Movie Quote of the Day (Robert Benchley, As a Psychoanalyst Futilely Interacting With a Patient)

Psychoanalyst [played by Robert Benchley]: “Ah, you think both your father and mother were normal?”

Patient [played by John Butler]: “How should I know? They looked all right to me!”

Psychoanalyst: “Was either one of them ever psychoanalyzed?”

Patient: “No, of course not.”

Psychoanalyst: “Just how would you describe your phobia?”

Patient: “My what?”

Psychoanalyst: “Your phobia—this fear that you seem to have—uh, what it is you're afraid of.”

Patient: “Oh, I seem to be afraid of falling all the time, falling off things.”

Psychoanalyst: “You're afraid of falling off high places.”

Patient: “Huh? Uh, no—off of low places.”

Psychoanalyst: “Would you please explain that a little more fully?”

Patient: “Well, whenever I get on anything low like a milking stool or a suitcase—you know, [motioning toward his knee] about that high—I'm just afraid I’ll fall off, that's all.”

Psychoanalyst: “Well, it's a clear case of gluctophobia. Have you ever actually fallen off a milking stool or a suitcase?”

Patient: “Oh, sure—all the time.”

Psychoanalyst: “Very interesting, very interesting. When did you first notice this?”

Patient: “When I first fell off.”— Mental Poise (1938), film short written by American humorist and film actor Robert Benchley (1889-1945) and directed by Roy Rowland

TV Quote of the Day (‘The Sopranos,’ on Carmela’s Relationship with Her ‘Good Man’ Tony)

Carmela Soprano [played by Edie Falco, pictures]: “He's a good man. He's a good father.”
 
Dr. Krakower [played by Sully Boyar]: “You tell me he's a depressed criminal, prone to anger, serially unfaithful. Is that your definition of a good man?... You must trust your initial impulse and consider leaving him. You'll never be able to feel good about yourself. You'll never be able to quell the feelings of guilt and shame that you talked about, so long as you're his accomplice.”
 
Carmela: “You're wrong about the accomplice part, though.”
 
Dr. Krakower: “You sure?”
 
Carmela: “All I did was make sure he's got clean clothes in his closet and dinner on his table.”
 
Dr. Krakower: “So ‘enable’ would be a more accurate job description for what you do than ‘accomplice.’ My apologies... Take only the children—what's left of them - and go.”
 
Carmela: “My priest said I should work with him, help him to become a better man.”
 
Dr. Krakower: “How's that going?”— The Sopranos, Season 3, Episode 7, “Second Opinion,” original air date Apr. 8, 2001, teleplay by Lawrence Konner, directed by Timothy Van Patten
 
I have not yet seen The Many Saints of Newark and am not sure when I will. But it is hard for me to imagine the prequel to The Sopranos matching the original in quality. The above dialogue, in its emotional anguish and clear-headed moral insight, illustrates why.
 
The aging Dr. Krakower is one of the few mental-health professionals who recognize early on that it is not possible—certainly not at this stage—to “work with” Tony. 

Carmela is right in only the most limited sense: her husband is capable of love, both towards herself and their children. But that only proves that he is human, not that he can be changed.
 
Dispensing with the jargon of the latest edition of The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Dr. Krakower speaks in old-fashioned terms about guilt, shame, and, without explicitly using the words, “fidelity,” “responsibility” and “complicity.”  
 
He does not say what viewers increasingly recognize as the series goes on: that, for all her anger at her husband, Carmela will not make the irrevocable decision to leave her husband because, with her beautiful house and the implicit power he gives her to harm others to cross her, she benefits materially from her association with him.

"Blood money," the phrase that the psychiatrist uses to explain that advantage—as well as his own refusal to accept her money from this session—inverts the label used by the faith Carmela cites as her thin fig-leaf for sticking with Tony.

 
There are no monsters as frightening as those that exist in our reality. This Halloween weekend, with geysers of blood spurting on TV sets and across screens, it is worth bearing in mind that Tony Soprano and his kind walk among us.
 
They might not have been concocted from the lab of a mad scientist, but—through whatever combination of genetics, culture or personality experience—they have become sociopaths, with enormous potential to spread their infection throughout society. (To see the characteristics of this type and how Tony fits it, turn to Alex Li San's 2020 post from Medium, “Are You a Psychopath?”)

In fact, Tony’s longtime therapist, Dr. Jennifer Melfi, finally breaks with him when she realizes he not only fits the definition of “sociopath” but also that his very sessions with her have—to borrow Krakower’s term—“enabled” her client.

 
As a mobster, Tony can wield power unavailable to Dracula, Frankenstein or the Wolf Man: he can direct the resources of a criminal enterprise as far-reaching and populated as any business to affect how people work and even whether they live. But his status only makes him the ultimate example of a particular form of sickness.
 
Consider that description by Dr. Krakower: “depressed criminal, prone to anger, serially unfaithful.” That describes a brand of toxic masculinity found far more often than just in the netherworld of organized crime. It is also shorthand for the domestic abusers in every socioeconomic niche in American culture.

Quote of the Day (F. Scott Fitzgerald, on the Consequences of Not Thinking for Yourself)

“Either you think—or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.”— American novelist and short-story writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), Tender is the Night (1934)

I came upon this quote accidentally, but with a thrill of re-discovery. A quotation from an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, much like a lyric from a Stephen Sondheim musical, may convey one quality in isolation—wittiness, say, or gracefulness—and quite another in its original context, where layers of irony and reverberations against the larger work matter.

So it happens with this passage late in Tender is the Night. By themselves, this sentence might simply read like the author’s general warning to the reader. But within the context of the novel—the devolution of a love story, amid what Fitzgerald called, as the title of one of his short stories, “emotional bankruptcy” —it is the interior monologue of a sexual-abuse victim and mental-health patient moving toward autonomy. Yet that personal freedom comes at the expense of a husband whose energy and skills atrophy as he cares for his wife’s psychological needs.

As a child, Nicole Warren was molested by her father Devereaux Warren, a rich industrialist. The family makes it possible for Dick Diver, a scholarship student in college, to own his own clinic, facilitating, despite his intention to stay financially independent, his ability to wed Nicole.

Over a decade, a transfer of vitality takes place, with Nicole growing stronger and Dick more fragile. Following Dick’s affair with a Hollywood starlet that the Divers met on the Riviera and alcoholism increasingly consuming him, Nicole is ready to move the marriage further toward its dissolution, as she contemplates her own affair.

The verbs that Nicole summons—“discipline,” “pervert,” “sterilize” and “civilize”—were part and parcel of the growing interest in psychiatry that many Americans (including Fitzgerald) were developing in the Twenties and Thirties. 

“Pervert” signals sexual corruption—not just Nicole’s father but also, it grows on the reader gradually, Dick, whose interest in young teenage girls—starting with his patient Nicole, then proceeding in turn to actress Rosemary Hoyt, a patient at his Swiss clinic, and, in the novel’s conclusion, a young woman he seduces in upstate New York--becomes more and more obvious and dismaying.

“Discipline” implies punishment intended to correct misbehavior and instill adherence to rules of order. But that is not the case with Devereaux Warren, who had hoped that he could make Nicole yield to his wanton impulses, not to curb hers.

This passage takes on added meaning because of its relationship to Fitzgerald’s life. To the extent that he could enter into a feminine consciousness at all, it was due in no small part to his heavy use of his wife Zelda’s thoughts expressed through her journal and letters.

But it was not simply a matter of appropriating her phrases that Fitzgerald was up to. Just as Nicole was trying to carve a life apart from Dick, Zelda was trying to do so professionally from Scott—first disastrously through ballet dancing, then (equally so, in terms of her relationship with Scott) as a writer, then at last, fleetingly, as a painter, the medium in which she was neither too old to begin nor in direct competition with her husband.

Nicole is about to leave behind the two father figures who have directed her life to date—not just Devereaux Warren but also Dick Diver. Dick had assumed the paternalistic role that Mr. Warren forfeited as soon as he exploited Nicole. But safeguarding her health has become all too entangled with his occupation, as indicated by two verbs in the above paragraph, “sterilize” and “civilize.”

Nicole’s molestation requires Dick to somehow clean her psychic wounds—an effort rendered difficult, even exhausting, because of her periodic breakdowns. Moreover, Dr. Diver would have to recognize this as a problem that the new “science” of psychoanalysis was only discovering, as indicated by Sigmund Freud major title of the time, Civilization and Its Discontents.

But Dick’s stewardship has come at the price of repressing her natural strength. For as long as he is viewed as sober and responsible, Nicole must accede to his wishes.

But a drunken spree leading to Dick’s arrest and beating by Italian police upends the couple’s parent-child relationship. Nicole’s multiple resentments over the years—over yielding to his wishes and, more recently, over his affair with Rosemary—now lead her to embark on an affair with the aviator Tommy Barban (whose name strongly suggests “barbarian,” an emblem of the natural state that Dick can no longer prevent her from reaching toward).

Tender is the Night does not have the soaring magic of The Great Gatsby. But it has so many subtle and graceful passages such as today’s quote that it repays periodic rereading.

Quote of the Day (Comic Wil Shriner, on Having ‘No Perception of Time’)

"(I told my shrink) I had no perception of time. He said, 'Your three hours are up.'”—Actor-comedian-game-show host Wil Shriner, quoted in Duncan Strauss, “O.C.Comedy Review: Will the Real Wil Please Stand Up?”, Los Angeles Times, October 26, 1989

Quote of the Day (W.H. Auden, on Sigmund Freud)

“Of course they called on God, but he went his way

down among the lost people like Dante, down

     to the stinking fosse where the injured

   lead the ugly life of the rejected,

and showed us what evil is, not, as we thought,

deeds that must be punished, but our lack of faith,

     our dishonest mood of denial,

   the concupiscence of the oppressor.”— W. H. Auden, “In Memory of Sigmund Freud,” from Another Time (1940)

The death of Sigmund Freud in London occurred 75 years ago this week against the dark background of what he had called Civilization and Its Discontents: a war breaking out in Europe that would unleash the darkest impulses that human beings were capable of. It also came as a time of particular anguish for the pioneer of psychoanalysis: having left his beloved Vienna only when the Nazis who had thuggishly absorbed his country began to burn his books, he had been living in exile in London, suffering as mightily now in mind as much as in body.

Frequently, researchers will find on the Web articles that say that Freud died of cancer. This leaves out half of what happened—the more important part, even. To say that Freud was suffering from cancer doesn’t convey half of the horror he endured. As far back as 1923, he had been diagnosed with malignant oral epithelioma. The problem was that Freud could never bear to give up his cigars, which he thought made him more creative. By 1939, he was reduced to using prostheses to talk and eat, enduring repeated primitive X-rays and radium therapy, not to mention the post-op complications from 30 medical procedures.

No matter what one’s feelings about assisted suicide, it is difficult to accept the irony of a man who tried to help his patients cope with their psychic pain now battered by remorseless pain of his own—until, in a last stab of control of his life, Freud requested that his physician give him 21 milligrams of morphine. The request, fulfilled, ended his life.

The death of Freud also provided the occasion for another magnificent work, written in what might have been his annus mirabilus, by W.H. Auden. In 1939, a year of profound political and personal dislocation, Auden was inspired to write several of the poems that would be on the short list of his finest works: “September 1, 1939,” “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” “To an Unknown Citizen,” and this.

For most of the prior two decades, Auden had substituted Freudian psychology and sociology for the High Anglican faith in which he had been raised. By the end of the “low, dishonest decade” of the 1930s, he was questioning whether these were sufficient for understanding a suddenly darker world. (There is a hint of this in his elegy for Freud, with the line, “Only Hate was happy,” and there seems an uncanny premonition about the Final Solution in the phrase “covering the garden with ashes.”

The following year, Auden had returned to his former religious practice.

Yet, a dozen years after his return to religion, Auden had not so much rejected Freudianism as subordinated. In a 1952 New Republic essay, he posited that, even “if every one of his theories should turn out to be false, Freud would still tower up as the genius who perceived that psychological events are not natural events but historical and that, therefore, psychology, as distinct from neurology, must be based on the pre-suppositions and methodology, not of the biologist but of the historian.”

Extraordinarily, in a way that even the man Auden called “The Master” might not have anticipated, Auden laid out the case for Freud as a figure of moral agency: “In the long run, however, the welcome given to psychoanalysis by the public is based on a sound intuition that it stands for treating everyone as a unique and morally responsible person, not as a keyboard--it speaks of the narcissism of the Ego, but it believes in the existence of that Ego and its capacity to recognize its own limitations--and that in these days is a great deal.”

Quote of the Day (Irving Kristol on Religion, Psychoanalysis, and Mental Health)

“Psychoanalysis is unlike traditional medicine in that nature does not so readily supply us with a working definition of the psychically ‘normal.’ Our definition of physical normality (‘health’) is not something we have strenuously to imagine or blindly to postulate, and there are obvious and sharp limits to possible disagreement; it is simply given to us because we are what we are. But psychoanalysis is in a more ambiguous position. Its definition of mental health has to be in good measure ‘thought up,’ and it must be done by men whose ideas are influenced by their lives and times. Psychoanalysis is always open to the accusation that its criteria of ‘neurosis’ and ‘mental health’ and ‘adjustment’ have a cultural bias, and are influenced by political ideologies, national prejudices, and personal whims. To take the accusation in its most general form: any psychoanalytical approach which, out of diplomatic cordiality toward religion, renounces its claim to an objective knowledge of human nature or to a lasting, true insight into the fundamental constitution of existence, must admit that it is historically and socially conditioned. And once there is no objectively true human nature which is taken as the norm, there is no possibility of general agreement on what it means to be ‘sick’ and what it means to be ‘cured.’ We can then have Communist analysts, Nazi analysts, democratic analysts, anarchist analysts, all with irreconcilable criteria of mental health.”—Irving Kristol, “God and the Psychoanalysts: Can Freud and Religion Be Reconciled?”, Commentary, November 1949

This Day in Scientific History (Freud Gives 1st American Lecture)

September 7, 1909—Speaking extemporaneously in German, tossing unexpected one-liners into the mix, Sigmund Freud delivered the first of five lectures on his revolutionary method for treating mental illness—psychoanalysis—in a country that embraced his pioneering work far more quickly than Europe ever did, but which he could never bring himself to like.

In late August, Freud and disciples Carl Jung and Sandor Ferenczi had disembarked from the George Washington before traveling to Clark University in Worcester, Mass., where the Austrian physician was set to speak on five consecutive days on “The Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis.”

The European group had been invited by Clark president G. Stanley Hall, who, in observance of the institution’s 20th anniversary of becoming the second graduate school in the U.S., had scheduled a mind-boggling agenda of conferences featuring renowned speakers in Clark’s major areas of study: mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, child welfare, and international relations.

The picture accompanying this post captures several of the participants. In the front row, from left to right, are Freud, Hall and Jung; in the back row are Abraham A. Brill, one of the earliest psychoanalysts; Ernest Jones, the biographer whom Brenda Maddox would term “Freud’s Wizard” for his role in disseminating the master's ideas in the Anglosphere; and Ferenczi.

After twenty years of patient work, Freud’s theories had still not caught fire to anywhere near the extent that he wanted. The prior year, the “First International Congress of Psychoanalysis” had been held in Salzburg.

Now, you’d think that a new psychological theory heavily reliant on interpreting sexual matters (you can almost see the delighted male faces in attendance: It’s all about sex), coupled with the chance to soak up the sounds of the city that nurtured the likes of Mozart and Schubert, would have brought everyone running to this “First International Conference.” But only 40 people showed up—an okay turnout, but, all things considered, still disappointing.

That’s part of the reason why Freud’s eyes popped when, the prior December, he received the invitation from Hall. To have him speak, the university would award him an honorary degree—the only official honor of this kind that Freud received throughout his life.

The honorary degree didn’t end up being the only inducement the university would offer to lure him over:

* Freud’s speaking honorarium was increased from $400 to $750;

* Hall promoted Freud as the star attraction of the conference; and,

* The school issued, at Freud’s request, a last-minute speaking invitation to Jung as well.

Leon Hoffman’s New York Times op-ed article last week, “Freud’s Adirondack Vacation,” notes one of the interesting oddities of the conference. Despite an hour alone together, the Viennese physician failed to win over pioneering American psychologist-philosopher William James to his ideas on the interpretation of dreams and the power of the unconscious (“They can’t fail to throw light on human nature,” James wrote, “but I confess that he made on me personally the impression of a man obsessed with fixed ideas.”)

The person that Freud did impress—perhaps more crucially, given that James would be dead within a year anyway and would therefore have little time to propagate the Austrian's ideas—was James Jackson Putnam, a professor of neurology at Harvard. Putnam invited Freud, Jung and Ferenczi to his family camp in the Adirondacks, where, amid the wonders of nature, the American and the Austrian became friends.

Within two years, Putnam would become the first president of the American Psychoanalytic Association, a post from which he proselytized for Freud’s idea that mental illness was not simply a result of “degeneration” of the brain, but that the unconscious could powerfully influence the body.

Freud could not have been more pleased by the reception of his work in the United States, writing:

“In Europe I felt as though I were despised; but over there I found myself received by the foremost men as an equal. As I stepped onto the platform at Worcester to deliver my Five Lectures upon Psychoanalysis it seemed like the realization of some incredible day-dream: psychoanalysis was no longer a product of delusion, it had become a valuable part of reality."

For all his gratitude to Hall and Putnam for spreading his ideas, however, Freud was far more ambivalent about their country: “America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success,” he would observe some years after his only visit to this country.

Maybe some of Freud’s attitude stemmed from a not-especially-healthy source: “What is the use of Americans," he remarked, “if they bring no money?'

At the time of his death in 1939, forced into exile from Austria, watching Europe plunged into another military conflagration, Freud would have been astonished to know that six years hence, the nation he scorned would lead the way in eradicating the mass psychosis of Nazism from the European body politic.