(Ben)Jamin' with Dr. Phil: part 2?

In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin asserts that “even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” (Illuminations 220). Benjamin goes further, pointing out that reproduction through mechanical processes also removes itself from the original and places the subsequent copies “into situations which would be out of reach for the original.” (Ibid). In the case of Dr. Phil episodes, this is particularly true. Imagine a guest sitting down and watching the show they appeared on during a repeat, a year or so later. If symptoms and psychoses have intensified, it is easy to see how the patient would feel manipulated, abandoned, and like a failure. If the condition originally complained of has improved, it is likewise easy to comprehend how a repeat could retrigger or reshape a latent disorder. This is, of course, not exactly replicated when an average viewer watches a repeat, or a first-run example of mechanical reproduction. Benjamin is adamant, however, that this is as true for a spectator as it is for a participant. It is what he calls the “aura” withering, becoming alienated, and losing its uniqueness (222). While this idea has comprehensive implications for all arts and communicative media, Benjamin is focusing on film. Just as film loses ritualistic value and the ability to interact with an audience, Dr. Phil’s program—as compared to a heretofore non-existent live theatre version of Dr. Phil—is embroiled in difficulties since Dr. Phil is psychoanalyzing and performing, not for real live people, but to a camera. The audience, as Benjamin points out, is put in the position of the critic, identifying with the unseen cameraman, seeing Dr. Phil only through his mechanical, impersonal eyes (228). While Dr. Phil claims that his show aims to help viewers at home (particularly children) as much as he tries to help guests, this is of course impossible in a true psychoanalytical sense. Dr. Phil has the most powerful and oppressive bodyguard conceivable in the camera, taking away the audience’s freedom and preventing two-way communication. Benjamin describes a consequence by positing that “the aura that envelops the actor disappears, and with it the aura of the figure he portrays.” (229). The mechanical reproduction inherent in the television industry seems to analogously extinguish the aura to the person, the real humanness, of Dr. Phil. What is left? According to Benjamin it is the “spell of the personality” and “the phony spell of a commodity.” (231). The difference between a person and a star has nothing to do with their ability to communicate artistically and everything to do with whether or not they are being filmed. Film’s salvation is that it changes the methods of participation in a way that has positive, as well as negative, effects. It can be personal in a new, mechanical way in the sense that it is perhaps better adapted than any artistic medium to “mobilize the masses.” (240). If the Dr. Phil show is unsuccessful, then, it may have less to do with the capabilities and disabilities that follow the camera, and more to do with the limits of psychoanalysis. Unless one is speaking of a mass psychosis, a public and communal therapy is useless by its very nature. Benjamin ends his essay with a rather curious epilogue. Thinking of the essay as a quarreling over semantics or an arcane argument about aesthetics is shown to be completely false. In fact, as Benjamin makes clear, what is at stakes is far more serious: fascism, modern society, and war. Benjamin (a Marxist, of course) has a simple solution: “politicizing art.” (242). Dr. Phil’s politics are about as personal and overt as is his contact with the television audience. Following Benjamin’s model, Dr. Phil’s vague and cautious political aesthetic—“children are important!” and “craziness is bad!”—is the perfect fodder for a war-mongering fascist. The only question remaining is whether the aggressive Fascist of the future is today’s Dr. Phil or the viewers of his enduring repeats.

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.

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?