American Imago: (Vol. 12)

Wilmer, Harry. A Psychiatrist on Broadway.  American Imago. Summer, 1955.  12:  157.

Today the drama uses the psychiatrist as a scapegoat. He is rarely permitted to function as a diagnostician or therapist. This scapegoat use is not reserved for psychiatrists alone. They are assigned unattractive roles. Eighteen celebrated plays are mentioned in this connection; three have been voted New York Drama Critics Circle Awards. Three are among all time hits. Four have played to full houses simultaneously. Of the many shows only Lady in the Dark and Home of the Brave give sympathetic delineations of the psychiatrist at work. The contents of the plays are examined. In three Pulitzer prize plays (The Shrike, Harvey, and A Streetcar Named Desire), one is asked not to look at mental disease: in Harvey to laugh at it, in Streetcar to whisk it out of sight, in The Shrike to ignore the fact of mental disease and pity the dilemma of a “sane” man. One can understand the Cocktail Party as a psychiatric play only if one begins by assuming that this sophisticated drama is not about psychiatry at all but is a deeply religious story given us as a first-rate comedy of manners. It would be indubitably far more realistic and probably healthier for society—with over half the hospital beds occupied by mental patients—if the psychiatrist were not used dramatically to foster the illusion that there is no such thing as mental illness.

Skinner, John. Censorship in Films and Dreams.  American Imago. Fall, 1955.  12:  223.

Motion pictures are modern substitutes for the myths and fairy tales of earlier times, for films are often adaptations of older stories which reassert timeless unconscious themes. For the price of admission, the poor man may enter the palace and temporarily deny his earth-bound existence, one of the original functions of the motion picture in America. In two films described there is a repressed expression of sexuality and aggression, the two emotions most frequently forbidden by parental