The scene is the Grill, a trendy restaurant in Beverly Hills. The players are a screenwriter, a producer, and yours truly, in the role of psychoanalyst/consultant. The screenwriter begins the discussion. “So, have you read this book Final Analysis by Jeffrey Masson?”
I offer a droll response “Yes … unfortunately.”
The producer chimes in, “You mean you don't like it?”
I retort with bracing candor, “What exactly is there to like about it?”
The screenwriter points out, “Well, there's some hilarious stuff in it. Like that scene where he tells his analyst that he doesn't like the furniture in his office, and the analyst says, ‘Fuck you! It's my office, and I'll decorate it any God damn way I want.‘”
I reply, “Yeah, I found that pretty funny too, but I seriously doubt that an entire film could revolve around that humorous exchange. Besides, there aren't any sympathetic characters in the entire book. Everyone is treated with contempt.”
The screenwriter makes another try. “But there are lots of ridiculous scenes with analysts, and audiences love to see analysts portrayed as buffoons.”
With some trepidation, I step in and defend my profession. “But that's a huge problem. You hardly ever see analysts accurately portrayed in film. I'd love to see a Hollywood film that attempts an approximation of what analysts actually do.”
The producer starts to lose his patience at this point. “Come on, now, no one likes the way they're portrayed in movies. This business is about entertainment. We're not trying to make a documentary here.”
I rise to the occasion and attempt to use what he said against him. “Okay, then from a pure entertainment perspective, the book sucks. And any film made from the book would also suck.”
The conversation went on like that until everyone had finished their decaf cappuccinos some two hours later. I'm happy to report that no further plans were made to make Final Analysis into a feature film. (Film buffs will note that a film of that name came out in 1992, directed by Phil Joannou. This Hitchcock ripoff starred Richard Gere as a sex-symbol analyst but was utterly unrelated to the Masson book.)
In retrospect, this outcome may have been my most triumphant moment as a consultant to the film industry. Since the first edition of my book Psychiatry and the Cinema (written with my brother Krin Gabbard) appeared in 1987, I have periodically functioned in a consultant role to screenwriters, actors, directors, and producers. I hesitate to admit this role in print, because the history of psychoanalysts' involvement in film is not a pretty one.
Stephen Farber and Marc Green's Hollywood on the Couch documents many of the misadventures associated with this questionable marriage. The tale is replete with boundary violations of the “whopper” variety, such as therapists serving as co-authors with their screenwriter-patients or appearing as actors in their director-patients' films and totally losing track of any therapeutic vision.
A more striking feature of psychiatric and psychoanalytic consultations to film is the overall ineffectuality of the analyst's input. More than once I have seen the credits roll and been amazed to discover that an analyst or psychiatrist had served as a technical advisor to a film with the most preposterous portrayal of psychotherapy or psychoanalysis ever recorded on celluloid. Technical advisors may be tolerated on the set, but their influence is often quite limited if their advice conflicts with the auteur's intent to entertain. I remember talking to Susan Dime-Meenan when she was executive director of the National Depressive and Manic-Depressive Association. She informed me that her group had actually consulted on the making of Mr. Jones, a 1993 bomb in which the ubiquitous Richard Gere plays a patient with bipolar affective disorder. She lamented that about the only impact she had on the end result was the selection of the books on the therapist's office shelves.
Part of me can empathize, of course, with the director's or producer's point of view. If a film were to portray an analytic session with great authenticity, 90 percent of the audience would fall soundly asleep and the other 10 percent would demand their money back. The filmmaker has no debt to reality, even though cinematic images undoubtedly bias people against the kind of work analysts do.
Moreover, in truth not all of my experiences have been thoroughly disillusioning. Amanda Silver and Rick Jaffa, co-screenwriters of the 1996 John Schlesinger film An Eye for an Eye, consulted with me about a specific aspect of the screenplay. Early in the film the Sally Field character loses her daughter as the result of a violent rape and murder. The screenwriters wanted to pick my brain about the common psychological reactions to that sort of trauma. They seemed genuinely interested in what I had to say, and they made some changes in the script that reflected some of my input. For example, they had decided that one way such a person might deal with her rage would be to engage in extremely aggressive lovemaking with her husband. The original script had a scene involving postcoital conversation, in which Ed Harris (playing the husband of the Sally Field character) said, “I feel like I just made love with Lawrence Taylor” (NFL linebacker of considerable ferocity). I suggested that the assumption behind the line, not to mention the line itself, might be questionable, and the scene was rewritten.
I have also had some positive experiences consulting with actors who have wanted to discuss psychological aspects of their characters with me. An actor will send me a screenplay and ask me for my thoughts about the psychodynamics of his character. After studying the script, I usually have one or two brainstorming sessions with the actor and try to reach some compromise between the actor's vision of the character and psychological realities. Such discussions can be stimulating and a good deal of fun. They can also get incredibly weird. I won't mention any names.
The siren song of the great silver screen has an intoxicating effect on many of us in the mental
Glen O. Gabbard, M.D., is Bessie Walker Callaway Distinguished Professor of Psychoanalysis and Education in the Karl Menninger School of Psychiatry at the Menninger Clinic. He is also the director of the Topeka Institute for Psychoanalysis, where he is a training and supervising analyst.
health professions. When my brother and I wrote Psychiatry and the Cinema, we interviewed a number of therapists who had appeared in motion pictures. Penelope Russianoff, who played the unconventional therapist of Jill Clayburgh in the 1978 Paul Mazursky film An Unmarried Woman, told us she was genuinely hurt by the bad reviews she received, even though she knew she was not a professional actress and could hardly be expected to perform at the level of the rest of the cast. Six years after the film, she could still quote the critics. She also was quite disappointed that no additional offers of film roles came her way.
Both film watching and psychoanalytic careers are related at some level to voyeuristic motives to observe, discover, and look into the workings of the human mind. Psychoanalysts probably have a good deal to offer to filmmakers as consultants, but we analysts are probably far more convinced of that than those who work in the film industry. This kind of consulting can be enjoyable and even intellectually stimulating at times, but keeping one's expectations modest is probably a good idea. Over-investment in one's influence on the end product is a sure road to disappointment.