- 19 hours ago
Psychological perspectives on madness are discussed.
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00:00:00and the arts.
00:00:41David Briscott, KABC 790.
00:00:44Ellen.
00:00:45Hi.
00:00:46What can I do for you, Ellen?
00:00:48Where do I start?
00:00:50Where it hurts.
00:00:52I smoke cigarettes and...
00:00:55When Sigmund Freud began to pioneer the exploration of the unconscious,
00:00:59it's unlikely that he foresaw this particular version of his talking cure.
00:01:05How much pot do you smoke?
00:01:07Maybe a joint a day.
00:01:10It's a controlled usage.
00:01:12David Briscott is not just a DJ turned agony uncle.
00:01:16One of the brightest young psychiatrists of his generation,
00:01:19he turned his back on a promising psychoanalytic career
00:01:22to reach a much wider audience.
00:01:25You're moving up, Jody.
00:01:26Okay.
00:01:27Thanks.
00:01:28Don't go away, Ann.
00:01:29I'm here.
00:01:30Okay.
00:01:31Christina?
00:01:32Yes?
00:01:32He's looking forward to talking to you.
00:01:34Okay, thank you.
00:01:35Okay.
00:01:36Yeah, but you're doing a joint of marijuana
00:01:39and the routine of two quaaludes at night.
00:01:42Yes.
00:01:42What are you thinking about in terms of your kids?
00:01:45Do you think they know?
00:01:47No.
00:01:48How old are they?
00:01:52They're three, four, and nine and a half.
00:01:55Okay.
00:01:56The nine and a half, does she notice it?
00:01:58That we're high?
00:01:59Yeah.
00:01:59No.
00:02:00Want to bet?
00:02:01She doesn't.
00:02:02Want to bet?
00:02:06You're not there for her.
00:02:09I am there for her.
00:02:11No, you're not.
00:02:13Don't play with me on this one.
00:02:15If you're, if you have three drinks in you or you're smoking a joint and doing two quaaludes,
00:02:20you're not there for her.
00:02:21She looks in your eyes and she sees them a little bit red and she has that funny feeling
00:02:25about you.
00:02:26All she's going to do is it's going to take one connection with one kid in the schoolyard
00:02:31who's smoking the stuff and she notices that he's acting the way mommy does.
00:02:36Click.
00:02:37Whether she ever says anything about it or not, the association's made.
00:02:41I know.
00:02:41So why are you crying?
00:02:43Okay.
00:02:43Don't go away.
00:02:45That should be interesting.
00:02:4784.
00:02:48His young wife.
00:02:50David Viscott, KABC 790.
00:02:59The fact is that everybody tells a lie.
00:03:04I have a nose for when a thing is a lie.
00:03:06I never attack a person.
00:03:08I always attack the lie.
00:03:09If you notice, listening to what I'm doing, they all back off and they hear the truth underneath
00:03:14it.
00:03:14That's what the therapeutic act must essentially be, is giving a person an opportunity to be
00:03:20more honest.
00:03:21Invasive?
00:03:22Well, yes.
00:03:23I invade the lie.
00:03:24But a person can be whatever they want.
00:03:26I have no qualms with that.
00:03:28But when someone's being phony about what I actually hear them feeling and what they're
00:03:31saying, that's fair game.
00:03:33Because that's what everybody hears on the other side of the microphone.
00:03:39You tune in and your car radio.
00:03:41And I have hundreds of thousands of people playing a game with us who say, that guy's not
00:03:45telling the truth.
00:03:46Get him, David.
00:03:47I mean, not get him, David.
00:03:48But the thing is, when they say, get him, David, they are recognizing inside themselves
00:03:53an ability to hear a greater truth.
00:03:56I think I am patient.
00:03:57Prime 9 news at 8, 9 or 10 PM on KCAL-TV.
00:04:02A complete hour of news no matter which hour you choose.
00:04:06David Viscott, KABC.
00:04:07What can I do for you?
00:04:10It's as much my mind as my body that is ill.
00:04:14I never felt like this before.
00:04:18I was walking along the road, past the rock where we had sat together.
00:04:23And suddenly this suffocating feeling came to me.
00:04:30And I was crying out.
00:04:35The old madness that I thought I had conquered came over me again.
00:04:44A middle-class Victorian intellectual such as Olive Schreiner would have been horrified
00:04:50by the idea of broadcasting her psychological miseries to a huge anonymous audience.
00:04:56And yet the people who now phone in their problems to a media psychiatrist share a pedigree
00:05:03with her.
00:05:04Because although Olive Schreiner used the word madness to describe her own state of mind,
00:05:11neither she nor the people who are now availing themselves of David Viscott's services
00:05:16would think of themselves as having anything in common with the inmates of an asylum.
00:05:22In fact, although there are precedents, at the end of the 19th century,
00:05:26a new sort of patient seems to be making her appearance.
00:05:35My doctor turned out as usual a fiasco.
00:05:38I asked him whether it was not unusual for someone to be so ill
00:05:42and yet have no organic trouble.
00:05:44And he said, yes, very unusual indeed.
00:05:47In fact, most of these patients were women
00:05:48who were said to be suffering from various forms of hysteria.
00:05:57I lie down ever so much now.
00:05:59John says it is good for me and to sleep all I can.
00:06:03Indeed, he started the habit by making me lie down for an hour after each meal.
00:06:09It is a very bad habit.
00:06:11I'm convinced, Visi, I don't sleep.
00:06:14And that cultivates deceit.
00:06:16For I don't tell them I'm awake.
00:06:18Oh, no.
00:06:21The fact is, I am getting a little afraid of John.
00:06:23He seems very queer sometimes.
00:06:27And even Jenny has an inexplicable look.
00:06:35I long for a large room to myself with books and nothing else.
00:06:41But I can shut myself up and see no one and read myself into peace.
00:06:49This would be possible at Gordon Square and nowhere else.
00:06:55I wonder why Savage does not see this.
00:07:03As a matter of fact, my sleep has not improved one scrap since I have been here.
00:07:09And his sleeping draught gives me a headache and nothing else.
00:07:16It's not so much that a new kind of patient is appearing,
00:07:21but rather that the profession is beginning to recognize as a patient
00:07:25more and more people who might previously have escaped medical attention altogether.
00:07:31I see more and more of such examples every day in my practice.
00:07:34An increasing number of women out of relationship with the surroundings in which they were born,
00:07:39resulting in a disorder of mental balance.
00:07:42The existence of what might be called male hysteria has been much examined by the French neurologists
00:07:46who claim that hysteria is far more common among male than female patients.
00:07:51Nevertheless, what happens among the French is of no interest here in Britain.
00:07:56We are already enough of a weakened state, sir, without you positing an epidemic of hysteria amongst the population.
00:08:03I assure you, Mr. Hislop, that I did not mean to suggest an epidemic.
00:08:06I'm more interested in how Mr. Duncan assumes that hysteria,
00:08:10if we may settle on that term for now, is caused.
00:08:14As to causality, I would not presume to pronounce,
00:08:17but finding the typical subject in my experience is the young woman.
00:08:20It must be recognized that educational and social repression
00:08:25and all kinds of other barriers to the free play of a girl's power
00:08:28are settled by social and ethical customs.
00:08:32Thou shalt not thus greet a girl at every turn.
00:08:34If we increase the educational opportunities for women, we will engender over ambition,
00:08:39feverish pursuit of gain and pleasure and other vices of one kind or another.
00:08:44We already witnessed the development of religious indifference and general unbelief
00:08:47associated with the neglect of general hygienic conditions.
00:08:50And all of this can be laid at the feet of women?
00:08:52If women remove themselves from their natural sphere of domesticity to that of mental labor,
00:08:58they render themselves less fit to maintain the fragility of the race.
00:09:01Give me the little woman who is not too well educated and his only ambition is to be a good
00:09:07wife and mother.
00:09:08Such women are capable of being the mothers of men.
00:09:10The 19th century brought back into prominence the notion that modern civilization somehow depleted and exhausted the refined nervous system.
00:09:18And in order to counteract this, doctors such as Weir Mitchell recommended a strenuous regime of rest and nursery nourishment.
00:09:26The cure is permanent and complete. The fact of the menstruation is attestation to that.
00:09:33Now, over the years, the term hysteria had been applied to many different forms of behavior and experience.
00:09:41To a sense of panic and suffocation.
00:09:44To flatulence, dyspepsia and anxiety.
00:09:47To alarming abdominal distensions.
00:09:50To swooning, lassitude, fainting in the vapors.
00:09:53To bouts of unmotivated screaming and spectacular convulsions.
00:09:58So it's impossible to identify a single consistent condition that merits this or any other name.
00:10:05In fact, it's hard to understand why all these symptoms were ever grouped together under one heading.
00:10:13Gynecologists were of course seeing a lot of these women in their consulting rooms.
00:10:17And they began to claim that they had techniques available to intervene, perhaps cure these conditions.
00:10:25And these picked up in many ways on ideas that had been advanced in the first instance by psychiatrists themselves.
00:10:31For instance, the idea that there was a connection between masturbation and insanity, which was a chestnut that was quite
00:10:37commonly invoked through the 19th century.
00:10:39Or the idea that there was a particular connection between women's reproductive organs in their brains.
00:10:45And so quite naturally, gynecologists' interventions operated on this front.
00:10:51Either, for instance, through operations called clitoridectomies or by removing ovaries and so on.
00:11:00And there was quite a vogue for that, particularly in the United States, but to some extent also in England.
00:11:08In France, meanwhile, an alternative treatment would emerge in the hands of the great French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot,
00:11:15whose photographic archive is deposited in the Countway Medical Library in Boston.
00:11:21Here, if you bother to look, are to be found more than 10,000 clinical images,
00:11:26which remain largely unexamined after nearly a hundred years.
00:11:32Although Charcot's main interest was in organic diseases of the nervous system,
00:11:37he also was confronted by a large group of patients, mostly women,
00:11:42for whose peculiar symptoms he could find as yet no physical cause.
00:11:53For these so-called hysterics, he reinstated the somewhat discredited technique of mesmerism,
00:11:59under the new title of hypnotism.
00:12:01And to an admiring audience of doctors and medical students,
00:12:05he demonstrated its capacity to relieve what had previously been intransigent symptoms.
00:12:14As one reads the accounts of Charcot's melodramatic demonstrations at the Salpetriere during the 1880s,
00:12:21one gets the impression that for many years the Clinique in Paris was the site of a long-running play
00:12:27in which Charcot simultaneously took the roles of author, director and impresario.
00:12:33And with the help of a talented staff of photographers,
00:12:35he bequeathed a huge volume of production stills of his leading ladies,
00:12:40a veritable iconography which gave hysteria a convincing clinical reality which perhaps it didn't deserve.
00:12:50And yet, for at least one member of Charcot's audience,
00:12:54who, as a contemporary witness of the events,
00:12:57seemed unaware of the extent to which they resembled performances on the stage,
00:13:02that the behaviour of the patients did provoke ideas that went considerably beyond what Charcot believed them to illustrate.
00:13:13Ah.
00:13:18Charcot, as he himself said, was a visuel, a man who sees.
00:13:22He was not a reflective man, not a thinker.
00:13:27Well, that's from an obituary by one of Charcot's students.
00:13:33Grateful though he was for the clinical opportunity that Charcot had provided him,
00:13:38the student, Sigmund Freud, recognised that his great teacher had been blinded,
00:13:43or at least misled, by his emphasis on visual appearances.
00:13:49But that wasn't the only point at issue.
00:13:52Because, unlike Charcot, who was convinced that the cause of these symptoms was organic,
00:13:59and that these would eventually be identified within the nervous system,
00:14:04Freud suspected that the cause was mental.
00:14:07And that although these mental causes undoubtedly brought about spectacular changes in physical behaviour,
00:14:14that the root of the trouble would be found not in the brain,
00:14:17but somewhere in the patient's imagination.
00:14:20And after some rather unsuccessful experiments with it,
00:14:24he began to believe that hypnosis was not necessarily the best way of uncovering these causes.
00:14:36I know something else has occurred to you.
00:14:44You can never be free of your pains, as long as you conceal anything.
00:14:51It has nothing to do with the present case.
00:14:59Now he is free to marry again?
00:15:03Good.
00:15:08Who?
00:15:10Who is free again?
00:15:13My...
00:15:15My...
00:15:15My brother-in-law.
00:15:17My dead sister's husband.
00:15:21Tell me the circumstances in which this thought,
00:15:24that your brother-in-law is free again, occurred to you.
00:15:29Florian Elizabeth von R is, I suppose, the first of the cases that he really analyses through.
00:15:36He's also discovering that she's not particularly willing some of the time to talk about what he wants her to
00:15:41talk about,
00:15:41and what she would really also, on one level, want to talk about, which is resistance.
00:15:46So it's really, in some ways, a kind of apprentice case,
00:15:50in which he analyses a patient really more than he has done with previous patients who have been mostly hypnotized,
00:15:56and therefore are in a different league.
00:16:00Um...
00:16:00And I...
00:16:01You know, Freud was very...
00:16:05eager to learn from his patients, and he does.
00:16:08One of the things he cultivates in the early 90s is keeping his mouth shut, listening.
00:16:13And patients will say to him, let me finish.
00:16:16And he learns that, and he lets them finish.
00:16:18The first time, I began to think,
00:16:23it might not be so bad to be a girl and to have to have a husband.
00:16:29In fact,
00:16:30a strong desire to have a husband grew in me.
00:16:35One who would know how to capture my heart as he had.
00:16:39So,
00:16:40for a long time,
00:16:43you have been in love with your brother-in-law.
00:16:46No.
00:16:47It's not true.
00:16:49You've talked me into it.
00:16:52My leg hurts.
00:16:54I am no better since I came here.
00:16:58In any case, I am incapable of such wickedness.
00:17:04It soon became apparent to Freud that hypnosis was inappropriate and unproductive
00:17:09when it came to treating the curiously disabled patients who presented themselves in his consulting rooms.
00:17:15And that in order to cure these disorders,
00:17:18it was necessary for them to undergo a process of autobiographical reconstruction,
00:17:23to investigate the indirect and often self-deceiving manner in which the patients represented their own past.
00:17:31Freud, like many of his predecessors,
00:17:34recognized the almost self-evident fact that the human mind contains more than its owner is conscious of at any
00:17:39one time.
00:17:40In fact, you've only got to think of your own memory.
00:17:43But when Freud used the word unconscious,
00:17:46he was referring to a much larger province whose contents could only be brought to light
00:17:50by a special clinical technique called psychoanalysis.
00:18:10As Freud saw it, the relative inaccessibility of the unconscious contents was the result of a repressive process,
00:18:19which prevented the expression or even the conscious experience of certain urges and impulses,
00:18:25which might be in conflict with the moral order of the social world.
00:18:30The originality of Freud's theory lay in his recognition that the process of repression did not actually annihilate these impulses.
00:18:38On the contrary, for him, they retained their energy, but seemed to undergo transformations,
00:18:45so that if they overcame the forces of repression and slipped past the vigilant frontier guards,
00:18:52they would return to consciousness in disguised form.
00:18:57How do they return, though?
00:18:59Well, the most conspicuous escape is to be seen in the area of dreams.
00:19:05But they were also to be seen, or rather heard, in the apparently absurd slips of the tongue.
00:19:11For Freud, there was no such thing as an unmotivated mistake.
00:19:17These, then, are the normal expressions of unconscious activity.
00:19:22But if, in the course of a person's development, he or she fails to reconcile certain instinctual urges
00:19:28with the increasingly stringent demands of the social environment,
00:19:32these unresolved conflicts somehow arrest the process of development,
00:19:37and later manifest themselves as psychological illness.
00:19:43In the next case, the patient was introduced to me by a father, himself an ex-patient.
00:19:51I have no doubt that this incident with Mr. Kay, this tale of an immoral suggestion that supposedly took place
00:20:00at Lindau,
00:20:01is a fantasy which has forced its way into Dora's mind.
00:20:04Dora's father disputed the story that she told,
00:20:08naming that this close family friend, her, Kay, had made a pass at her.
00:20:12She keeps pressing me to break off relations with Mr. Kay,
00:20:15and more particularly with Mrs. Kay, whom she formerly used to worship.
00:20:19But that I cannot do.
00:20:21Well, with my state of health, I scarcely need assure you there's absolutely nothing wrong in our relation.
00:20:29We are simply two poor wretches who try to give one another what comfort we can by an exchange of
00:20:38friendly sympathy.
00:20:40Freud realized that the reason why Dora's father was prepared to turn a blind eye to Herr Kay,
00:20:46making advances to his daughter, was that he wished to continue his affair with Herr Kay's wife.
00:20:51My father was standing beside my bed, and woke me up.
00:20:56I dressed up quickly.
00:21:00Mother wanted to stop and save her trail case.
00:21:04But father said, I refuse to let myself and my two children be burned.
00:21:09For the sake of your jewel case.
00:21:13What is this about a jewel case that your mother wanted to save?
00:21:19My mother is very fond of jewelry, and had a lot given to her by father.
00:21:25I remember he gave her a bracelet once, which she didn't like.
00:21:31I would have accepted it with pleasure.
00:21:35I used to be fond of jewelry, too.
00:21:39But I haven't worn any since my ounce.
00:21:44But does nothing else occur to you in connection with the jewel case?
00:21:51So far, you've only talked about jewelry. You've said nothing about a case.
00:21:57Mr. Kay had made me a present of an expensive jewel case.
00:22:05Then a return present would have been very appropriate.
00:22:12Perhaps you do not know that jewel case is a favorite expression for the same thing that you alluded to
00:22:21not long ago by means of the purse that you were wearing.
00:22:24I mean, of course, female genitals.
00:22:28I knew you would say that.
00:22:32That's to say, you knew that it was so.
00:22:40This is the thought which has had to be repressed with so much energy.
00:22:45This shows not only are you afraid of Mr. Kay,
00:22:50but that you are even more afraid of your temptation to yield to him.
00:22:57In short, these efforts show...
00:23:04how deeply you love him.
00:23:07So Dora is the classic woman patient of the major case histories.
00:23:12And of course, she's the most controversial because she's the one that's been picked up by feminists particularly as a
00:23:18symbol of a male chauvinist pig at work.
00:23:22In this, I characterized the behavior of the woman was entirely hysterical.
00:23:28I should without question consider a person hysterical in whom an occasion for sexual excitement elicited feelings that were preponderantly
00:23:35or exclusively unpleasurable.
00:23:37But I might point out, by the way, to start with, that Freud published the case knowing it was a
00:23:42failure and because it was a failure.
00:23:44He was very interested in trying to figure out what went wrong, which included what he had done wrong,
00:23:49in having this young patient coming to him and then leaving him, as it were, as he says, dismissing him
00:23:55the way he dismissed his servant after eleven weeks.
00:23:59I sometimes think that one of the most dramatic events in the development of psychoanalysis was the conceptual somersault which
00:24:07Freud made when he encountered the disturbing frequency
00:24:10with which his patients admitted experiences of sexual interference in early childhood.
00:24:16Now, to begin with, he was tempted to take these accounts at their face value and to assume that the
00:24:22neurotic disorder was an attempt to represent these traumatic events in symbolic form
00:24:28so that the unacceptable implications didn't have to appear in consciousness.
00:24:33Now, whether or not it was because Freud himself found it hard to accept that outrages of this sort could
00:24:39occur in apparently respectable middle-class families,
00:24:42the theory he elaborated as an alternative, revealed or purported to reveal a previously unsuspected feature of mental life in
00:24:52general, and that was the role of fantasy.
00:24:55Now, according to Freud, what had been repressed in these young women was not the fact that they had been
00:25:02interfered with,
00:25:03but perhaps the more dreadful implication that they had imagined or even relished the prospect that such a thing might
00:25:10have occurred.
00:25:11In the light of what social workers are increasingly telling us today, and indeed what doctors in asylums are discovering,
00:25:18that an alarmingly high percentage of patients do seem to have suffered actual sexual abuse as children,
00:25:24it could turn out that Freud's inventiveness actually postponed a more realistic appreciation of his patients' autobiographies.
00:25:34And yet, even if you make an allowance for the fact that reality sometimes outweighs fantasy in such cases,
00:25:41it still doesn't diminish Freud's achievement in identifying the significance of sexuality in children.
00:25:48The case, known as the Wolfman, vividly demonstrates this.
00:25:54I dreamt that it was night, and I was lying in my bed.
00:25:58It also shows how blurred the frontier is between fact and fantasy.
00:26:03And I was terrified to see that some white wolves were sitting on the big walnut tree in front of
00:26:08the window.
00:26:09There were six or seven of them.
00:26:12The wolves were quite white.
00:26:14They looked more like foxes or sheepdogs, for they had big tails like foxes,
00:26:20and they had their ears pricked like dogs when they pay attention to something.
00:26:26In great terror, obviously, of being eaten by the wolves, I screamed and woke up.
00:26:31My nurse hurried to my bed, but it took quite a long time before I was convinced that it had
00:26:36only been a dream.
00:26:37The problem with that case is not so much the dream,
00:26:41but the question as to whether what Freud and the Wolfman together make out of the dream was a realistic
00:26:48experience or a fantasy.
00:26:49That really is the big question.
00:26:54It was night is simply a distortion of I was asleep,
00:26:59while the window opened of its own accord is simply to be translated as I woke up of my own
00:27:07accord.
00:27:09He'd woken up then, and he'd seen something.
00:27:14The attentive looking ascribed to the wolves must be shifted onto the boy himself.
00:27:24The influence of fairy stories provides the wolf as a symbol of his father.
00:27:29If the other factor emphasized by the dreamer is also distorted by means of a transposition or a reversal,
00:27:38the wolves watching immobile become two people, one of whom is the father being watched in violent action.
00:27:50What in fact emerged was the observed scene of his parents copulating,
00:27:56his father entering from behind,
00:27:59and that this position was especially favorable for observation of his parents' genitals.
00:28:07This event actually took place at five o'clock in the afternoon just before his second birthday.
00:28:13Now the question that arises then is,
00:28:15could a little boy have actually seen this episode and remembered it?
00:28:22Could it have traumatized him or not?
00:28:24Or was that something that he had put together later when he was somewhat older,
00:28:29perhaps watching animals having intercourse, and then projected it back?
00:28:34Freud can never come up with any conclusive decision on this,
00:28:39and he then, which is also heroic, although some people have objected to it, of course,
00:28:44then concludes it doesn't really make too much difference.
00:28:47Psychologically speaking, whether it was a realistic observation
00:28:49or a fantasy that was based on either his parents or on others,
00:28:55or his putting together material of having heard stories about this and then fantasizing about it,
00:29:00ultimately does not make that much of a difference.
00:29:03I mean, here he is applying the idea, which, of course, dates from the late 1890s,
00:29:08that fantasies are as important as triggers of traumas, neuroses, and so on, as realistic experiences.
00:29:18Now, Freud himself had very little to do with the inmates of asylums.
00:29:24His patients formed what was to become a swelling multitude of the neurotically ill,
00:29:30and in so doing they laid the foundations for a new psychiatric empire.
00:29:35But Freud was convinced that the classical psychoses also revealed the characteristic dialect of the unconscious mind,
00:29:44and that they also were susceptible to analysis.
00:29:49Well, it was this aspect of his teaching which was to prove so successful on the other side of the
00:29:55Atlantic.
00:29:56In fact, when Freud came to the United States to give his famous lectures at Clark University,
00:30:01he smelt the air and predicted that psychoanalysis would flourish there.
00:30:06And indeed it did.
00:30:08Today, organizations of specialists in mental medicine, like the New York Psychoanalytic Institute,
00:30:14have helped to gain general medical acceptance for such doctrines.
00:30:22Here are offered both lectures on psychoanalysis for laymen,
00:30:26and courses of study for physicians and the origin and treatment of mental troubles.
00:30:31Distressing experiences in childhood may set up patterns which in later life will produce mental conflicts.
00:30:39It's surprising that this sort of approach transplanted itself so successfully to a country that was becoming increasingly committed to
00:30:46a neurological view of mental illness,
00:30:48and in which there was an almost naive trust in new technology.
00:30:54Well, that sound we're hearing now is coming from the normal brain.
00:31:00In some ways it's comparable to the distant roar of a four-engine plane.
00:31:07This is a mentally ill patient.
00:31:10Notice the difference in the sounds coming from his brain.
00:31:14This is a sick brain.
00:31:16It sounds like a plane with its engines misfiring.
00:31:21In a way, that's just what's happening.
00:31:23The idea that insanity was simply a question of neurological ignition failure
00:31:28would have been quite unacceptable to William Allenson White,
00:31:31who was superintendent at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington from 1903 to 1937.
00:31:40White had been enormously influenced by Freud.
00:31:44He adopted a distinctively psychological approach to the treatment of mental illness.
00:31:49For example, when the surgeon Walter Freeman asked White to allow him to perform lobotomies at St. Elizabeth's,
00:31:57he told Freeman,
00:31:58it'll be a hell of a long while before I let you operate on any of my patients.
00:32:03As far as White was concerned, and I quote,
00:32:06the real individual doesn't reside in the bony levers of the skeleton,
00:32:12the delicate contracting fibers of the muscle,
00:32:14the wonderfully intricate and complex functions of the internal organs,
00:32:18but in the wishes, the hopes, the desires, the ambitions, the sorrows and the joys which he experiences.
00:32:26And whether you will or no, you must be physicians of the mind when you deal with him.
00:32:31For after all, the body is only a means to an end, and the end is a mental one.
00:32:44More and more American asylums took psychoanalysts onto their payroll,
00:32:48to offer even their psychotic patients interpretive treatment.
00:32:53And instead of listening to their brains misfiring,
00:32:56increasingly American psychiatrists paid attention to what their patients actually said.
00:33:10The influence of psychoanalysis soon extended into other fields.
00:33:16With the onset of the Second World War,
00:33:18conscription provided a new population upon which psychoanalytic techniques could be practiced.
00:33:24With American youth responding to the call of war magnificently and by the millions,
00:33:29the United States is finding its first opportunity in 25 years
00:33:33to take an inclusive look at the mental and physical state of its young manhood.
00:33:39Have you ever had any obsessions?
00:33:43Obsessions?
00:33:43I mean ideas that drive you to do something.
00:33:47And no matter how hard you try to forget them, you can't.
00:33:52Well, yeah, I guess so.
00:33:54I remember when I was a kid, I used to have spells
00:33:56where I was afraid to touch a knife for fear I'd cut my throat.
00:34:00Ever feel that way now?
00:34:12Rejected by the armed forces, an emotionally unstable individual is turned back into society,
00:34:17to become lost again, one among the nearly seven million Americans suffering from some form of emotional or mental ill
00:34:26health.
00:34:27Today, mental illness is by way of becoming America's number one health problem.
00:34:32By the end of the war, the prestige of psychoanalysis was so great
00:34:36that on literally thousands of couches across the nation, patients who could afford to divulged their coded secrets.
00:34:44I've done a good job actually, but I just can't complete it.
00:34:50The completion of it is not the important part of the work.
00:34:53It's an important thing to me. This is very unrealistic.
00:34:57So to me, this is why I think it's a symbol of something. It's not what it is, actually.
00:35:04All this is avoiding the issue, isn't it?
00:35:06I don't want to be the boss, but I think sometimes that I am more of a dominating person than
00:35:11I am.
00:35:11But I don't want to be.
00:35:13Even as it flourished, psychoanalysis was undergoing the most energetic revision.
00:35:18And there emerged an almost bewildering variety of schools, all of whom traced their ancestry back to Freud.
00:35:25In spite of their differences, they all shared an interest in biography and in the unconscious.
00:35:31And for all of them, the painful process of unravelling the past was seen as something fundamentally therapeutic.
00:35:37Nate's brother called this morning and said his dad is real sick in the hospital again.
00:35:43Every human being has large areas of himself which he does not want to know anything about,
00:35:48which he has put behind him, but which nevertheless trouble him.
00:35:52And can produce illness of great severity even up to suicide.
00:35:58Psychotherapy is an attempt to help this patient understand himself and get on terms with
00:36:02and become acquainted with aspects of himself which he has lost touch with.
00:36:07In fact, a much colder reception awaited Freudian ideas in England.
00:36:11But at the Castle Hospital just outside London, Tom Main found the one favourable environment
00:36:17in which he could develop a regime which owed much to psychoanalytic principles.
00:36:23His emphasis, however, was not so much on the individual as on the family.
00:36:29Simply because of the responsibility that seems to fall on the shoulders of those people who do share the room
00:36:34with her.
00:36:35There are forms of illness which are the result of family process.
00:36:39And to take one individual, the presenting, apparently sick one,
00:36:43and ignore the rest of the family pathology seems to us not to make sense.
00:36:47We therefore make, quite frequently, family diagnoses.
00:36:50We don't accept that the one presenting the illness is necessarily the one who is the key to the whole
00:36:54problem.
00:37:01Nowadays, a comparable regime is still to be found at the Castle Hospital.
00:37:05Here, a male nurse is working with a father and his daughter.
00:37:10The psychiatric problems of the parents were on the point of endangering the physical and mental health of their child.
00:37:18They've been living at the Castle for 18 months.
00:37:23Do you want your hat on, Vicky?
00:37:24No.
00:37:26Coming to the Castle was a very last resort for us, because it would have otherwise been Vicky going for
00:37:31adoption.
00:37:33Two of our children was taken for adoption, and we had just, this was sort of the last chance of
00:37:40getting our third daughter back.
00:37:44When we first came here, up to the first three or four months, we was always denying things that had
00:37:50ever happened.
00:37:51And then once we started owning up to, and owning some of the things that we had done,
00:37:57that was then when it was felt that we could be trusted with our daughter,
00:38:01because at the time, because we were actually saying how we felt and that, that it could be worked with.
00:38:09It could be, it could be, it could be.
00:38:11It could be, it could be, it could be.
00:38:13Encouraged to reconstruct and confront unacceptable facts about their own childhoods,
00:38:18these parents are now to be entrusted with the future of their one remaining daughter.
00:38:24Are you finished cutting the trees?
00:38:26Yeah.
00:38:28Even though we are going home, there's always a fear that we are going to get into the same position
00:38:34as,
00:38:35before we came here, but I think the more we think of the work that we've done here,
00:38:40and the different ways that we've learnt with being here,
00:38:44I think we can really try not to let that happen again.
00:38:57At the Arbors Crisis Centre in North London,
00:39:01analytic techniques are controversially applied to more seriously disturbed patients,
00:39:06even to those who have at some time been diagnosed as psychotic.
00:39:10Are you scared?
00:39:11Of what?
00:39:13It doesn't have me checking off the books.
00:39:16Like, I mean, when I was in hospital, I've been called a schizophrenic,
00:39:19a manic depressive, a personality disorder, all sorts of things.
00:39:22They've been trying to put a diagnosis to me.
00:39:25What's the matter, eh?
00:39:26Onions.
00:39:26I know when I start crying.
00:39:29In the hospital, they called me clinically depressed with suicidal tendencies.
00:39:35What was the other one they called me?
00:39:37They called me one in a hospital I was taken to when I was sectioned.
00:39:41Oh, psychotic.
00:39:44Although there are many psychiatrists who dispute the applicability of this approach
00:39:48to patients suffering from serious mental illness,
00:39:51Joe Burke, one of the founders, still insists that Freud has something valuable to offer.
00:39:56I think Freud was a great humanitarian.
00:40:00He bequeathed towards a tolerance of different states of mind,
00:40:04of different forms of behavior,
00:40:08and a possibility of making these things intelligible,
00:40:12making the unintelligible intelligible.
00:40:15I find it really difficult liking myself.
00:40:21I mean, the first admittance I had to hospital
00:40:24was because I'd literally had enough of myself, so I cut my wrist.
00:40:29I got a piece of glass, and I just sort of dug it in my arm.
00:40:34I don't regret it, though.
00:40:37I think in some ways I should regret it,
00:40:39because I am left with a hand that's a bit sort of duffed up, you know?
00:40:44But, you know, I sort of sit and think about everything that's gone on to me,
00:40:50and that was the first thing I'd ever done to myself.
00:40:53Everything else had been done to me.
00:40:56You look terrific.
00:40:57Right, thanks.
00:40:58So, where are we going?
00:40:59A restaurant called The Courtesy.
00:41:01Oh, the chair.
00:41:01Oh, are you kidding? That's nice, isn't it?
00:41:03It's okay, I've got a cat.
00:41:05Oh, okay.
00:41:06Well, see you later. Have a good time.
00:41:08Yeah, go ahead.
00:41:09It's okay.
00:41:12At the time when I do it, I'm usually going through a great deal of mental pain,
00:41:15and to cut myself, it's sort of like transferring it to something physical,
00:41:21so I can focus on some physical pain rather than on the mental pain I'm going through.
00:41:27One other thing I like is when I see the blood coming out of my arms,
00:41:30it's almost like I'm getting all the dirt out of my body,
00:41:33but I never get enough out, so I have to do it again and again and again.
00:41:36Not forever and ever.
00:41:41Most of what takes place in the name of psychiatric treatment
00:41:46is a form of shutting people up.
00:41:49What we do here is something different.
00:41:52We take it that a person's suffering, a person's weird experiences
00:41:57or strange behavior is in many ways a cry for help,
00:42:03an attempt to reach out, an attempt to be understood.
00:42:07So the way we help people here is by allowing them to reach us with their suffering.
00:42:22Would you say that's one reason why you came to Arbor's? To be able to cry?
00:42:27To have a safe place.
00:42:28To have a safe place to cry?
00:42:30To face what I have to face.
00:42:34What kind of things do you anticipate you have to face?
00:42:38The pain of what my mother did to me.
00:42:50For the opponents of psychoanalysis, a serious objection to the theory
00:42:55is that the act of interpretation, which is risky enough with contemporary material,
00:43:00is unforgivably suspect when it comes to reconstructing what Henry James called the unvisitable past.
00:43:07And it's often pointed out that the real child, as opposed to the remembered child,
00:43:13was conspicuously absent from Freud's clientele.
00:43:19So instead of encountering the infant vicariously through the fallible memory and fantasies of adults,
00:43:26the actual experiences of the child gradually became the object of attention.
00:43:31It feels secure even when with strangers, as you see.
00:43:41Now, note the contrast.
00:43:45This is the same child after it had been deprived of its mother for three months.
00:43:51As you see, its expression is mask-like, similar to that of an adult suffering from depression.
00:44:01The more recent counterparts of these observational studies are yielding new and more complex theories,
00:44:08not so much about individual experiences as about the psychological interaction between individuals.
00:44:17This is a therapy conducted by Dr. Susan McDonough at the Bradley Hospital in Providence, in the States.
00:44:26This happens to be a situation of a little girl who has had a severe feeding problem, anorexia,
00:44:35a failure to thrive, in fact,
00:44:38and a mother who is an adolescent mother with a fairly disorganized life.
00:44:49And she's throwing so much stimulation at the kid and telling the kid what to do and directing the kid.
00:44:55And if I were the kid, I'd stop eating too, perhaps.
00:44:59What's that?
00:45:02So here, the major focus or target of what Susan is about is to help the mother read the child's
00:45:11signals better
00:45:12and set the limits a little bit better so that the child's needs have their own space and her needs
00:45:17have their own space.
00:45:18Right now, the mother and the baby are playing and their play is being televised.
00:45:22And they'll play for five, ten minutes. And then immediately after that,
00:45:27the mother will be shown a playback of what has just happened.
00:45:31And then she and Susan McDonough will use that really as the material to weave the therapy out of.
00:45:45Who's that?
00:45:46What we're seeing here is something which Freud had to infer rather than observe,
00:45:52and that is the relationship between mother and child.
00:45:56For Daniel Stern, who has spent years working and playing with babies and their mothers,
00:46:02the relationship between the two is a creative negotiation,
00:46:06the outcome of which, if all goes well, is a sane adult,
00:46:11confidently self-conscious of his or her independent existence.
00:46:17What do you think of that one?
00:46:19There are experiences of the self that you cannot have unless you're with another person.
00:46:25And that makes life very interesting and complicated.
00:46:28And a good example is that a baby of, oh, three, four, five months really is not going to laugh
00:46:35unless there's an adult there to jazz the baby up and have fun and have an amusing interaction.
00:46:41It requires the presence of another human being to kick that kid into a higher orbit of positive excitement.
00:46:49But then, in order to, as it were, use the enthusiasm of an other,
00:46:55at what stage does the child begin to have a theory of other people's or of other people,
00:47:02in other words, of things like itself having minds like itself?
00:47:05Well, that is the next jump from the emergent to the core sense of self
00:47:10to what I would call the intersubjective sense of self,
00:47:13which maybe is the most interesting philosophically in there.
00:47:17If the child sees something that they're really not quite sure what to make of it,
00:47:22they don't know whether to approach or withdraw, and so they're in a slight conflict or uncertainty at least,
00:47:28they'll do what's called social referencing.
00:47:31And what is meant by that is the child looks at the thing, doesn't know what to do,
00:47:36and looks at mom to read her face,
00:47:39and will take the cue from her as to how he should change his mental contents with regard to the
00:47:45affect.
00:47:49It's sort of a primitive form of adults saying to one another,
00:47:53I know that you know that I know.
00:47:55The most complicated would be what I could say to you, I feel that you feel that I feel.
00:48:00These early senses of the self I see as laying down the most basic groundwork of healthy human behavior.
00:48:13When you think about this sort of basic senses of the self that go into the core sense of self,
00:48:18if that weren't there, I almost don't know what that would be like here.
00:48:22It would be like being dead, certainly, in the most profound human way.
00:48:28The problem is, as Stern himself would be the first to admit,
00:48:31that what goes on between mother and child is so fleeting and so subtle,
00:48:35that it's hard to know what sort of intervention would guarantee a successful outcome.
00:48:39And anyway, in the case of most of the people who become psychiatric problems,
00:48:44this early stage has passed unobserved,
00:48:47so that we're already confronted by a fait accompli.
00:48:57Every child here at the Acliffe Center has previously been more or less written off
00:49:03as an incorrigible social or psychiatric problem.
00:49:06Right, come on, light up, quiet!
00:49:08But here, the treatment programs are eclectically put together
00:49:12from a wide variety of non-physical approaches to mental problems.
00:49:18Any kind of uniform therapeutic orientation is an act of gross self-indulgence.
00:49:24And therefore, every child has a wholly uniquely individual treatment program.
00:49:29So, for example, you may find that a child who is diabetic requires medical treatment.
00:49:34The fact that he's severely educationally retarded requires remedial education.
00:49:38The fact that he has poor family relationships requires family therapy,
00:49:42which is essentially talking therapy.
00:49:43The fact that he has very poor social skills demands intensive social skills training,
00:49:48which is a predominantly cognitive form of therapy.
00:49:51The fact that he sets fire to places demands behavioural therapy,
00:49:54aversive conditionally for his fire raising.
00:49:57And the fact that he's also extremely anxious may demand
00:50:00either some form of behavioural intervention or psychotherapy.
00:50:03The one thing that we will not use is medicines for anything other than explicitly,
00:50:09exceptionally well-argued therapeutic reasons.
00:50:12We will not use medicines for the purpose of control,
00:50:14for the purpose of making life easier for ourselves,
00:50:17which is essentially what often happens.
00:50:29William came to us from an autistic society school,
00:50:33where in fact, having been taken out by his caretaker,
00:50:36he attacked her and he broke her left wrist until the bone came out.
00:50:42He had, by the time that happened, he had got himself into a position
00:50:46where people were so absolutely terrified of him
00:50:48that they wouldn't go nearer than 20 feet to him.
00:50:50So they would put his food on the landing, push it with a stick,
00:50:54he would come and grab his food and the door was open
00:50:58and he would take himself to the toilet and go back into the room.
00:51:01And nobody got anywhere near William.
00:51:04When will we be free?
00:51:07When he first came to Ayrcliffe, we had him intensively investigated
00:51:12psychiatrically and neurologically.
00:51:14The conclusion was that he ought to be put on a cocktail of five drugs
00:51:17in order to enable him to cope until such time as he was old enough
00:51:21when rather more serious measures may be taken.
00:51:24I had such an impossible background
00:51:27that it was either here or somewhere more severe,
00:51:32like mental hospital or something like that for me.
00:51:37I mean, I think anybody there would think
00:51:41that you couldn't communicate with me at all in any proper manner.
00:51:50In his first quarter, he attacked the staff 428 times.
00:51:54By attack, I don't mean saying boo or having a dispute at the Vicarage Tea Party.
00:51:59I mean going for the eyes, biting out lumps of flesh
00:52:03and most horrific attacks on people.
00:52:08We eventually put him in a secure environment
00:52:10where in fact he was subjected to an intensive token economy
00:52:14but also intensive group pressure and counselling programme
00:52:16again using a variety of treatment modalities.
00:52:19And over a period of time, as he started to recognise
00:52:22that we were not going to reject him, he very slowly started responding to us.
00:52:27OK then. Let's go on to the first bit
00:52:29that we were looking at just now, William.
00:52:32To manage your own behaviour.
00:52:34How do you think you've been managing that in the last 24 hours?
00:52:38Aitcliff recognises that it's not possible to cure these children.
00:52:42Instead, the aim is to provide skills
00:52:45with which the child may be able to cope with the damage that's already been done.
00:52:50What do you think brought that behaviour on last night?
00:52:55I suppose because it's my review today and...
00:53:02I suppose I don't know, you want him to leave tonight.
00:53:04You see, all the management skills we've given you are managing your own behaviour.
00:53:07I mean you should have been addressing that with him before you went out.
00:53:11Or indeed waiting till after the meal and then taking it up with your father.
00:53:15And you see all the skills you've been given,
00:53:17you totally turned it on its head and used it in the wrong place out in public.
00:53:21Yeah.
00:53:22There's no good just conditioning a child as you would condition a Pavlov dog.
00:53:26You also need to do something with his language.
00:53:29With the way he construes the world.
00:53:32So that, for example, a child who doesn't see himself as having any option but to attack people
00:53:38if they misbehave or if they block his wishes,
00:53:40will begin to recognise that actually they are not blocking him.
00:53:44And if you want him to perceive those other people as not blocking him
00:53:46but helping him to do a better job than he was doing before,
00:53:49then you need to change his concepts.
00:53:52Can I remind everybody that when William first came to Eucliffe
00:53:54there were 428 attacks in the first quarter.
00:53:58Can people please remember what remarkable achievement has been made in William
00:54:03to get to the point that he has?
00:54:04And it is positively not true that he hasn't responded to what sanctions there have been.
00:54:10He's a pleasure to be with, he's a pain in the neck as well from time to time.
00:54:13You are as well.
00:54:17He is really a pleasure to be with, he's good fun, he's good humour, and when he's in good shape
00:54:23and in good humour with himself he's nice to be with.
00:54:26And I was glad that actually education also brought that out as significantly as he had.
00:54:31If it can work with children, it can work infinitely better with adults, irrespective of their level of disturbance.
00:54:39But it is hard, it does demand genuine valuing and genuine partnership, collaboration with your, the person who has been
00:54:47entrusted to you.
00:54:48And I think it is that fundamental attitude shift which is our problem, rather than the absence of resources or
00:54:53the absence of technology.
00:55:01The tragedy is that even if this eclectic approach were to be as fruitful for adults as it's said to
00:55:08be for children,
00:55:09the number of people who could actually avail themselves of this expensive amenity is a pathetically small proportion of those
00:55:16who need it.
00:55:21And in the only form where any interpretive approach to human misery is widely and freely available,
00:55:27it's become more than a prurient entertainment for the commuting motorist.
00:55:32She took a number of minor things with her and she is calling it a separation, okay?
00:55:39She is such a darling and I love that woman so much.
00:55:43I never thought in my life that I would cry as much as I have in the last week.
00:55:48Okay, let her call it a separation.
00:55:50I don't believe it.
00:55:51Yeah, but let her call it a separation for a moment.
00:55:53Meanwhile, make your adjustment, take care of yourself.
00:55:57Sure.
00:55:57I mean, get into the deliciousness of being 84 years old and still dealing with a broken love, a broken
00:56:06heart.
00:56:06Most of the guys you know 84 years old are trying to remember whether they took the same pill twice
00:56:11this morning or not.
00:56:12Yeah.
00:56:12Right?
00:56:13There's a good side to this.
00:56:14I mean, you're still alive and kicking.
00:56:17Yeah?
00:56:17I would have given you my mother's number who just turned 83, but I think she's too old for you.
00:56:23Thanks.
00:56:24You know what I mean?
00:56:25Yeah.
00:56:25David Viscott, K-A-V-C.
00:56:27Ted Payne.
00:56:28The news is that when you hit 84, you can still be like...
00:56:32Isn't that great?
00:56:32Isn't that great?
00:56:33I like that.
00:56:34What's cooking?
00:56:36If you're looking for love on your TV, then California 9 is where you want to be.
00:56:41We got twice the love, double Tony D.
00:56:43We got love, love, love, TLC.
00:56:47TLC means a double dose of Tony on Who's the Boss?
00:56:51And the arts.
00:56:53And the arts.
00:56:53And the arts.
00:57:33David Viscott, KABC 790.
00:57:36Ellen.
00:57:37Hi.
00:57:38What can I do for you, Ellen?
00:57:39Uh, where do I start?
00:57:41Where it hurts.
00:57:42Where it hurts.
00:57:44I smoke cigarettes and...
00:57:46When Sigmund Freud began to pioneer the exploration of the unconscious, it's unlikely that he foresaw this particular version of
00:57:55his talking cure.
00:57:56How much pot do you smoke?
00:57:58Um, maybe, maybe a joint a day.
00:58:01It's a controlled usage.
00:58:03David Viscott is not just a DJ turned agony uncle.
00:58:08One of the brightest young psychiatrists of his generation.
00:58:11He turned his back on a promising psychoanalytic career to reach a much wider audience.
00:58:16You're moving up, Jody.
00:58:18Okay.
00:58:18Thanks.
00:58:19Don't go away, Ann.
00:58:20Come here.
00:58:21Okay.
00:58:22Christina.
00:58:23Yes?
00:58:24He's looking forward to talking to you.
00:58:25Okay.
00:58:27Okay.
00:58:27Yeah, but you're doing a joint of marijuana and the routine of two quaaludes at night.
00:58:33Yes.
00:58:34What are you thinking about in terms of your kids?
00:58:36Do you think they know?
00:58:38No.
00:58:39How old are they?
00:58:44They're three, four, and nine and a half.
00:58:47Okay.
00:58:47The nine and a half, does she notice it?
00:58:49That we're high?
00:58:50Yeah.
00:58:51No.
00:58:51Wanna bet?
00:58:53She doesn't.
00:58:54She doesn't.
00:58:54Wanna bet?
00:58:58You're not there for her.
00:59:01The road past the rock where we had sat together.
00:59:06And suddenly this suffocating feeling came to me.
00:59:11And I was crying out.
00:59:16The old madness that I thought I had conquered came over me again.
00:59:25A middle-class Victorian intellectual such as Olive Schreiner would have been horrified by the idea of broadcasting her psychological
00:59:34miseries to a huge anonymous audience.
00:59:37And yet the people who now phone in their problems to a media psychiatrist share a pedigree with her.
00:59:46Because although Olive Schreiner used the word madness to describe her own state of mind, neither she nor the people
00:59:54who are now availing themselves of David Viscott services would think of themselves as having anything in common with the
01:00:01inmates of an asylum.
01:00:03In fact, although there are precedents, at the end of the 19th century, a new sort of patient seems to
01:00:10be making her appearance.
01:00:17My doctor turned out as usual a fiasco.
01:00:20I asked him whether it was not unusual for someone to be so ill and yet have no organic trouble.
01:00:25And he said, yes, very unusual indeed.
01:00:28In fact, most of these patients were women who were said to be suffering from various forms of hysteria.
01:00:39I lie down ever so much now.
01:00:41John says it is good for me and to sleep all I can.
01:00:44Indeed, he started the habit by making me lie down for an hour after each meal.
01:00:51It is a very bad habit. I'm convinced, Visi, I don't sleep.
01:00:55And that cultivates deceit. For I don't tell them I'm awake. Oh, no.
01:01:02The fact is, I am getting a little afraid of John.
01:01:05He seems very queer sometimes.
01:01:08And even Jenny has an inexplicable look.
01:01:17I long for a large room to myself with books and nothing else.
01:01:23Where I can shut myself up and see no one and read myself into peace.
01:01:31This would be possible at Gordon Square and nowhere else.
01:01:37I wonder why Savage does not see this.
01:01:45As a matter of fact, my sleep has not improved one scrap since I have been here.
01:01:51And his sleeping draught gives me a headache and nothing else.
01:01:58It's not so much that a new kind of patient is appearing,
01:02:02but rather that the profession is beginning to recognize, as a patient,
01:02:07more and more people who might previously have escaped medical attention altogether.
01:02:13I see more and more of such examples every day in my practice.
01:02:16An increasing number of women out of relationship with the surroundings in which they were born,
01:02:20resulting in a disorder of mental balance.
01:02:23The existence of what might be called male hysteria has been much examined by the French neurologists
01:02:27who claim that hysteria is far more common among male than female patients.
01:02:33Nevertheless, what happens among the French is of no interest here in Britain.
01:02:38We are already enough of a weakened state, sir,
01:02:40without you positing an epidemic of hysteria amongst the population.
01:02:44I assure you, Mr. Hislop, that I did not mean to suggest an epidemic.
01:02:47I am more interested in how Mr. Duncan assumes that hysteria, if we may settle on that term for now,
01:02:55is caused.
01:02:56As to causality, I would not presume to pronounce, but finding the typical subject, in my experience, is the young
01:03:01woman.
01:03:01It must be recognized that educational and social repression and all kinds of other barriers to the free play of
01:03:09a girl's power
01:03:10are settled by social and ethical customs.
01:03:13Thou shalt not thus greet a girl at every turn.
01:03:16If we increase the educational opportunities for women, we will engender over ambition, feverish pursuit of gain and pleasure and
01:03:23other vices of one kind or another.
01:03:26We've already witnessed the development of religious indifference and general unbelief associated with the neglect of general hygienic conditions.
01:03:32And all of this can be laid at the feet of women.
01:03:34If women remove themselves from their natural sphere of domesticity to that of mental labor, they render themselves less fit
01:03:41to maintain the fragility of the race.
01:03:43Give me the little woman who is not too well educated and his only ambition is to be a good
01:03:48wife and mother.
01:03:49Such women are capable of being the mothers of men.
01:03:52The 19th century brought back into prominence the notion that modern civilization somehow depleted and exhausted the refined nervous system.
01:04:00And in order to counteract this, doctors such as Weir Mitchell recommended a strenuous regime of rest and nursery nourishment.
01:04:08The cure is permanent and complete. The fact of the menstruation is attestation to that.
01:04:14Now, over the years, the term hysteria had been applied to many different forms of behavior and experience.
01:04:22To a sense of panic and suffocation, to flatulence, dyspepsia and anxiety, to alarming abdominal distensions, to swooning, lassitude, fainting
01:04:34in the vapors, to bouts of unmotivated screaming and spectacular convulsions.
01:04:40So it's impossible to identify a single consistent condition that merits this or any other name.
01:04:47In fact, it's hard to understand why all these symptoms were ever grouped together under one heading.
01:04:54Gynecologists were, of course, seeing a lot of these women in their consulting rooms, and they began to claim that
01:05:00they had techniques available to intervene, perhaps cure these conditions.
01:05:06And these picked up in many ways on ideas that had been advanced in the first instance by psychiatrists themselves.
01:05:12For instance, the idea that there was a connection between masturbation and insanity, which was a chestnut that was quite
01:05:19commonly invoked through the 19th century.
01:05:21Or the idea that there was a particular connection between women's reproductive organs in their brains.
01:05:27And so, quite naturally, gynecologists...
01:05:29I am there for her.
01:05:31No, you're not. Don't play with me on this one.
01:05:35If you have three drinks in you, or you're smoking a joint and doing two quaaludes, you're not there for
01:05:40her.
01:05:41She looks in your eyes, and she sees them a little bit red, and she has that funny feeling about
01:05:45you.
01:05:46All she's going to do is it's going to take one connection with one kid in the schoolyard who's smoking
01:05:52the stuff, and she notices that he's acting the way mommy does.
01:05:56Click. Whether she ever says anything about it or not, the association's made.
01:06:00So why are you crying?
01:06:02Okay, don't go away.
01:06:05That should be interesting.
01:06:0784.
01:06:0784.
01:06:07His young wife.
01:06:10David Viscott, KABC 790.
01:06:19The fact is that everybody tells a lie.
01:06:23I have a nose for when a thing is a lie.
01:06:26I never attack a person. I always attack the lie.
01:06:29If you notice, listening to what I'm doing, they all back off, and they hear the truth underneath it.
01:06:34That's what the therapeutic act must essentially be, is giving a person an opportunity to be more honest.
01:06:41Invasive? Well, yes, I invade the lie, but a person can be whatever they want. I have no qualms with
01:06:46that.
01:06:47But when someone's being phony about what I actually hear them feeling and what they're saying, that's fair game.
01:06:53Because that's what everybody hears on the other side of the microphone. You tune in in your car radio. And
01:07:01I have hundreds of thousands of people playing a game with us and say, that guy's not telling the truth!
01:07:05Get him, David!
01:07:06I mean, not get him, David, but the thing is, when they say get him, David, they are recognizing inside
01:07:12themselves an ability to hear a greater truth.
01:07:16I think I am patient.
01:07:17Prime 9 News at 8, 9 or 10 p.m. on KCAL-TV. A complete hour of news no matter
01:07:23which hour you choose.
01:07:25David Viscott, KABC.
01:07:27What can I do for you?
01:07:30It's as much my mind as my body that is up.
01:07:34I never felt like this before.
01:07:38I was walking along the road.
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