As I turned the pages of Hollywood on the Couch, I experienced a multitude of reactions. Carefully sublimated voyeuristic tendencies came frequently to the surface as I was made privy to lurid gossip about Los Angeles analysts and their celebrity patients. Periodically, I would recoil in horror, saying to myself, How could he do that to a patient? or Did these colleagues have no sense whatsoever of professional boundaries? At other times I responded with a more forgiving attitude: Oh, well, those were the early days of analysis, before we had developed standards of professional conduct. I also noted a tendency to distance myself—I would never do that!—from some of the more egregious examples of exploitation and dual relationships with patients. This occurred particularly when the analyst in question had trained, as I had, at the Menninger Clinic. As my free-floating responsiveness continued to shift, I noted a more charitable stance creeping into my thinking: I can understand how the siren song of Hollywood glamour might be irresistible to analysts who were still finding themselves professionally. I would probably be tempted, too.
One reaction was particularly striking. The more I read, the more I wanted to isolate the events described in the book by regarding them as the outgrowth of the peculiar culture surrounding Tinseltown and the narcissistic lure of the silver screen. However, as I continued to reflect on my reactions, I recognized that they were actually quite similar to my thoughts and feelings as I read the recently released Freud/Jones and Freud/Ferenczi correspondence: Jones is paying a former patient blackmail money to keep her from embroiling him in a sex scandal; Ferenczi is head over heels in love with a young woman he is analyzing, who just happens to be the daughter of his mistress (whom he also analyzed), so he sends her to Freud to get the professor's opinion about what he should do.
What's going on here? Why can't we analysts behave ourselves? I know, I know. These were psychoanalytic pioneers trying to define the limits of technique and the ethical standards of practice. The only problem with that excuse is that we know that disturbing boundary violations are to be found today, in one form or another, in every institute and society. We are more sophisticated today in terms of our knowledge of the impact of boundary transgressions and are certainly more likely to respond with appropriate measures when we learn of a colleague who is out of control. However, I suspect that Hollywood on the Couch confronts us with a fundamental narcissistic vulnerability inherent in the work of psychoanalysts.
Farber and Green suggest that movie stars and analysts have in common the experience of being idealized and admired while feeling that the idealization is not in fact deserved. While regarded by others as a bit superhuman, the two groups are all too aware of their human frailties. Analysts, then, not unlike movie actors, may struggle with a yearning to be known as they really are, rather than serving as a repository for the transference fantasies displaced and projected onto them. While most analysts, of course, do not indulge in the kind of horrific and boundariless shenanigans described in this book, we would be guilty of scapegoating were we to view such temptations as residing only in colleagues.
How many of us can say we are immune to the fantasy that a certain luster is conferred upon us when we treat extremely wealthy or famous patients? Although we do not talk about it openly, there are certain patients for whom we seem always to have room in our schedules. And who among us has not been tempted, at one time or another, to gossip to other analysts about particularly juicy material we have heard from the couch?
The authors have done some painstaking research to unearth a kind of oral history of the parallel evolution of the movie industry and West Coast psychoanalysis. At times, because of their apparent delight in finding evidence of psychoanalytic scandals, related to the film industry or not, they stray from their central topic. Although Farber and Green do not hold psychoanalysis in high regard, an objective reader could understand how their research might lead them to their low opinion of our profession. To be sure, some of our colleagues are quoted in the book decrying the outrageous instances of countertransference acting out, but no one comes off looking particularly good. The authors do not hesitate to name names, and they do not restrict themselves to analysts who are deceased. Some solace may perhaps be taken from the fact that they also trash nonanalytic therapists, Werner Erhard, and other New Age gurus.
In the course of the book, Farber and Green take a number of interesting detours, some having little to do with ethical concerns. An absorbing account is provided of Lee Strasberg's appropriation of psychoanalytic ideas to train students at the Actors Studio. The authors also discuss writer-director Nicholas Meyer's view of the parallels between the analyst/patient dyad and the film editor/director dyad, a discussion I found stimulating and provocative.
The book's intended audience is not entirely clear. Psychoanalysts may find it titillating, but they will also find it highly disconcerting. Movie buffs may find it fascinating. The general reader may not give a damn. Having our dirty laundry aired in public is not particularly pleasant, but there are painful lessons to be learned from this book that we ignore at our peril.