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.