In Treatment: Doctor Paul Weston—Psychotherapist or Cinetherapist?

Be-Tipul, the basis for HBO's In Treatment series, debuted on Israeli television in 2005. Conceived by producer/director Hagai Lei and writer Ori Sivan, its format was novel: On four successive days, Tel Aviv psychologist Dr. Reuven Dagan met with four private patients; same patient, same weekday; and on the fifth with Gita, his mentor, supervisor, and sometime therapist. Dr Dagan's wife, adolescent children, and various client-related characters made cameo appearances. But at the heart of each episode was always the session itself.

Prior to Be-Tipul, an entire hour of psychotherapy had never been shown on big or small screens. It seemed a received truth of the film industry that no viewer would want to endure actual sessions, for most devolve around what Virginia Woolf called the “cotton-wool of everyday life”—with little drama or penetrating insight. Besides, who would tolerate such work a day banality being lensed predominantly in head shots?

Before Be-Tipul, screen psychotherapy consisted of Tinseltown's notions of treatment's juicy bits—shocking revelations about the traumatic past; earthshaking insights; seismic intrapsychic changes; pyrotechnic confrontations between patient and healer, and so forth. Potential viewer ennui was also regularly staved off by making the therapist race out of his office to rescue a client from some desperate circumstance. In John Huston's Freud, the founding father himself shouted profound insights at an Anna O character from the bottom of a railway bridge, to prevent her fatal swan dive.

When I lectured at the Jerusalem Cinematique in the late seventies, private psychotherapy was not as available in metropolitan Israel as it was in the United States. A typical urbane New Yorker or Angelino would gab about couch time at the drop of a martini. But psychoanalytic treatment, even when available, was viewed by many Israelis as whinging self-indulgence, unworthy of the Sabra's true grit.