To deconstruct Aquinas and Phil side-by-side, it seems strange that, despite the Saintly one’s definition of lying, Summa Theologica is structurally supported by unconcealed lies. Aquinas offers many articles, containing questions, followed by several short objections, then his answers to them, plus concise and exact replies to each objection. Thus, each original objection is a hypothetical strawman for burning down, seeming to fit the philosopher’s own description of a lie. In a similar way, the Dr. Phil show exhibits a deeply rooted structural lie by attempting to focus on a “real” and “serious” problem—i.e. compulsive lying—only to completely disregard a problem when a more attractive (for ratings, revenue, etc.) interpretation comes along—i.e. the compulsive liar is telling the truth about being a serial killer. If, as on the Dr. Phil show, everyone’s a liar, then the act of lying honestly might become a question of aesthetics more than ethics.

Anorexic to Dr. Phil: "Bite me"

Today’s Dr. Phil show dealt with eating disorder, primarily anorexia and bulimia. I had expected it to be a particularly telling episode, especially from the previews, which showed Phil staring down an emaciated girl with the words “you are going to die...soon!” In fact, McGraw was far more reasonable and reasoned than normal. He went out of his way several times to say “it’s not as easy as saying: start eating,” and he did make several salient points. However, if there is one part of Phil’s logic and methods that needs to be addressed, surely it would be that he claims—in an apparent contradiction—that it is a problem that stems “from within” as well as being “driven by media images [and] media icons.” McGraw did not elaborate how such a relationship between the subject’s interior psyche could be related to a larger social consciousness, but luckily Freud did precisely this in his work Civilization and Its Discontents. Freud writes that “it was discovered that a person becomes neurotic because he [or she] cannot tolerate the amount of frustration which society imposes on him [or her] in the service of its cultural ideals.” (39). Considering only this idea, one could imagine how any or all of the four guests on the show could have become anorexic or bulimic because of society’s imposed cultural ideas. However, the fact that Freud writes “cannot tolerate” clouds the situation. The standard explanation of anorexia, incorporating Freud’s vocabulary when possible, would be: the subject feels society imposing the cultural ideal of skinniness, health consciousness, and so on, causing them to try and fulfill the objective to the extreme. But that is no longer Freud’s model. To him, psychosis arises not from the wish to fanatically fulfill society’s imposed ideals, but rather from the subject’s inability or unwillingness to tolerate such ideals. It would be more in line with Freud to say that these guests are, in fact, not enthralled by the media’s glamorous portrayal of youth, beauty, and tiny figures. Instead, from the very beginning of their psychosis, they found these images and ideals to be quite disgusting and deplorable. It was exactly this desire to not tolerate, to rebel, which drove them to the extreme, just so that they could prove to themselves, to their families and friends, to Dr. Phil, and to the whole world that the ideal is an extremely dangerous and perverse one. Engrained within their psychosis is a realization that Freud already understood, but Dr. Phil and the mainstream media are understandably reluctant to make: “this useless thing which we expect civilization to value is beauty.” (45). Dr. Phil can blame Nicole Ritchie and the media which fetishizes small sizes but, as Freud understands, that is simply a confined, contemporary manifestation of the problem and not the problem itself. As he writes: “the urge for freedom…is directed against particular forms and demands of civilization or against civilization altogether.” (49). Today’s guest, then, are obsessed and drawn into the values and images of the media at the exact symbolic location of their rebellious psychosis. Specific cultural values have always, and will always, continue to change, but the individual’s great need to “defend his [or her] claim to individual liberty against the will of the group” is an innate and unstoppable force and one which, not surprisingly, Dr. Phil cannot understand or articulate.

The Third Worldwide Web

In the nearly two months and 15 entries that comprise the Deconstructing Phil. lifespan, no episode has presented such a dire need of drastic interpretation as this evening's. “Bringing Home Katherine” part one aired today (the second half set to hit the small screen tomorrow) where Dr. Phil introduced his audience to Katherine, a girl who, at 16, fell in love via myspace with Abdullah, a 20 year old Palestinian man, and procured a passport to leave the country surreptitiously. When she was then reported missing, the FBI intercepted her in Amman, but after she later turned 18, with her family unable to stop her, she “ran away” from home again to live with Abdullah and her sister called Dr. Phil for help. Dr. Phil, of course, agreeing that Katherine is in danger, blames the internet. The real culprit is Orientalism. As Edward Said wrote in his groundbreaking work Orientalism, “the Orient is not an inert fact of nature. It is not merely there, just as the Occident itself is not just there.” Instead, Said writes, such concepts, in all their geographic and cultural facets, are “man-made.” It is clear that the Orientalist picture of Palestine presented on the Dr. Phil show is one manufactured and in many ways fantastic. In fact, the dialogue was eerily similar to one of the most famous pieces of literature addressing the topic: Othello. Mary, Katherine’s sister, described her as being “under a spell,” the same way Brabanzio, Desdemona’s father, describes how his daughter was “corrupted/ By spells and medicines bought of mountebanks.” (I.iii.60-61). The family also repeatedly alleged (with no apparent factual basis) that Katherine had been brainwashed. At least Brabanzio said it with a bit more sophistication and panache when he bemoaned “O, treason of the blood!/ Fathers, from hence trust not your daughters’ minds.” (I.i.170-171). They also characterized both of Katherine’s premeditated, voluntary, and mostly unaided journeys to the middle east as “kidnappings.” This is, of course, the jaundiced and Janused voice of Iago, starting the whole tragedy with the cry of “thieves, thieves, thieves!/ Look to your house, your daughter, and your bags./ Thieves, thieves!” (I.i.79-81). The similarities are astounding, and it would be interesting to further compare Katherine’s story with that of Desdemona and the famous Moor (who, interestingly, some Shakespeare commentators read as an Arab). The main point here, though, is that the picture of the middle east presented by Katherine's family (with the help of Dr. Phil) is very much based on and promoting a fiction. It is extremely unlikely that any of the guests, or even Dr. Phil, ever visited Palestine, and certainly none were experts. The next important thing that Said tells us about Orientalism is that “the relationship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony.” (Orientalism). As Shawn [sic!], Katherine’s mother says: “I don’t know anything about Abdullah.” Such lack of knowledge is utterly unacceptable for a hegemonic figure (an American, a matriarch, a mass media product, etc.) Instead, it must be filled in—with xenophobic, racist, and jingoist notions if those are all that’s available. Katherine’s liberal international relations stance was stated quite adroitly and succinctly when she said: “I respect [Abdullah’s] culture, and he respects mine.” Though no one explicitly voiced it, the ideological position of those left in California was clearly: I don’t respect his culture (hell, I don’t even know it), but he needs to respect mine. If more evidence is needed that this is really a power struggle in every sense of the word, simply consider the fact that Katherine’s mother was outraged that at “18, according to the state of Michigan, [my daughter is] an adult.” While most people would probably see this as an entirely reasonable, acceptable, and just matter of law, Shawn was so outraged at her lack of control over her daughter that she “considered taking her passport or having her kidnapped.” Here, we can see Said’s point that “Orientalism…as such has less to do with the Orient than it does with ‘our’ world.” (Orientalism). Here Said seems very indebted to Lacanian psychoanalysis—the self being defined through the Other—when he writes, “Orientalism is premised upon exteriority, that is, on the fact that the Orientalist…makes the Orient speak.” When Katherine returned to America after her first, unsuccessful expatriation attempt, her sister Mary said “I’m glad she’s here on American soil and alive.” The Orient is where danger is located, the Occident is, by way of contrast within an artificially constructed binary, the place of safety. But in this globalized, post-September-the-11^th-of-2001 world, how far does Mary have to broaden the Other in order to make herself and the place she lives safe seem safe? Of course, her secure and harmless Occident could not include the inner city, or the American military "nuclear" family. Could it include NRA members' houses, where every room has 3 loaded guns? The first generation immigrant living next door to the vigilante Minuteman border patrol? The very idea of liminality seems to become the territory of the Orient as exteriority and “a re-presence, or a representation” become vital since there is, in fact, no interiority and “no such thing as a delivered presence” (Orientalism). When Dr. Phil says “that situation over there…is highly unstable” he was apparently talking about Palestine, but he could have just as easily been talking about dozens of “Oriental” countries from Iraq and Iran to Venezuela and Cuba. But it masks (or, in fact, redefines) a more important question: in what way is the United States “highly stable”? Every episode from the Dr. Phil canon illustrates precisely how unstable America is. In this particular case, Shawn was so worried that Abdullah and his family would “kidnap” Katherine and prevent her from filing the proper paper work to travel across the Atlantic, yet that is precisely what she had previously contemplated. Katherine’s aunt callously cried that “Katherine needed her butt whipped” and yet expressed horror that the Oriental Arab/Muslim might be abusing her. Similarly, when she complained to Dr. Phil, “in America, men don’t call women ‘bitch,’” Dr. Phil could only respond “well, I wish that was true.” In fact, this reveals it all. The essence of Orientalism, wherever it may be found, is that it expresses what Orientalists want for their Orient and (perhaps more subversively) what they would like to see in their Occident too. When Dr. Phil says, so matter-of-factly, “at 16, Katherine shocked the world” he is—as an Orientalist—the one applying the questionable shock therapy to the world, re-shaping (and not just reporting) the Orient in his own warped and equally dangerous western space. Said is insistent, though, that Orientalism is not escaped or surpassed by academics, instead Orientalism is precisely “a distribution of geopolitical awareness in aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts.” (Orientalism, see also the picture from The XXth Century Citizen's Atlas, John Bartholomew, Edinburgh, pp7). Perhaps the most important question, then, is: in this supposed critique of Dr. Phil’s Orientalism, even in breaking down his superficially Occidental world, have we really helped to define a true Orient? No, of course we can’t, nor can anyone. There isn’t one.

Dr. Phil's Text Messages

Here, for the first time, Deconstructing Phil. is in video form. Today's episode of Dr. Phil dealt heavily with the properties of language and it's subsequent interpretation as a couple getting ready for marriage started feuding and verbally fighting with the groom's mother. In order to examine some of the general structuralist, poststructuralist, and deconstructionist matters brought up in the episode, Roland Barthes, Ferdinand de Saussure, and Jacques Derrida are our guides as we consider what's so interestingly and complicatingly wrong with saying things like "her sorries are 'I'm sorry you took my words that way'" or "they're fighting before they're even related".

McGraw's Familiar Quotations

Tonight, Dr. Phil appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman, right after "stupid pet tricks." Dr. Phil is actually a fairly frequent guest on the Late Show, which is particularly surprising since, especially in the past, he has been the subject of considerable ridicule. Recently, when it comes to McGraw, Dave seems to have shifted his comedic technique from open mockery to Socratic irony. Practitioners of Socratic irony take on a faux naïveté to reveal the foolishness and ignorance of the person they question. In this subtler, yet still quite complex fashion, Dr. Phil gets introduced as "America's favorite t.v. mental health professional," a platitude which is in a way true, but also meaningless considering the subtextual, sarcastic implications that 1.) there are basically no other "t.v. mental health professionals" and 2.) Dr. Phil is barely a "mental health professional." While Socratic irony is often very funny, it can also expose things that are normally kept out of the dialogue, particularly here, as the questioner has become the questionee. Thus, when Letterman asked Dr. Phil about many issues that have been discussed previously on the Dr. Phil show, he got very different answers. On Britney Spears, to whom Dr. Phil recently devoted an entire episode (see "Dr. Phil Isn't a Freud of Anything"), the audience got insight into this prize quote: "you gotta not pay attention to her." It would be easy enough to say that this is simply an indication that the Dr. Phil we get on the Late Show is not the same Dr. Phil we get on the Dr. Phil Show. This is obviously partially true, yet it should not permit a complete contradiction, at least it usually doesn't. We allow dramatic actors, politicians, athletes, and other non-comedic public figures to appear on such humor-driven talk shows, often even making fun of themselves, and while this is often viewed as portraying a different side of the celebrities in question, they do not deny their other work. If we are to consider this advice good and actionable, it necessitates that we ignore not just Britney in the tabloids and Entertainment Tonight, but also as she is discussed on the Dr. Phil show. In this sense, Dr. Phil has come onto the Late Show to advertise and promote his own show and—through Socratic irony, his own precarious ideology, and lack of philosophic universality or commitment—has criticized and dismissed it instead. Similarly, we learned what Dr. Phil really thinks about the kids he so desperately tries to protect on his own show. All week, we've heard the broken reproductive futurist record: save the kids, do it for the kids, don't endanger the kids. What did Dr. Phil say about the kids tonight? "I would just turn the hose on them." That's right, when Letterman led McGraw down the road that leads to complaining about today's youth (with their loud music, lack of clothing, and "grinding") Dr. Phil responded by suggesting (in an act reminiscent of one of the status quo's best defenses against the civil rights movement) that we turn the hose on them. When Dave questioned him on the future, Phil replied: "Where does it go from here? There's nowhere else to go...I guess we're just going to all run around naked." We could interpret this in a number of ways. Again, it might simply be a joke that is Venn-diagrammatically distant from the true value of Dr. Phil's wisdom. But what sort of wisdom can be obfuscated simply by an appearance on the Letterman show? Freud holds up to comedy just fine; consider any Woody Allen movie or the ubiquitous penis joke. There seems to be deeper things at work here. Phil could also be refuting and depreciating his advice given in more serious surroundings, now admitting that all that kids-are-the-future-are-important talk is nonsense. It could also be an admission that, though he is, in reality, working and fighting for the children, it is to no avail, the future is grim, his work is not working (it is flawed and could never work, it isn't reaching the needy, et cetera). Most insidiously, one could also say Dr. Phil is, in fact, creating the problem himself. To my knowledge, very few people have championed the therapeutic possibilities of hosing children down. Perhaps the problem itself did not address until Dr. Phil chose to find it. Indeed, many people probably do not find these "problems" harmful in any way, including the deplorable—wait, I mean vulnerable—children committing such despicable—wait, I mean helpless—acts. It seems Dr. Phil is an unruptured personality with a split philosophy. To use Lee Edelman's binary of the sinthomosexual and the reproductive futurist (see "The Queerest Dr. Phil Yet") we could say Dr. Phil embodies both, fighting for and against the children depending on the situation. He demands neither jouissance nor an endlessly delayed realization of an impossible end, but instead seeks to continually create problems which make possible their own solutions which make possible their own problems, this is the true child he's fighting for, the child named "America's favorite t.v. mental health professional."

The Birth of Phil Studies

Today’s episode of Dr. Phil was rather uninteresting, unless, of course, you enjoy listening to former child star Danny Bonaduce recount his failed marriage and the myriad of other problems he so clearly continues to have despite being “sober.” Still, there was some theory that we could talk about. Phil made his usual reproductive futurist rant about how the important thing is the children and their lives. We get it, you’re a heterosexual—yawn. We also had the astute point by our esteemed Dr. that “there are two Danny Bonaduces—Danny Bonaduce the personality and Danny Bonaduce the real person that I know, who cares about his family and his kids.” It would be interesting to take this to the next step: people on t.v., or in any theatrical situation, are not real people. We could think of Žižek’s idea of acting “as if,” Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality, Lacan’s Borromean knot, Brecht’s alienation effect, and so much more! It will be fun, and Dr. Phil is one thing, but I’m not going to do it with Danny Bonaduce, at least not until he starts calling himself a poet or a philosopher, or something like that.

Instead, tonight we have a bit of meta-analysis to do as it has recently come to my attention that I did not, in fact, create the field of Phil studies. I had hoped that, like Freud or Marx, I was working as a “founder of discursivity” (Foucault, What is an Author?) Therefore, it was quite a surprise to find that, over two years ago, a pair of professors from St. Lawrence University had written a good-sized scholarly article on Dr. Phil in The Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, a web-based periodical from the Department of Religious Studies and Anthropology at The University of Saskatchewan. Professor Egan and Papson’s full article, “You Either Get It or You Don't”: Conversion Experiences and The Dr. Phil Show,” is available here: http://www.usask.ca/relst/jrpc/art10-drphil.html.
I encourage you to at least read the abstract. Egan and Papson are observant enough to realize that there is no religious content in the Dr. Phil show, but do assert that the episodes follow the structural pattern and the narrative of a religious conversion (particularly of the televangelist ilk) with a confession and testimonial followed by conversion and transformation. The authors conclude that “the televised presentation of reoccurring conversions functions to produce a sense of moral authority, self-empowerment, and an imagined community [and] that the boundary between the sacred and the secular blur in this highly commodified television spectacle.” Now, I have a friend who says he likes theory, but thinks a lot of theorists argue too much with each other. I find these two positions difficult to reconcile, as it should be the duty of any decent theorist to envisage critiques and theories that can hold up against the entire world to reinvent and reinvigorate its intellectual understandings and possibilities. The idea, the theory itself, might stand out in (or against) reality, but it does not reach the level of discourse until it is acknowledged, reproved, and re-proved. Egan and Papson are already, of course, part of the discourse within Religious studies. They’ve cited authorities within the field and it’s periphery (at least, not being an expert on theology, I assume that’s what they’ve done). They’ve been reviewed to reach publication, and have likely been cited or read as a result. But this is all as religion experts, or, perhaps in the amorphous field of cultural criticism. When it comes to Phil studies, however, it is safe to assume that this is—as Dr. Phil would say—their first rodeo. We can remedy that. Firstly, I think Egan and Papson are wise to bring in things like Neilson ratings and advertising. Economics and politics are central organs in Phil studies. Egan and Papson also sagaciously pick up on the fact that the Dr. Phil we see on television is actually a staged personification. The analysis has only one glaring deficit in that Egan and Papson do not seem to pick up on the fact that there is a Phil canon. Instead, they simply observe two shows, “Addiction” and “The Weight Loss Challenge.” This ignores the fact that Dr. Phil often brings back guests, revisits segments, issues, or mini-series like the Dr. Phil house and obviously expects his viewers to watch regularly, visit his website, and read his books. More importantly, it seems to skew their findings slightly. While both the episodes they chronicled might have taken on the mode and style of a conversion, there have also been many that might more aptly be described as promoting reversion (to better times, etc.), aversion (when something just needs to stop), or diversion (for preventing that which hasn’t actually even begun to occur). From outside the actual mechanism of the Dr. Phil Show, the possibilities are even more numerous. As we’ve tried to demonstrate, the show can also be seen as the location of perversion and subversion. Even limiting oneself to the domain of theology, it might be just as fitting to describe the arc of most shows as an exorcism or, in some cases, an excommunication. The fact is, the Dr. Phil canon is large and often contradictory. This is also a part of Egan and Papson’s largest mistake. While they seem to see an insidious side to Dr. Phil because he attempts to become the high priest, carving out his own commodified religion, mixing the secular and the sacred, there is an equally dark side. Failing to promote the scriptures, the pillars of psychology—the great psalmists like Freud, Jung, etc. and their seminal works—is tantamount to heresy. If Nietzsche and Marx are correct in their assertions that “God is dead” and “religion is the opium of the people,” then we must conclude that—if Dr. Phil is attempting to rule over a conversion to a half secularized, half sacred televangical reality—he is continuing to feed his guests’ various addictions, refusing help, and instead embracing philosophical death for all parties involved (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right").

The Myth of Sisyphil

Tonight’s episode of Dr. Phil brought us back to an episode that first aired 3 or 4 weeks ago. Using the unique medium of the Dr. Phlashback we can refamiliarize ourselves with the episode: “Ken’s got enough money for fancy cars, cruises, and air hockey machines and I’m on welfare” “Keri makes the kids afraid to come visit and lies to the police” “He hits them” “She’s on drugs” “Well, I’m just gonna sit back and let ya’ll work this out.” Apparently Dr. Phil’s strategy didn’t work the first time, but this most recent encounter was equally hostile and ineffective. Dr. Phil summoned all his reproductive futurist gusto and teleological bourgeois might to reminded Ken and Keri that he wanted to “restore order” and “come down on the side of the kids.” Numerous times the bickering between Ken and Keri (with wife and boyfriend respectively) got to the point that Dr. Phil just stopped. Resuming, he always called their interactions “infantile” (which we’ve already discussed elsewhere in some detail) and “absurd.” This should immediately bring to mind Camus’s famous concept of the Absurd, especially since it is best expressed in the essay “The Myth of Sisyphus,” where he uses the example of the mythical Greek who, as punishment for his wily and deceitful feats, had to push a huge bolder up a hill daily, to watch it roll back down and start over again. Here, there seems to be a little of Sisyphus in syndication. The question is, then, does Dr. Phil’s interpretation of the absurd have anything to do with Camus’s Absurd, and is there, indeed, anything absurd or Absurd about the situation at hand? First, it should be noted, that to Dr. Phil and many laypeople, absurdity is a bad thing, equated strongly with misery, unfairness, and weirdness. To Camus, though, Absurdity is a very normal, ethical, and happy idea. He famously writes: “one must imagine Sisyphus happy” because “happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd discovery. It happens as well that the felling of the absurd springs from happiness.” The core elements of Sisyphus’s (and Camus’s) Absurdity do not seem absurd when viewed through the lens of Dr. Phil and those like him because they do not speak of, or with, the same Absurdity. To Camus, coming face to face with the Absurd is becoming “convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human” whereas to Dr. Phil it might be something like: ceasing to be human (and instead infants, animals, monsters, et cetera). The absurd hero looks at the world and, especially at the height of its absurdity, thinks: “all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems…neither sterile nor futile.” To Dr. Phil (who is not, like Sisyphus, the “wisest and most prudent of mortals) to think of life without order, end, and meaning is a tragic punishment. Thus, we might even say that Dr. Phil does not meet the first criterion of the Absurd hero, that of consciousness. We can say of Sisyphus, but not Dr. Phil: he “knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent.” For Dr. Phil—and by extension Ken, Keri, and the whole gang—the Absurd epiphany has not been reached and cannot be built on until there is the realization that objective success is hopeless. The only hope, for Sisyphus and Phil alike, is not to put the rock down, but rather to keep going while consciously embracing, not maligning, the Absurdity inherent within the system. To try and “fix it” is worse than going against the natural order of things or defying the gods because it is to miss out on the possibility that “the lucidity that was to constitute…torture at the same time crowns…victory.” To Camus, life and its Absurdities are worth living again and again. For Dr. Phil, we must consider the possibility that his show is, in a very real way, the locus of many suicides, perhaps chiefly his own.

The Phil in Pedophile

Today we were bestowed with another generous helping of Dr. Phil Now, where the singular psychologist gave us his 9 ½ cents worth on an important issue: pedophilia. Examining the case of Chester Stiles—a recently apprehended fugitive accused of raping (and video recording) a 3 year old girl—we heard from a variety of guests including the victim’s mother, her lawyer, a relevant district attorney, and the son of the woman who may have unintentionally facilitated the contact. What is so outrageous about this outrageous current event? The rape? Most certainly not. Rape is obviously a horrendous act, but unfortunately it is far too prevalent an occurrence to elicit such shock and condemnation by itself. It would be safe to assume that, instead, the answer lies in the 3 year old victim’s youth. It matters more that the victim was a child than that there was a lack of consent. This socially promulgated act of fetishization in the form of reproductive futurism has been addressed in previous essays, and it will likely be discussed in further detail again. In this situation, however, it seems completely inadequate to give up here. There was a strange subtext to today’s episode that seemed to suggest that—on an atavistic level of psychological relics and symptoms—we were not actually discussing the righteousness of pedophilia. Philosophically, we have only one appropriate source to turn to, Socrates, the “father” of moral and political philosophy. Socrates was also accused, tried, and eventually executed for “corrupt[ing] the youth” and “not believ[ing] in the gods of the state” (Plato’s Apologia, trans. Benjamin Jowett). Pederasty was a very real (and generally accepted) part of Socrates’s Greece, so it is an equally real (though often bowdlerized) possibility that the great philosopher was actually being accused of a crime similar to the one outlined here by McGraw^*. It is curious then that Socrates’s defense does not address such a possibility, nor does it respond to Plato’s (more Platonic) version of an ethical pederastic relationship or even the abstract idea of corruption in terms of Athenian youth. Instead, Socrates uses the important platform to defend wisdom and philosophy and, by association, one could easily interpret this as Dr. Phil’s true target. On the first take, it seems absurd to conflate pedophilia with philosophy and the death of one of the most celebrated philosophers. Yet even on the show pedophiles, and Mr. Stiles, were not characterized as the usual lot of ruffians and hoodlums. Instead, the various guests and Dr. Phil described the classic pedophile as “calculated and cunning,” “charming individuals,” “and intellectualizers.” It seems like a great many of our finest thinkers then, our philosophers par excellence, all fit the profile of the pedophile. Dr. Phil, in his aversion to pedophilia, echoes exactly the Athenian prosecutors who warn the public: “guard and [do] not allow yourselves to be deceived by the force of [Socrates’s] eloquence” (Apologia). Socrates’s defense, his articulation of his own wisdom is simple though considerably counterintuitive. Unlike most men (and I see no need to exclude Dr. Phil) who claim to be wise without really knowing themselves or the world, as Socrates says: “I know but little of the world [and] I do not suppose that I know” (Ibid). A constant, deep, and serious inquiry is therefore required, a philosophical delving into the nature of existence, ethics, society, the self, et cetera. Dr. Phil, on the other hand, inheriting the role of the prosecutor, is content to rest on “oration duly ornamented with words and phrases” in lieu of seeking out serious questions of truth. In his possibly well-intentioned efforts to eliminate pedophilia, Dr. Phil has also, through his sophistry-laden methodology and motivations, also placed himself in the position of prosecuting philosophers (regardless of whether their “corrupt[ion] of the youth” is ultimately for good or evil, physical or psychic) (Ibid). Socrates’s prophecy that the Athenian public (who voted to convict and punish him to death) and prosecutors will be reviled through history did seem to come true. Dr. Phil reveals another way the prosecutor injures himself more than the accused in the event that truth is not actually on trial: if no one is beyond suspicion and those most interested in getting to know and manipulate children are pedophiles, we might easily conclude that—in a philosophic sense—there is something of a pedophile in Dr. Phil and a part of Dr. Phil in every pedophile.


^*It seems necessary, before the argument continues any further, to point out a few facts that are quite pertinent, though perhaps not essential: 1.) Socrates’ trial is not, of course, retold by Socrates himself. In fact, Socrates has left no works extant (leading many to conclude that he didn’t even exist) and this particular reading comes from Plato’s Apologia. 2.) While the word "apologia" looks and sounds like the etymologically similar “apology” it means something somewhat different: a defense or explanation of one’s beliefs.

The Phil-Phunction

Today’s episode, “The O.J. Simpson Book Battle,” discussed the circumstances and controversies involved in the recently published book If I Did It. The show featured the work’s ghostwriter and the Goldman family as guests. Most peculiarly, it presented Dr. Phil in a novel role, that of the literary critic, as he promised to give the audience his “reading” of the book. When Pablo Fenjves explained that the book was proposed, agreed to, and created in the context of a “hypothetical confession,” Dr. Phil seemed unable to comprehend such an abstract idea and even noted: “hypothetical and confession, I don’t see how those two words go together.” In the realm of critical theory, however, there are, in fact, many ways of interpreting this. One of the more interesting pieces to discuss such issues is Michel Foucault’s essay “What is an Author?” In this piece, Foucault makes a great many comments that help to elucidate problems in today’s Dr. Phil. It is suggested that “today’s writing has freed itself from the dimension of expression,” that “the work, which once had the duty of providing immortality, now possesses the right to kill, to be it’s author’s murder” and that “we must locate the space left empty by the author’s disappearance.” In fact, Foucault focuses not on the author, but rather the author-function. The author-function is more than the realization of the act of writing—even a famous writer’s signed checks, grocery lists, and tic-tac-toe games are generally not authored. Instead “the author-function is…characteristic of the mode of existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourses within a society.” The authorship doesn’t simply describe who wrote something, but how, when, and under what circumstances. As Foucault writes, “literary anonymity is not tolerable,” perhaps—as this episode shows—because readers and their societal discourses need someone to punish. Nonetheless, the author-function is a construction and the specifics are “only a projection…of the operations that we force texts to undergo, the connections that we make, the traits that we establish as pertinent, the continuities that we recognize, or the exclusions that we practice.” If it is so mind-blowingly incredible that a hypothetical statement could also be a confessional one, it is only because we (not he) find it so impossible and because we are actually operating within a self-structured discourse which aims at separating the two concepts both hermetically and hermeneutically. Such a perspective is only as interpretively necessary as we make it; in fact, one could easily turn around and say that the idea of a hypothetical confession is at the root of all fiction. If it was conclusively discovered that Shakespeare was a murderer (like so many of his most realistically written characters in works of stunning detail) would that in any way affect his work? Objectively, it doesn’t, only when viewed through the author-function does it matter in the least whether any writer is a real murderer or simply imagines. Foucault also points out that the author-function demands a “certain unity of writing—all differences have to be resolved.” Dr. Phil and the gang are clearly fulfilling that end of the function, but it also glazes over a more serious issue. After all, while it might have been from interviews, it was not actually O.J. Simpson who wrote the book. No, it was Fenjves. The discourses are not in a position to evaluate Fenjves, however, either as a murderer or an author. Therefore, he is pushed aside radically, left to talk about what is not in the book, explaining his interactions with the true author. In this sense it seems that what Dr. Phil really can’t comprehend is that “all discourses endowed with the author-function do possess this plurality of self.” The “I” that is talking in one sentence is never the same exact “I” that is in the next, nor does the pronoun mean the same thing as the viewer jumps through passages, between chapters, or across books or genres. In this way, there is little connection between the speaker, the writer, and the author. In short, Dr. Phil’s show provides an answer to Foucault’s final question that is very different from the one given by the author himself. The question is: “what difference does it make who is speaking?” Foucault leaves it up to the reader, whereas Phil is not shy about letting his audience know that it matters a great deal, especially when he’s the one speaking.

Dr. Phil Now or Never

Today we were treated to another dose of “Dr. Phil Now!” where Dr. Philistine investigated the very current phenomenon of school shootings. Obviously, we shouldn’t belittle the trauma felt by victims of any violence, nor should we condone brutal, inhumane behavior. At the same time, it might be just as wrong to refrain from belittling Dr. Phil, allowing his brutal, inhumane brand of psychology to persist without criticism. This issue touches upon many political ramifications such as gun control, education policy, and the rights and freedoms afforded to individuals (particularly young people). The most interesting fallacy related to school shootings, though, is not overtly political, but rather historical. Dr. Phil repeats an oft reported error so familiar to media reports, expert explications, and uneasy community meetings: these acts of violence are new and anomalous. This is an irrefutable—and perhaps deliberate—distortion of the historical record. A Columbine survivor and guest added: “one thing got me into college, I thought it didn’t happen there.” Again, this is the historical record being annihilated. Even between the Columbine shooting and the Virginia Tech massacre (which apparently re-opened this victim’s eyes) there were at least 9 shootings on college campuses resulting in 19 deaths and many more injuries. In fact, there are dozens more similar acts of violence going back to at least 1936 where a student at Lehigh University killed himself and his English professor after demanded that his grade be changed. In 1966, for instance, a meticulously planned shooting by a deranged, well-armed shooter took place atop the Tower at the University of Texas which killed 16 and wounded more than 30 more. In fact, a reasonable (though necessarily morbid) examination of the relevant history shows that almost all the common assumptions are wrong. Some of the most deadly school related killings in modern times don’t even take place in America, but rather as part of broader conflicts in places like Bratunac in Yugoslavia, Stalino in Ukraine, Hue in Vietnam, and Beslen in Russia. As these events also illustrate, such attacks are also often not the result of, as Dr. Phil muses, “heartbroken teenage boys” and “loners” but rather adults (or, more ominously by groups of adults) with deep felt social, political, and personal grudges. Even in America, the deadliest school-related killing was not perpetrated by a depressed, socially awkward adolescent at a modern, suburban campus. Instead, it was at a rural Bath, Michigan schoolhouse in the year 1927 when a 55 year old school board treasurer and farmer killed 45 students and teachers, injuring 58 more. Disgruntled over his foreclosed farm, difficult family situation, and other townspeople who ignored his fight for lower taxes, the killer used dynamite and combinations of shrapnel to destroy his own home and set off explosions in three locations at the township’s only school. The purpose of recounting these gruesome events is not to glorify them or even compare body counts as part of a dismal contest, but instead to point out that they are not completely new phenomena, nor do they follow (at least with any great regularity) any of the characteristics so meticulously mapped out and emphasized by Dr. Phil. This is quite different from Santayana’s famous claim that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” (George Santayana Reason in Common Sense). It is difficult to see how anything can be repeated when it is forgotten, covered up, or unknown to begin with. There are many conceptions of history. Hegel and Marx posit dialectics where various stages and interactions are thought to lead to progress and eventually a teleological perfection. Others, like Walter Benjamin, read history as a persistent accumulation of chaos and catastrophe, with progress coming in the form of the backward-flung angel hurling through the post-lapsarian state (Illuminations). In this sense, it doesn’t really matter whether our age is the pinnacle of human existence or the nadir, or even if our time is not substantially different from anything that has already occurred. What is important is that virtually all reputable sciences, philosophies, and psychological movements (predicated on the idea that past events affect subsequent consciousness) must take account of past events and consider a broader historical context. Otherwise, as Dr. Phil demonstrates, one’s historical perspective mirrors that dangerous relationship where the subject becomes an illogical and introverted, social outsider obsessed with destruction.

The Queerest Dr. Phil Yet

“Queerness can never define an identity; it can only ever disturb one.” -Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive

Boy, oh boy—it’s episodes like today’s that make me happy I write a blog that applies post-structural theory to the Dr. Phil Show. After introducing us to Kim and Cory, a teenage couple in a tumultuous marriage with two neglected children, Dr. Phil went on a maniacal crusade. The mission was not to promote family planning or contraceptives, nor was it even to sound the clarion call of abstinence, but instead Dr. Phil pleaded with parents of teens and the teens themselves, begging them to listen as he shouted: you’re not really in love! By the way, this isn’t his first rodeo. As usual, there’s a large body of literature we might wish to consult in order to deconstruct Phil’s sophism. Since it is fairly inconceivable that any teenage lover would listen to this episode without a fit of Romantic giggles, it seems only fair that we pick a theorist who—despite his or her value—would likewise be ignored by Phil. That brings us to queer theorist Lee Edelman and his recent book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. But Edelman’s queerness isn’t exactly the queerness that so rarely shows up on the Dr. Phil show. Rather, it’s the queerness that is always somehow present in the Dr. Phil show. As Edelman writes, queerness “names the side of those not ‘fighting for the children,’ the side outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism” (5). We see this nearly every episode when Dr. Phil says something to his guests like “Your [insert destructive behavior here] would be fine, except you have kids!” or, more subtly, when he makes comments like “it’s time for you guys to grow up and be adults!” Thus, Dr. Phil sets himself up in the most favorable ideological position; he’s the one fighting for the children. His guests are always the queer ones—man, oh man do they need help—those queer folks who aren’t acting like adults or taking proper care of the kids, their future, their Other-to-come. Surely it is not a coincidence that virtually every episode is in some way an incarnation of a plagued marriage or perverted parent-child relationship. That’s the queerness—the lack of reproductive futurism—that must be mended. At least that’s what Dr. Phil—indeed all politics and society—would have us believe. Edelman sees it differently. To disregard for a moment the specific, non-theoretical children with diaper-rashes and growling stomachs, we can begin to see what Edelman terms the “sinthomosexual”(33). Building off of the Lacanian concept of the sinthome, Edelman writes that sinthomosexuals assert themselves “against futurity [and] against its propagation, insofar as it would designate an impasse in the passage to the future and, by doing so, would pass beyond, pass through, the saving fantasy futurity denotes” (Ibid). Instead, sinthomosexuals are “insisting on access to jouissance in place of access to sense.” (37). In this radical juxtaposition, there is now something wrong with Dr. Phil. He’s the one continuously restaging his “dream of eventual self-realization by endlessly reconstructing, in the mirror of desire, what [he takes] to be reality itself” (79). Of course you’re miserable now, it’s about your children…What? They’re miserable too? Well, then it’s about their children…We need not applaud the guests for mistreating their children, but perhaps they should be congratulated for standing up against the tyranical “belief in a final signifier” and their attempts to undermine “the promise of futurity” (37, 35). Kim and Cory from this “troubled teen love” episode are indeed unfit in many ways. They aren’t great examples of the sinthomosexuals who triumphantly live for the jouissance not the unreachable desire of futurity. Of course, Dr. Phil is also not a perfect and blameless reproductive futurist as he steps in with his Texas justice to spank the “children raising children.” The admission that children themselves—traditionally non-sexual and without agency—can be corrupted and destined to an unhappy future is something of a precarious step for Dr. Phil. While certain aspects of mainstream psychology focus on how the curable adult subject was influenced as a child (with the events and impacts reappearing through symptoms as an adult) Dr. Phil has never seemed to agree. At one point Dr. Phil suggested that he should have been involved all along (even before Kim and Cory had their kids) in order to insure a happy childhood and future. Dr. Phil is not promoting sinthomosexuality or the toned down and mitigated version of reproductive futurism inherent in most psychoanalytic thought—instead he’s demanding to be involved in every conception of the future to come personally (whether it’s queer or not) from the very childish beginning, to the equally childish future that will not end.

Dr. Phil Isn't A Freud of Anything

Today’s episode was a “Dr. Phil Now” episode. Apparently, “Dr. Phil Now” shows are where Dr. McGraw completely (as opposed to just mostly) ignores clinical psychology—instead musing for 40 minutes about a “current event.” Today’s “current event” was the controversial, politically charged, and culturally influential demise of Britney Spears, and her subsequent loss of her children’s custody. Now—at a psychoanalytical low point that perhaps rivals Britney’s own personal nadir—it might be the best time to ask: is Dr. Phil being a doctor? It is well-known that Dr. McGraw is not a psychiatrist, a medical doctor, but his ardent followers are quick to point out that he is, in fact, a trained, accredited, and practicing psychologist, with a Ph.D. in psychology. It is important, then, to ask: is Dr. Phil being a Doctor of Philosophy? If we turn to the intellectual often cited as the progenitor of psychology, Freud, the answer is clearly and emphatically in the negative. One of the works where Freud best outlines psychoanalysis is in the aptly named, and posthumously published, An Outline of Psycho-Analysis. In the chapter entitled “The Technique of Psycho-Analysis” Freud writes, from the perspective of the analyst, that “with the neurotics…we make our pact: complete candour [sic] on one side and strict discretion on the other.” This is at complete odds with McGraw’s approach—emanating, as it does, from network television—which is inherently indiscrete. Furthermore, even if McGraw is using “candour,” it is both futile (since Britney is probably at a discothèque and not watching the show) and unfounded. Freud is adamant that proper psychoanalytical methodology must revolve around self-observation, personal meetings, and one-on-one discussion with the subject (Ibid.). Today’s show included former bodyguards, a bevy of lawyers, an Entertainment Tonight correspondent, and even paparazzi tycoons, but no Spears. This, alone, invalidates the process of one involving psychoanalysis in the strict, conventional sense. McGraw is also failing on another important count. As Freud writes:

“We avoid telling [the patient] at once things that we have often discovered at an early stage, and we avoid telling [the patient] the whole of what we think we have discovered…as a rule we put off telling [the patient] of a construction or explanation till [the patient him or herself] has so nearly arrived at it that only a single step remains to be taken, though that step is in fact the decisive synthesis” (Ibid).

Obviously, this model cannot occur here. We have only the thesis (or perhaps the antithesis) unable to properly meet as they share no (conscious) dialectic. Freud continues by saying that if psychoanalysts “proceeded in another way” they would either “have no effect or…provoke a violent outbreak of resistance” (Ibid). In broader terms, it is perhaps the warped and grotesquely psychoanalytic tendencies of media outlets which has put Britney in this situation to begin with. Had we (the fans, the media, the public) not wanted to know so much about her, get inside her (head), or force our own broken syntheses—perhaps the circumstances would be quite different. Lastly, Freud writes that one of the greatest advantages helping along the psychoanalytic process is that “rationality” and “intellectual interest” to overcome suffering will be awakened through “the theories and revelations of psycho-analysis” (Ibid). By rejecting such established theories and practices, Dr. Phil might be closing off his best opportunity to help (including his own professed work). If hope to be the defenders of theory and psychoanalysis, must we be the ones to then say: “Leave Britney alone, Dr. Phil”? As Freud notes, the patient will always see the analyst not as a helper, but as “the return, the reincarnation, of some important figure out of…the past” (Ibid). We can’t really blame her (or any Dr. Phil show viewer for that matter) for associating McGraw less with Freud than with the paparazzi, the incestuous stage parent, or the poorly-matched husband (think synthesis). Freud also writes that “real sexual relations between patients and analysts are out of the question” and that affection of preference should be only sparingly granted. This might just be Dr. Phil’s most totem-less and taboo shortcoming if we consider the necessarily (albeit veiled) sexualization of Spears during the broadcast as she becomes the unattainable subject of desire, the faulty feminine idol which must be reworked, the focus of an incestuously productive dialectic, and the paradigm of an unacceptable patient-analyst relationship in virtually every other way imaginable. Here, the real neurotic resisting, perverting, and manipulating the analysis and discourse might be the one with a safe job, a comfortable marriage, and unchallenged control over his kids.

What in Phil's Name is Going on Here?

Today’s episode of Dr. Phil ushered us into the always unpleasant and fractured confines of the Dr. Phil house, where we met a second pair of newlyweds in dire need of man campification. The Dr. Phil canon is quite large, and it is not immediately clear if he has ever associated himself with Jungian psychology—or any school for that matter. Today, though, a quick look at Jung’s God-image archetype seems fitting. The problem pair today was mostly Jack and Danielle. Jack was characterized by the entire house (and an unusually surly Dr. Phil) as a “rude” and uncooperative “know-it-all” who is “constantly manipulating” and undermining his wife, the rest of the house’s progress, and—worst of all—the show. Jack, on the other hand, claims that the others are taking advantage of him, lying to him, leaving him utterly confused. Making matters worse, Danielle’s various psychic problems contribute and exaggerate the situation. At first, this may seem like a time to talk about group psychology and the collective unconscious. But, in many ways, it is unclear whether man camp constitutes a true collective. Anyway, we have darker waters to walk: the archetype of the God-image. Jung speaks of “an archaic God-image that is infinitely far from the conscious idea of God” (The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconsciousness). The individual enlightened by a conscious awareness of the God-image sees, within his own mental and spiritual state, the manifestations of a Godliness that differs significantly from the removed, inhuman, and arcane God of many established theologies. Jung writes that “what one could almost call a systematic blindness is simply he effect of the prejudice that God is outside man” (Psychology and Religion). What is this “important and influential archetype” doing, resurrected here on the Dr. Phil show (Ibid.)? For most of the guests, very little. Only Jack seems to have any conscious comprehension of his own power—even if it is, all too often, manifested malevolently. Danielle is the prime example of an individual with no sense of his or her own mental and spiritual agency or value. She overtly projects not only her scapegoat desires onto others (mainly her husband), but she also imbues external forces with all the power to control her reality, destiny, and perceptions. Even if her husband immediately stopped being abusive, where would she turn? Not into herself. Deep within her lies a terrible secrets that “not even [her] parents know” and which would “ruin [her] life if it got out.” This secret seems to be preventing what Jung might call the necessary development of a interior God-image for a healthy psychic state. More insidiously, it seems that the very lack of this God-image is what causes the secret to be so powerful and threatening. It has no power over Jack—or Dr. Phil, the God-image extraordinaire. He tells Danielle that, for Jack, it’s “all about controlling you.” That’s a serious no-no, since Dr. Phil wants to control everyone in his house, with Godlike omnipotence and authority. The end of the show is ambiguous in that it is unclear whether Dr. Phil has actually killed Jack’s God-imagined gusto and ego-centricism. This reveals a very important fact about the God-image. Individuals with a well developed God-image archetype may have great control over themselves, and in some cases considerable powers over those who still hold fast to the exterior image of God, but they have little binding authority over others who feel the God-image within themselves. To take it to the degree of blasphemy, one might think that Christ could ordain himself easily, were he the only one around at the time who saw Godliness within himself. When two people feel so ordained, however, as Phil and Jack both do, of course a battle between good and evil will ensue. Jung’s answer is very different from Phil’s though. In Jung’s words “it is the prime task of all education (of adults) to convey the archetype of the God-image, or its emanations and effects, to the conscious mind” whereas in Dr. Phil’s words “you need to listen to my advice” and stop being such a manipulative little know-it-all when “you’re not the smartest guy in the room…not by a long shot” (The Religious and Psychological Problems of Alchemy). Is that evil, good, or just God-image talking?

We "Other Genians"

The premise of today’s episode of Dr. Phil, if it is to be believed, is that last Friday’s episode was so controversial, so action packed, so mind-blowingly amazing, that it had to be extended to a second show. Thus we are again entertained (it is, after all, a daytime television show) by the racially motivated violence and bitter division among the inhabitants of the small Louisiana town of Gena. In honor of Louisiana’s French roots, I suggest we take shelter with the esteemed French post-structuralist, Michel Foucault. Let us consider a few thoughts from his essay “We ‘Other Victorians’”:

[I]f repression has indeed been the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age, it stands to reason that we will not be able to free ourselves from it except at a considerable cost: nothing less than a transgression of laws, a lifting of prohibitions, an irruption of speech, a reinstating of pleasure within reality, and a whole new economy in the mechanisms of power will be required. For the least glimmer of truth is conditioned by politics (5).

This passage, from Foucault’s book The History of Sexuality does, of course, focus on sexuality, though it seems just as applicable to our study of race. The story of the Gena six and perhaps all racial conflict is the story of a corrupted and uneven politics of language. As evidence, we see that members of Gena’s African-American community refer to the hanging of the 3 nooses on the schoolyard tree as a “terrible hate crime” and the beating of the white student as “a school fight” while the white citizens represented on the Dr. Philippe show had the exact opposite view of the magnitude of each event. Systemically, there is no resort, of course, otherwise Dr. Phillippe would not need to be talking to these people and their would have been fair and equitable treatment for all parties. More importantly, though, there’s also no easy remedy in the philosophical discourse. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy’s entry for “race” is shorter than its entry for “comedy.” Tying and hanging a noose is surely less insidious (though more overt) than the real injustice: there’s no statute to prosecute the act under. It is obvious, further disturbing the situation, that the problem is not with Gena, but rather the entire culture. Indeed, the power behind society seems to, quite literally, quarantine and segregate such problems to the geographically remote “Other” which is no longer quantifiably associated—except that it is everywhere within it. Perhaps there is something latently teleological and dialectical about any binary—male and female, modern and postmodern, black and white—which does not only allows, but leads to the power struggle over linguistics and knowledge. Even by looking forward and claiming that compromises can be reached is only a matter of affirming the repression (The History of Sexuality 7). It is not enough to be weary of politics, the system, or society, one must also take a critical eye to the language and knowledge controlled under the hegemonic dominance of the aforementioned institutions. To watch Dr. Philippe is to actively take part in racism; then again, to not watch Dr. Philippe is also to engage actively in racism. In a Foucauldian universe, there is perhaps more benefit to all sitting down and admitting that we are each alike and united in our socially embedded, inescapable racism.

That's not so Thanatos, Daddy

“Hobo Daddy,” tonight’s episode of Dr. Phil focused entirely on the story of Kayla, and her Father Jerry, who left when she was a young child to live life as a homeless hobo, floating up and down the Mississippi River. We also learned how Jerry had treated his son, and Kayla’s older brother, like a friend, partying and drinking with him when he was only 14 or 15. Later, when Jerry had begun his itinerant life, Micah became embroiled in drug problems, committing suicide and effectively abandoning his own family. Kayla and her mother both blamed Jerry for Micah’s problems. With such a confused, envious daughter and a wild, norm-defying father, the Oedipus complex might be a good place to start. On the other hand, we might also want to consider theories like Lacan’s jouissance or Name of the Father, in light of Jerry’s perpetual, rambling journey and Kayla’s apparent dependence on a paternal image to allow signification and prevent psychosis. It is implied that the show is meant to be told from the Kayla’s perspective (already an incestuous, taboo turn for a traditionally objective science) and yet, quite often, Jerry comes across as the hero. He thinks of himself as “a modern day Huck Finn,” appears as the protagonist in a documentary about his life as a hobo, and appears on the show as a genuinely naïve, well-meaning, foreigner. One way to theorize across the teleological and ontological river that seems to be dividing the father and daughter, without unduly privileging one over the other—as Dr. Phil had great trouble doing, first chastising Jerry and sympathizing with Kayla, then adopting the opposite view—would be to consider the relationship as that between Eros and Thanatos. First developed as a psychoanalytic concept by Freud, the idea is that human nature is in constant conflict between the drive for life and the drive for death, Eros and Thanatos respectively. Eros, the drive for life involves repetitive, compulsory (and, perhaps counter-intuitively, often discontented) compulsions for life, sex, art, and wholeness. Thanatos, conversely, is characterized by the drive to repeat unpleasant events from one’s past, to cause destruction, to revert to an earlier state, and to seek death. In seeking death, however, the drive is really seeking an end to chaos and diverse sensations in favor of finality and the cessation of inordinate pain. For the most part, Jerry seemed to personify Eros, living the Romantic life on the river, drinking, constantly reminding people to live their life, emotionally lucid, and giving birth not only to Kayla and Micah, but also a film. Kayla seems more obsessed with the drive toward death. She constantly relives not only Micah’s death, but all the unhappy moments of her life. It appeared to be a compulsory need for destruction which caused her to angrily shout out things like “I’m fine—this is about Micah!” “I could never abandon [my own] kids!” and “you’re not my father!” From the death drive’s point of view, Kayla is fine, unable to abandon her kids, and fatherless. Not because she’s a better person, but because she’s the dead one. If not reliving her past memories as the ghost of her three-year-old self, she’s projecting herself onto the dead brother. This binary is in no way frozen, or complete, however, but this seems to be an important issue, if not the implicit subterranean cause, of the entire model. There is, of course, a perspective where Jerry is the one seeking death (via alcohol, drugs, and danger) while Kayla seeks life. It is this struggle which causes the conflict between the two instincts, and between the two main guests on tonight’s show. It also helps to explain why the usually rigid and confident Dr. Phil had trouble picking sides. Ultimately, this is relationship between life and death drive is also an important concern or contributing factor in topics as various as Jung’s (significantly different) conception of the motherly archetype of Eros or Lacan’s idea of jouissance. Similarly, this concept might be revealing when applied to the reasoning and reasoners behind the energetic hero-worshiping of (read as: “long live”) Dr. Phil and those who wish he’d just shut up, or die.

The (wo)Man Camp Which Is Not One

On today’s episode, “The Dr. Phil House: Man Camp Newlyweds, Part 2,” we were introduced to 3 troubled, recently married, couples as they enter the Orwellian Dr. Phil House. Though it was advertised and continually referred to during the show as “Man Camp”—which seems to suggest that it’s the men who are the delinquents needing to be trained—most of the attention, including criticism, was actually given to the three women. This leads me to believe that the most appropriate resource in an interpretation would be Luce Irigaray’s essay This Sex Which is Not One. Irigaray exposes many key ideas, starting with the observation: “Female sexuality has always been theorized within masculine parameters.” Already, this might help to explain why an episode largely devoted to the problems of women could retain the title of “Man Camp.” Irigaray continues by pointing out that “women and her pleasure are not mentioned…the penis is the only recognized sex organ of any worth.” Though critical of Freud, Irigaray seems to hold onto the general notion that sexuality and libidinal desires are at the core of all human interaction and psychology. Women’s genitals relate to their use of language and on neither level can they communicate with man’s desires because their logic and sex are both omnipresent and non-existent. Dr. Phil seems to embody this model perfectly. He orders the husbands and wives to be separated, and lets the men into the house first. Not only are the sexes (or we might more accurately say genders) not aloud to communicate, but they aren’t even coeval or ontologically present. One need not deny that the women—particularly the alcoholic Karla who the episode revolves around—have problems. There should be a degree of suspicion, though, that instead of offering concrete, systematic alcohol abuse treatment, the phallic Phil takes a great deal of time to expose and humiliate Karla for having an equally phallic bottle of vodka hidden in her purse. Even when he gives advice that could be viewed as more constructive, he seems unable to communicate with Karla as a women, exactly as Irigaray hypothesized. Dr. Phil claims that she’s “out of control.” Women don’t talk; they “whine.” Irigaray writes that “the vagina is a flaw” and, at times, Karla’s womanhood seems to be a problem that is as serious, or more problematic, than her drinking. When Dr. Phil and Karla’s father eventually shift their gaze to John, the husband, the only criticism is that he has anger issues and “a man who would hit a woman is a poor excuse for a man.” Though this chastisement is apparently meant to criticize John, instead it is saying he is a poor man (i.e. a woman?) and that the problem is not hitting people, but rather women. In this sense, too, the woman—not the man’s violence to overcome the communication gap and find material substance—is the root of the problem. Karla, it seems, is not being helped at all. In fact, as Irigaray writes, she is “more or less [a] complacent facilitator for the working out of man’s fantasies.” We learn what her husband, Dr. Phil, her father, her neighbors, and the other guests feel about her, but she remains one who is “indefinitely other in herself” with “no ‘proper’ name.” The great mistakes and abuses that Irigaray (a psychoanalyst who Dr. Phil apparently hasn’t read) warns about have become true. John, the husband, may be at fault for masochistically choking Karla to control her actions, but Dr. Phil does the same when he tries to “trap women into giving an exact definition of what they mean…mak[ing] them repeat (themselves) so the meaning will be clear.” Dr. Phil can put women in his house and observe and reconstruct their every hidden movement, but when he watches their lives go by in home videos, he still refers to himself as “an outsider.” If Irigaray is right, this means that, no matter how the existing order is toyed with, history will simply have to repeat herself without being understood.