Wild in the Streets

Seeing that most patients have a parental transference with their doctors, is it a stretch to look at the other patients in a psychiatric practice as an extended family? Part of the fantasy that patients in therapy perennially have, is that of entering the inner sanctum. They want to know all about their doctors, just like they wanted to know whether their parents were sexually active or not. It’s rare that patients get to know much about the person they’ve been seeing, but perhaps they will do better if they try to find out the identities of their therapeutic siblings. Adopted children are usually successful when they set out to identify their biological parents and finding out the patients who a doctor has treated, while difficult, is probably not as hard as an adopted child trying to locate his or her birth parents. Why bother to do this? The most obvious answer is to compare notes. All therapists have their peculiarities and peccadillos and it’s always fun to discover how much is transference on the patient’s part and how much results from the fact therapist X just acts the same way in every situation. Is the complement of patients parentalizing their therapists, the tendency of therapists to infantalize their patients, turning them into helpless adoring creatures, tabula rasas, petrie dishes in which Victor Frankenstein can perform his wonders? Naturally it would also just be fun to gossip and collect any information you could about mommy or daddy’s extra curricular activities?  Could you imagine attending a convention where the current or former practice of your beloved doctor takes over an inn in Vermont for the purpose of discussing his or her treatment of them? It would be something like the civilian population bugging CIA headquarters or better yet Wild in the Streets, the l968 B movie starring Christopher Jones, Hal Holbrook and Shelley Winters in which children take over the world.

Anus Mirabilis

Remember when you were a kid and had a thermometer shoved up your ass? Remember the jar of Vaseline? Remember the dread? There are those who spend their lives running away from such experiences, either by way of geography, escaping to far way lands where there are no thermometers (there is a whole critical school which argues that this was the traumatic situation that produced The King and I), or by joining Christian Science or Scientology or choosing an ayurvedic cure in which there is no need for thermometers. But why all this phobia about fever, which is the body’s natural way of fighting infection?

Police officers get arrested for doing to suspects what some parents did to their children in the heyday of the anal thermometer. Was the insult to the anus all that it was cracked up to be?  The anal thermometer is a vestige of neo-colonialism, of a hierarchical world in which family life reflected the hegemony of the West over so-called underdeveloped countries. Children were told to be seen and not heard, and that applied to their medical treatments too. That is, until the release of Wild in the Streets (l968), the classic Shelley Winters vehicle in which children take over the world. In today’s society, where even infants tend to be well informed and five-years-olds have thousands of Facebook friends, it’s harder for a parent or a priest to get away with some of the abuse we have read about recently in the press. Children are empowered, and parents who eschew the armpit or the mouth had better beware that their child might end up calling a hotline and eventually forming a support group, where they can spend the rest of their lives blaming anachronistic forms of temperature taking for turning them into drug or sex addicts.