Forgive me, Dr. Phil, for others have sinned

God is dead, but Oprah is alive and kicking. Even those of us who are familiar with Oprah Winfrey's television show only through the brief glimpses we get while channel surfing know that its function is now chiefly religious. The frequency with which one stumbles across members of the audience confessing their sins (aka issues) is astonishing.

Like all the religious leaders who infest the airwaves Oprah promises her flock release from their sorrow and travails. As part of her evangelization she has for yers been aided by one Phillip C. McGraw, a psychologist known to his admirers as Dr. Phil. Dr. Phil is a big Texan with a deep voice which he uses to give Oprah's guests what he describes on his website as a talking to. People with problems describe them to Dr. Phil, and he sternly lectures them about what they need to do to get back on the path of clean living.

These lectures have made Dr. Phil wildly popular. His picture has appeared on the cover of at least one major newsmagazine, and he now has his own television show. But what exactly does he say in these talkings to?

Well, I once saw him inform a large woman who wanted to lose weight that she had to be committed to losing weight. If you try to make sense of this statement, the best translation you can come up with is "If you want to lose weight, you have to do something that will make you lose weight, and you have to keep on doing it." Can't argue with that, eh?

In fact, all Dr. Phil has seemed to be doing, any time I've watched him giving someone a talking to, was saying aloud what most people in the audience were thinking. He was not impressing the audience by demonstrating how he could come up with solutions they wouldn't think of but by showing that a Ph. D. had come up with the same solutions they had come up with. And by allowing the audience to pile on, metaphorically, to the person getting the talking to.

To be fair to Dr. Phil, though, he has not shied away from explaining his ideas about how people should be behaving. He has published three popular books about his ideas, the most recent of which when this article was first published in 2002 was Self Matters, published by Simon and Schuster. On his website Dr. Phil describes this book as groundbreaking. So what does it say?

The central idea of Self Matters is that the feeling that one's life is "incomplete, unbalanced, and altogether more difficult than it really should be" stems from a lack of congruity between one's "authentic self" and one's "fictional self." Your authentic self is "the person you once were before life took its toll," while the fictional self is "the identity...you believe you are supposed to be, the person people tell you you are." The problem, apparently, is not that life is difficult but that you believe it should be difficult. Get rid of that evil fictional self and what's left is your original authentic troublefree self!

Dr. Phil does propose a method for eliminating the fictional self. It involves asking yourself questions like:

• What are the ten most defining moments of your life?
  
• What are the seven most critical choices you have made to put you on your current path?
  
• Who are the five most pivotal people in your world and how have they shaped you?

Of course, the only answer an honest and moderately intelligent person could give to those questions is "How am I supposed to know?" Well, Dr. Phil says you're supposed to know. This is part of what is called an internal audit. You audit your fictional self, decide how you can change your attitudes and beliefs about your defining moments so that they are authentic, and then change them.

In other words, years of conditioning don't matter, social pressures don't matter, economic necessity doesn't matter – you can change your attitudes and beliefs all by yourself and when you do your problems are over.

Of course, it's not attitudes and beliefs which cause problems, it's behaviour, and as psychologists know, attitudes and beliefs are poor predictors of behaviour. For example, we all know people with very liberal attitudes and beliefs about life who still behave like reactionaries – gee, for some reason Bob Rae just popped into my mind. Even in the unlikely event that you can discover for yourself the crucial psychological factors in your life, simply changing your attitudes and beliefs about them, even if that is possible, is likely on average to have zero effect on your behaviour.

I suppose one could argue that Dr. Phil has uncovered an enormous vein of alienation in society and is at least trying to do something about it. And getting people to think about their lives and to take responsibility for them are good things, aren't they?

One could also argue, though, that what Dr. Phil has uncovered is an enormous vein of narcissism and paranoia. According to Dr. Phil, the individual starts out as perfect and his problems begin when other people take part in his or her life. In fact, his conception of the fulfilled life is startlingly similar to the one conventionally assumed to be that of the prettiest girl in high school. The appeal of this conception to such a large part of the North American population is at the very least depressing.

Viewed in this light, Dr. Phil's ability to get people to think about their lives and to take responsibility for them would seem sinister if there were any chance of his ideas working. Would you like to work for an "authentic" boss who thought you were the source of all his problems?

Of course the truth is probably less threatening, or at least we can hope that it is. I don't believe that Dr. McGraw is a charlatan or any other kind of crook. Unlike respected members of the conventional religious community he isn't peddling consecrated prayer cloths or oil with the story that they'll make you rich or cure you of cancer. He actually wants people to think, which in my experience is a sign of sincerity. For all I know Dr. McGraw's intent is to use people's narcissism and paranoia to get them to examine their own lives rationally, and then to substitute effective non-narcissistic and non-paranoid strategies and tactics for the ineffective narcissistic and paranoid ones they have been using. Where was id, there let ego be, and maybe Dr. McGraw thinks you have to trick people into substituting ego for id.

If that is Dr. McGraw's strategy, it is still likely to be ineffective, for the reasons which have been given above. So why do people swear by Dr. McGraw's immature ideas and patently ineffective internal audits? One reason is that, like many psychologists and psychiatrists, Dr. McGraw may well have an ability to get people to change which is independent of his ideas. That is, he does help people personally, but not for the reasons he thinks he does.

Of course that doesn't do anything for people who just buy his books or sit in a large audience at one of his seminars, but there is also a phenomenon called cognitive dissonance reduction. If you pay money for a book or to attend a huge seminar at which you do not get personal attention you have an interest in believing that you got your money's worth, so you believe it.

Then again, people's problems are not naturally immutable. As we know, many people's problems become less serious over time without therapy or counselling. If that improvement follows a reading of one of Dr. McGraw's books then one may attribute it to the application of his principles. And Dr. McGraw makes a lot of money, so everybody's happy. Which is what everyone wanted in the first place, isn't it?

It is most likely, though, that the reason people swear by Dr. Phil is that there is always a seller's market in hope. As Dr. Johnson observed, hope is the chief species of enjoyment that human life affords. Unfortunately, the supply of hope is always limited, especially since conventional religion lost its ability to inspire it. Obviously Dr. McGraw's contention that your life is not hopeless but in fact an unending opportunity for unlimited gratification is going to appeal to people, and it will be all the more appealing for being so lengthily argued.

In other words, ideas like Dr. Phil's are religious. In a country which has abandoned the old gods, people like Dr. Phil step in to introduce a new opiate for the masses, a new improved god for a new improved society. The most popular new god is the self, which if left unfettered will, according to Dr. Phil, bring about paradise on earth. You can say another thing for Dr. Phil, though – he's got enough guts to place his paradise on earth, rather than in the neverneverlands where conventional religions place theirs.

Forgive Me, Dr. Phil, For Others Have Sinned © John FitzGerald, 2002