Daddy Dearest

BEFORE I can tell you my father's occupation, I want to get a few things straight.

To begin with, he's never given me a set of mental blocks for my birthday. He doesn't administer electroshock therapy when I'm naughty. And I don't have a driving desire to marry my mother.

By my defensiveness (paranoia?) you should know by now my father is a psychiatrist--a certified headshrinker. But I've determined, after years of extensive observation, that he is not as bad as some people in our society would have you believe.

First, there are those who argue that psychiatry itself is an illegitimate discipline. Dr. Thomas Szasz, for example, wrote in his book The Myth of Mental Illness, "It is customary to define psychiatry as a medical specialty concerned with the study, diagnosis and treatment of mental illnesses. This is a worthless and misleading definition. Mental illness is a myth."

Obviously Szasz has never heard Pat Robertson explain how he "prayed" a hurricane away from South Florida. He has never spent time with members of the studio audience at the Morton Downey Jr. show. And Szasz probably was travelling abroad when Mike Tyson, after calling Robin Givens the "slime of the slime," announced he still loved her.

MORE popular than those who claim psychiatry is a fantasy, however, are others who maintain that psychiatrists themselves are crazy. I had originally thought such people were confined to an elementary school art teacher who, upon hearing my father was a psychiatrist, crossed her eyes, twirled her fingers around her ears and yelled, "Wow, is he quackers?"

But now a popular magazine has attempted to legitimate these same sentiments. The cover article in the January 1989 issue of Atlantic Monthly attacks all people working in the helping professions. It is entitled "Wounded Healers: The old joke that therapists are more disturbed than other people may be no joke."

The article begins with the premise that "Something is a bit odd about people who proclaim 'I want to help other people"' and implies that "something" is that these people are stark raving mad. In the third paragraph, for example, the author quotes one woman as saying "What still strikes me, is I'll go to a party in New York, and inevitably the craziest person there is a psychiatrist. I mean the person who is literally doing childish antisocial things, making a fool of himself and embarrassing everyone else."

When I read this, I recalled the Christmas party my father hosted last month for the 50 psychiatrists who work at his hospital. Over a period of about three hours, the most exciting moment must have been when we ran out of ice for cocktails and I had to go to the freezer to get more. At one point, one of the psychiatrists sneezed without excusing himself.

Without offering a shred of evidence, the author proceeds to attack psychiatrists as "oddballs, Christ beards and psychotics" who were "exceptionally lonely and unhappy, socially ostracized at school and abused at home, either psychologically or physically." The article would make decent toilet reading if it didn't pretend to be nonfiction.

FINALLY, there are those who suggest psychiatrists raise their children funny. I, my brother Freud and sister Jung truly resent this implication. While we may be more able to recognize a blatant case of penis envy faster than the next guy, I don't believe having a psychiatrist father has significantly altered our so-very-important childhoods.

Still, people always ask me, "Doesn't your father analyze your every move? Doesn't he have an interpretation for everything? Isn't he always using mental tricks to get you to do stuff?"

I can't take these questions seriously. No matter how much psychiatric training my father may have, no matter how many times he rereads Freud, he will never learn to instill me with guilt like my mother can. Some things are beyond the realm of science.