33:Weaponized Pseudoscience

In 1938, an Austrian scientist of local renown of Jewish heritage fled the city of Vienna at the 11th hour as the Nazi regime took the country over. He booked a last minute ticket on the Orient Express train to Paris, crossed the English Channel, and took up residence in London for the last year of his life before it was cut short by cancer of the jaw.  During that year, he oversaw new translations into English of his major works, which in turn became the definitive English language editions of his work as his ideas spread through North America in the post war years.  Over the next thirty-five years or so his work and ideas became the gold standard in his field, even though in the forty or so years after many of his ideas were debunked and many of his experiments shown to be fraudulent.   He is exactly the kind of figure who in 1958 in America was considered to be a cutting edge genius (even though by that point he was twenty years in the grave), and who in 1994 was starting to be thought of as a pseudo-scientific quack whose ideas were at best outmoded and at worst outright dangerous.  His name was Sigmund Freud. 

Sigmund Freud of course does not appear in The Hudsucker Proxy.  As stated above, Freud was far too dead to help out with any psychoanalyzing of anyone at or related to Hudsucker Industries by 1958.  Nonetheless, Freudian analytic method had taken off in a huge way in the USA after the end of the second world war.  Freudian talk-therapy was (correctly) seen as more benign and less invasive to an otherwise well functioning person suffering from mental illness than existing American treatments, which largely revolved around at best removal from society via placement in asylums, or at worst highly invasive and largely unhelpful treatments such as lobotomies and electroshock therapy.  Freud himself enjoyed a great deal of posthumous celebrity in the US as a result.  He cut a striking figure, with his stern expression framed by his bald head, white beard, round glasses and the cigar that was almost always in his hand. He famously had a very particularly laid out room in which he saw patients, in which he saw them as he sat in a leather easy chair while they lay on his large sofa, specifically arranged so that his patients could hear him but not see him, so that their speaking could be done without feeling self-conscious of his note-taking. He was so particular about this layout that his Viennese office was recreated almost to a T in his London home in his final year, and was subsequently recreated almost exactly in the same way by many subsequent Freudian analysts.  Freud’s office became so iconic that it was recreated in a window display in the New York department store Barney’s in 1996, complete with comedian David Rakoff portraying Freud himself in the window. It therefore seems beyond dispute that when a man with a grey beard, bald head, round glasses, and a German accent appears in Hudsucker’s third act to present a psychoanalytic evaluation of Norville Barnes that he is intended as anything but a Sigmund Freud analogue. 

The ideology of Sigmund Freud can be summarized relatively easily, even if the particulars one could spend a lifetime discussing.  Freud largely believed that the psychological problems of human beings were caused by subconscious desires.  We largely want things that for whatever reason our conscious minds would prefer we not think about, and so we don’t.  For Freud, for us to overcome these problems we needed to become aware of these subconscious desires and confront them. Crucially, however, the patient needed to become aware of these desires themselves, they could not be simply told these desires.  As a result Freudian analysis was a complicated game of Socratic questioning where the analyst knew the underlying problem, but simply stating it out loud would not help.  One of Freud’s most well known subconscious desires was that of the Oedipal complex, wherein the patient’s problems derived from a deep seated desire to have sex with his mother.  The analyst in this instance would not say “you suffer from an Oedipal complex” but would rather start a line of questioning with “Tell me about your mother.”  Freud believed in this concept so deeply that he was willing to fabricate experimental data to support his claims, as it is known today (and indeed was starting to become common knowledge in the early 1990s) that many of Freud’s subjects either had their problems substantially exaggerated or where composites of multiple patients with different problems or were simply wholesale made up.  The reason Freud’s ideas stuck around and gained in popularity was due to the fact that the subject’s desires were not present in their consciousness, and thus effectively invisible.  I cannot deny my subconscious Oedipal complex due to the fact that no one has direct access to my subconscious, including myself.  I can no more deny my own subconscious desires to the Freudian than I can deny the existence of angels and demons to a certain kind of deeply religious Christian.  Just because I myself do not believe in them does not mean that they aren’t there. Because of this line of thinking, Freudianism becomes a kind of secular means of positing the Christian concept of Original Sin.  Just because a person hasn’t personally committed any evil acts or felt any desire to commit an evil act doesn’t mean that there aren’t unseen and unknowable forces compelling that person to do evil in the future. 

Dr. Bromfenbrenner has dialogue in one scene in Hudsucker. Norville by this point is despondent over being told that he’s been falsely accused of intellectual property theft via Buzz the elevator operator’s fabricated claims that he actually secretly was the Hula Hoop’s inventor, and also over being told that he had unwittingly brought an investigative journalist into the company (and dated her!) and thus stands to lose not just the position he stumbled his way into but also his entire future in the business world. At this point it has also become apparent that Norville continuing to run the company is a deep liability to the plans of Sidney Mussburger and the Hudsucker board, and so they use Norville’s despondency as a reason to bring in Bronfenbrenner as a means to remove him from his position by means of mental defect.  Norville is sad, but then again who wouldn’t be after having sabotaged their first real adult romantic relationship and finding out their career was over just as it was beginning? Nonetheless based on his single session with Norville the following is Bonfenbrenner’s assessment: “Patient dizplayed liztlessness, apathy, gloomy indifference und vas blue und mopey… Patient shows no ambition, no get-up-und-go, no vim. He is riding ze grand loopen-ze-loop zat goes from ze peak of delusional gaiety to ze trrrroff of dezbair. Patient is now near — but not yet at! — ze lowest point; ven he reachensies bottom he may errrrrupt und pose danger to himself und uzzers.”  This is accompanied by a jagged sine wave diagram apparently representing Norville’s emotional state.

Dr. Bromfenbrenner uses his single session with Norville and the fact that he previously appeared to be a cheery fellow to determine this trajectory of his emotional state. It has about all the logic of Bart Simpson discovering that Principal Skinner makes $25,000 per year and that he’s 40 years old and therefore inferring that he’s a millionaire. In addition Bromfenbrenner uses several Rorschach ink blot tests as part of his diagnosis.  Fellow psychiatric pioneer, the unsettlingly attractive* Dr. Hermann Rorschach designed his test specifically as a diagnosis of schizophrenia, in that patients who viewed his ink blots who responded to the question “what does this look like” with disturbing descriptions had some kind of disturbing ways of thinking that would become apparent. Dr. Bromfenbrenner does not however use the Rorschach blots to determine whether Norville is schizophrenic, but uses the blots to determine his overall mental state, a practice which started to become common in the 1960s in American Psychiatry, but should still be understood as an off-label use. There are two notable things about Norville’s Rorschach test.  One is that only three of the blots are in fact Rorschach blots. The other is that Norville’s assessment of these blots according to Dr. Rorchach would suggest a perfectly healthy mind.  A common misconception about the test is that the test’s administrator simply spills ink onto a piece of paper and folds it in half to create their own Rorschach blots, when in reality the blot test relied on ten very specific blots, specifically selected and designed by Dr. Rorschach allegedly to be as ambiguous and conflicted as possible so that there would be no objective “correct” answer**. The first three blots shown to Norville correspond to Rorschach blots numbers 3, 7, and 6 respectively.  Given that Rorschach intended for his blots to look like nothing in particular, Norville’s answers of “Nothing much”, “I don’t know” and “Just a blob” as to what they look like would indicate a perfectly well functioning mind to Rorchach.  Perhaps it is the fact that the blots do in fact look like “just a blob” is why the Coens added a fourth non-Rorschach blot to demonstrate how Norville is not paying attention to the test, in that this blotch clearly looks like a pair of bunny rabbits, not like Norville’s response of “sure beats me”

The thrust of Bronfenbrenner’s assessment of Norville’s mental state could not be more transparent were he made of glass.  He is a tool who the Hudsucker board has hired to give a tiny bit of legal veneer to why they plan on having Norville not simply removed from his position at Hudsucker industries, but removed from society at large.  If they had not found a willing puppet psychiatrist to recommend his commitment to a mental health facility one imagines that they might instead try and frame him for a felony.  By using the newly popular-in-America tool of Freudian analysis to do this however, they both rid themselves of a meddling rival to their own power but also rid themselves of needing to supply a comprehensible reason why.  Freudian analysis depends on the idea that mental unwellness is tied to an inscrutable subconscious that only may truly be understood by the psychiatrist. If the average Joe on the street hears that Norville Barnes is a dangerous criminal he might be incredulous that the goofus who invented the Hula Hoop and gave all those press conferences where he seemed like a swell guy is actually a danger to society, but if he hears that a psychiatrist determined that Barnes is a “manic-depressive paranoid type B, with acute schizoid tendencies” and that a for-real doctor diagnosed him as such, he might not understand what that means but boy does it sound serious.  He needs to be locked up for his own good!  Dr. Bromfenbrenner’s suggested treatment of “Kommitment, electroconfulsif therapy [and] maintenance in eine zecure wazility.” is itself unusual in that Freudianism’s one great success was that talk therapy could be used instead of these more dangerous and invasive treatments for mental illness.  Still though if Norville is a danger to himself and others as Bromfenbrenner seems to suggest, Freudianism could be used as a tool to send a person “to the sanuh… the sanitary... to the booby house” as Moses puts it in the film’s denouement.  

The profession of psychiatry in general has done marvels for humanity as a whole, and in many ways the kind of talk therapy that Freud espoused has been instrumental in its progress, but his specific method that specifically relied on no one but the analyst (including the patient themselves!) being aware of what really was happening in the patients’ minds was pseudoscientific at best and a dangerous tool for abuse of medical power at worst.  Freud’s practices and specific ideas have largely disappeared from modern psychiatric methods, but he remains a powerful cultural force.  In the public eye he remains an old but respected scientist, in the vein of medical luminaries like Harvey and Jenner and Lister rather than those we recognize today as being smart and passionate but ultimately quite wrong like Galen and Pliny the Elder. Freud was a giant in his time, but the more his specific ideas are relegated to the dustbin of history, the better. 

He probably had something he really wanted to say about Sidney’s cigars though… 

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*Look at this man! 

** If this is true one really wonders what Rorschach was thinking when he selected blot number 5 which clearly is a moth or a bat or something.