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.

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.