Consider three recent movies that are giving psychiatrists fits. In “The Prince of Tides, " Barbra Streisand not only treats her suicidal patient’s twin brother, Nick Nolte, but falls in love with him. Sex seems to be part of the cure-hers as well as his. Though professionals cried foul, moviegoers didn’t bat an eye. Even more bizarre is the homicidal, bisexual psychologist (Jeanne Tripplehorn) in “Basic Instinct, " whose affair with her patient Michael Douglas seems to be winked at by her colleagues. At least the shrink played by Richard Gere in “Final Analysis " has an inkling he’s getting into ethical hot water when he beds down with his patient’s sister. But hey, how many patients’ sisters look like Kim Basinger?
In real life, the instances of sexual breach of conduct overwhelmingly involve male therapists and female patients. In the movies, almost every woman shrink succumbs to the charms of the man on the couch. The message is clear, according to psychiatrist Glen 0. Gabbard: to Hollywood, “the only reason a woman is a therapist is that she hasn’t found a good man. " Gabbard, coauthor of the 1987 book “Psychiatry and the Cinema, " produces a long laundry list of examples, beginning with “The Flame Within " in 1935 and including “Sex and the Single Girl " (1964) and 1983’s “Zelig " (therapist Mia Farrow falls for patient Woody Allen) and “The Man Who Loved Women " (Julie Andrews falls for Burt Reynolds).
Like many of his colleagues, Gabbard is not amused by the romantic drift. “Barbra Streisand is no dummy, " he says. “She knows that if you want to make the holiday blockbuster, you better restore traditional sex-role stereotypes. So what do we have, a female psychiatrist married to a sissy violinist. She needs a quote real man, a macho football coach from the South. Then this real man sweeps her off her feet and she is transformed into a real woman. " Let us not forget, however, that a man (novelist Pat Conroy) cooked up this plot.
Hollywood films, says Susan Fisher, professor of psychiatry at the University of Chicago, “generally present psychiatrists as unable to completely stay within the boundaries of their roles. " If you consider not only Susan Lowenstein but Hannibal Lecter, that’s certainly an understatement. The shrinks themselves would rather see movies like “Ordinary People “: Judd Hirsch’s nurturing therapist is the profession’s role model of choice. The trouble is, sex sells better than sanity and a romantic dilemma will always take precedence over an ethical one. The problem of therapeutic sexual abuse is, in the Hollywood version, no problema at all.
