Hitchcock: Therapy, Love, Psychiatry
The therapeutic formation of the couple and the family (H as a moralist).
H’s understanding and critique of the interpretations of the therapeutic ethos and the institutions of the culture industry has not lost its relevance or cogency.
The Amer reworking of psychoanalysis
The increasingly fervent adoption of freud by the hollywood film industry,
Adorno and H could fear the same fate for their work, watering down and populism
Philip Rieff: The triumph of the therapeutic. The rise of new social ethos that replaced religious or moral sanctions with mental hygiene, psychic balance and personal growth
H’s response to the American reception of psychoanalysis and its role in the establishment of a distinctively therapeutic culture
H was a critic of Amer culture, with equal ambition but less gravitas than Adorno.
Holly films portray psychiatrists a sinister or satirized figures
Holly psyc in the 1930s are eccentric, heavily accented villains (Mr. Deeds), or eccentric, heavily accented buffoons (the bumbling alienist Dr. Eggelhoffer in “The Front Page” and “His Girl Friday.”
Self-Help
A blend of American pragmatism and European pessimism
A mixture of naive injustices to self-help, sustained grappling with fearsome aspects of the psyche (aggression, sexuality) and of society ills (crime, poverty).
Peter Biskind: Therapeutic imperialism–the claim that solution could be found to complicated problems of individual and society in psychoanalytic understanding and treatment.
