Zhat is verry in-terr-esting.
It's a nice quiet evening, and for once I don't have any very urgent schoolwork. I'm going to indulge myself and be fannish.
Has there ever been a psychiatrist/psychologist/analyst/shrink portrayed in a positive light, in a weird film? I can't think of any. In non-fantastical mainstream movies, yes, plenty--I remember liking Analyze This because the hero was a shrink, and he was the sole voice of reason in a mad world, partly because he was a shrink. But right now, I'm considering classic horror, recent horror, and SF and fantasy of all stripes. It's probably a subset of the idea that science is evil; in a movie with unreal creatures/monsters/shapeshifters/mutants versus men in lab coats, you know who the villains are going to be. The treatment of psychologists, though, is a whole discussion unto itself.
Here's a list of the only psychologists, analysts, or what have you (I'll just say "shrink" for brevity) that I can think of in genre films. Please add your own contributions.
1. Dr. Creepydude in Cat People. He has a name, but I've blanked it out of my mind. Our heroine, Irina, is sent to him by her husband, to clear her mind of this crippling delusion that she's a were-panther and can't ever make love. Dr. Creepydude gives her a session of therapy. It consists of hypnotizing her, making her lie on a couch with a bright light shining in her eyes in a "We have ways of making you talk" fashion, and forcing her to spout all her secrets in a single session. Perhaps forcing tranquilizers on her as well, I don't recall for sure. Then he stalks her to her favorite place, the zoo. And eventually he decides that the only way to end this silly delusion of Irina's is to force her to have sex with him, thereby proving that it's only in her silly little head. His subsequent attempt to rape Irina ends in his death, I am happy to state. The sad part is that he winds up destroying her, too, stabbing her with his swordcane. (Overcompensating for anything?) The unintentional (perhaps) message is that therapists will ruin your life.
2. Dr. Gogol in Mad Love. OK, he's a surgeon, not an analyst. But then again, perhaps the concept of "psychology" as a major or a medical field wasn't even around back in 1935, when Mad Love came out. In any case, Dr. Gogol engages in a splendid scene of pseudo-Freudian bullshit in a movie that was made back when Freud was state-of-the-art. As I'm sure I've discussed here at some point, the plot of the movie revolves around one of Gogol's patients, Stephen Orlac (played by the highly strung and very funny Colin Clive). Orlac's hands are crushed in a railway accident, and when Dr. Gogol gets the case he replaces the crushed hands by grafting on a pair of good-quality hands from a fresh cadaver. The transplant succeeds, Orlac is able to regain his mobility--but there are two things wrong. One: the cadaver belonged to a murderer whose M.O. was knife-throwing. Orlac starts spontaneously throwing knives, letter-openers, his fountain pens, etc., whenever he gets upset. Two: Dr. Gogol doesn't tell anyone that he replaced the hands at all--as far as the patient and his family know, these are just the original hands, and Orlac is turning into a sociopath. Of course, Stephen Orlac shows up, distraught and shouting, "What have you done to me?! You and your black magic!" But Dr. Gogol is master of the situation (because he's played by Peter Lorre, who was awesome that way). With barely a hint that he is making it up as he goes along, he tells Orlac that he, Orlac, must be acting out a repressed desire from his childhood--perhaps he saw another boy throwing knives skillfully and envied him, and the recent accident brought that desire to the forefront of his mind once again. Even Orlac, vulnerable as he is, doesn't quite buy that, but he doesn't figure out the real answer until much later. Refreshingly, somebody later asks Gogol, "What did you tell him, Doctor?" and Gogol answers, "Oh, a lot of nonsense I don't believe myself." Those transplanted hands wind up killing Dr. Gogol eventually, and serve him right.
3. Dr. Seward in the various versions of Dracula. He's not technically a shrink either, but, like Gogol, he's a character who was written before the idea was codified in popular culture. Seward is head of an insane asylum, so for all intents and purposes, he fits the mold. Unusually, he's not a villain--far from it, he's a very likable man. But he's painfully ineffectual to do anything against the villains in their first few moves in the game; his patient, Renfield, runs around spilling clues to the plot right and left, and we understand their import while Seward doesn't. This has the effect of making him look stupid, even if most of us would be as clueless in his situation. The movies usually take it further: Seward becomes Mina's stodgy old father, the one who refuses to believe in the supernatural and comes out with lines like, "Oh come now, Van Helsing, surely in this day and age you don't believe in those outmoded superstitions...?" And, of course, there's the medical care. Oh my God. Plenty of other Dracula fans have winced in horror at Seward and Van Helsing's practices. I will just note that they give Lucy blood transfusions from four different guys in an age before anyone understands the concept of blood types fully; put an "anemic" girl into a warm bath to relieve her condition; and when they find a man with a depressed skull fracture and an obviously broken back, they pick him up and put him on his bed. (Stoker didn't know a blamed thing about first aid or medicine in general, it seems. He should have asked Conan Doyle for advice.) I'm reminded of a parody of Dracula in The Five-Minute Iliad, where Seward makes notes on the behavior of Renfield: "Diagnosis: batshit insane. Treatment: morphine."
4. Dr. Jonathan Crane in Batman Begins. Dr. Crane is a charming and soft-spoken young man, in a position like Seward's--he's the superintendent of Arkham Asylum. In his secret identity, he is (dun dun DUNNN) the Scarecrow, my top pick for most disturbing Batman villain. He has sane people committed to his care, then drives them crazy by giving them hallucinogens and asking sweetly, "Would you like to see my mask?" Hey, that's just a burlap sack with a face on the front, what's so scary about a HOSHIT NO oh christ get it away from me THERE IS NO GOD. Oh, and he has a very good evil laugh. And that's just his first scene.
5. I think that Sir John Talbot from The Wolfman (1941) counts as an honorary shrink. With the best of intentions, Sir John manages to screw everything up hideously. His big dope of a son, Larry, has been acting strangely, claiming that he's going to turn into a wolf. Obviously the thing to do is talk some sense into him, and make him see that it's all in his head. He must just be depressed after that strange accident a couple of nights ago. When Larry fails to be reassured, Sir John comes up with an even better solution. He ties Larry up in a chair by a window, through which the moon will be visible when it rises. Tough love. We'll prove to him that it's all in his imagination. And then he leaves poor scared Larry alone in the room and goes back outside, to hunt for the real wolf which must be out there somewhere, mustn't it? (To do Sir John justice, he starts feeling badly about it a few minutes later, and heads back to the house to check on Larry. He's not a very good father, but he's not a heartless brute, either.)
And, most recently:
6. Dr. Honnegger, in The Wolfman (2010 remake). Holy lobotomies, Dr. Honnegger was wonderful. Where do I even start?
Well, this version is set in the 1890s. Lawrence Talbot (never Larry), our dark and brooding hero, had some kind of childhood trauma long before the movie begins. We understand that his mother committed suicide, and that young Lawrence saw her body with a slashed throat. His father dealt with the whole mess by putting Lawrence in an insane asylum for a year. No explanation as to exactly why--did the boy become violent, try to kill himself, threaten his father, what?--but after that, Lawrence was packed off to America to live with relatives, and never permitted to return home. (In this version, the grown Lawrence is an actor, which feels right given that so many actors have similar toys in their attics.)
Of course, he goes back to his father's house as a grown man when his brother dies. Shortly thereafter all hell breaks loose, also of course. To sum up: in this version, Sir John Talbot is a werewolf, and Larry gets in the way of one of his rampages, gets bitten and infected, and goes on his very own killing spree in monstrous form later on. The authorities aren't willing to believe in monsters, but they are willing to believe in psychopaths, and when they find Lawrence waking up under a tree the next morning, shaking, confused and covered in blood, that's all the evidence they need. Lawrence winds up taking the rap for his father's crimes as well as his own. Maybe Sir John is a mastermind who set this all up in advance; maybe he's just good at turning a situation to his advantage. In any case, he is a nasty old coot.
More on the overall movie, later on. I promised you an evil shrink, and an evil shrink you shall have. The police club Lawrence on the head, and the next thing he knows, he's regaining consciousness in a grotty insane asylum. In a straitjacket. Buckled onto a chair, above an immersion tank full of water and ice chunks. And, facing him...
Dr. Honnegger. Who looks like evil!Freud. Who represents everything that people dread about psychiatrists. Who has a pointed black vandyke beard, and slicked-down black hair, and little wire-rimmed glasses worn high on his nose, and big, sad eyes, and impeccably cut clothes. Who speaks (bless him!) with a rich and sinister Austrian accent, uses a sickeningly sympathetic bedside manner, and clasps his well-manicured hands in front of him. (Who is played by a character actor I know and like, incidentally--Antony Sher, who is best known for playing Richard III and writing a good book about the process, Year of the King. I've felt rather proprietorial towards him ever since reading his book, and when I recognized him here I wanted to stand up and cheer. Remember the scene in Shakespeare in Love where Will goes to see his therapist, Dr. Moth? Same guy. He's made a career of playing shrinks and villains, and here he gets to do both at once. From the tenor of his performance, he had the time of his life doing The Wolfman.)
And his first words are (paraphrased), "Oh... Meester Talbot. I am sor-ry to see you here again, after all these years. I am... disappointed. I feel I have failed with you. Fortunately, the medical profession hass made great strides forward in the treatment of... cases like yours... since you were here last. Yess. Great strides." Yep. It's the identical doctor who worked on him when he was a boy. And then he nods to an assistant. While Lawrence is still going "Buh... wha... hunh?", Dr. Honneger stands gravely aside, and Lawrence is cranked up and down into the water and half-drowned in a ghastly form of hydrotherapy. (The immersion system works on a nifty setup of cogwheels, levers and pulleys. Nice touch: the guard who throws the lever is a big, ugly lout, and he's grinning from ear to ear as his victim starts to scream. He enjoys his work as much as the doctor does. I was delighted when I looked up the cast list on IMDB and found that this guy is listed in the credits as "Creepy Guard".)
Scenes of pseudo-therapy/torture follow. I think that hydrotherapy may have been regarded as outdated in the real world by the 1890s, but electroshock therapy has persisted into modern times (think Sylvia Plath). Lawrence is pretty much reduced to a quivering wreck and spends most of his time hallucinating. The real corker comes with this movie's version of the "Tie him up and put him in the moonlight" scene, which takes place in a lecture hall/amphitheater full of medical men. Dr. Honneger's speech is worth quoting in full:
(as Lawrence is brought in, drugged, gagged, and strapped to a wheelchair:) "Ah, Mr. Talbot." (to the audience:) "We are here tonight to illustrate conclusively that Mr. Talbot's fears are quite irrational. So, we will remain in this room together, and once Mr. Talbot has witnessed that the full moon holds no sway over him, that he remains a perfectly ordinary human being, he will have taken his first small step down the long road to mental recovery. We are all aware that Mr. Talbot has suffered quite traumatic personal experiences. He witnessed his mother's self mutilations. His young mind, unable to accept it, created a fantastical truth, that his father is to blame. That his father is literally a monster." (Pitying voice, to Lawrence:) "But, your father is not...a werewolf. You were not bitten by...a werewolf. You will not become...a werewolf, any more than I will sprout wings and fly out of that window."
Cue grisly transformation scene, in a well-lighted lecture hall in front of two hundred witnesses. For most of which, the, er, good doctor has his back turned, lecturing to the audience. Only when said audience starts yelling, "Dr. Honnegger!" and pointing behind him does he turn quizzically around. And it's werewolf o'clock. Three guesses what wolf!Lawrence throws Dr. Honnegger through, very shortly thereafter. And the first two guesses don't count. Oh, and the doctor winds up impaled on a pointy iron railing--I give wolf!Lawrence ten out of ten for style. The werewolf also takes some time to catch Creepy Guard, rip his liver out and eat a big bite. Just this once, wolf!Lawrence's kills are downright heartwarming.
So... the overriding message is that modern science can't deal with the supernatural. That most modern of sciences, psychology, is already regarded as evil and untrustworthy by a lot of people in the real world, and has been since it began. It's hard to test and define according to the methods of "hard" sciences, and it deals with soft, mutable things that are hard to quantify--emotions, senses, memories, dreams, the unconscious. No wonder the whole concept frightens people. It was invented by scary people like Sigmund Freud. Freud may not actually have been a scary person--I find him likable and sympathetic, from what I've read of his personal life--but as far as popular culture is concerned, he was a menacing figure who wanted to pry into your innermost secrets, humiliate you, and tell you that your problems arose from your wish to sleep with your mother and murder your father. Then maybe he would send you to have a frontal lobotomy.
As far as the supernatural world in fiction is concerned, psychiatrists can try to fight on the side of reality, ordinary human life--but they're corrupt, incompetent to deal with anything villainous. They make effectual villains themselves, but they can't do a thing to help humanity, because of their refusal to believe. They're always the smart-alecky skeptics. Despite believing in all manner of kooky things, they can't admit that unnatural monsters, old gods, etc., really exist and can do harm. They represent a discipline that nobody trusts, opposing a force that they don't understand themselves. It all seems a tad harsh, especially given the good work that psychology has done for the human race in reality. I'd welcome a few instances of heroic shrinks, incompetent shrinks who learn their errors in time to do some good in the world, or shrinks who fulfill the role of Wise Old Stranger to the heroic characters.
Has there ever been a psychiatrist/psychologist/analyst/shrink portrayed in a positive light, in a weird film? I can't think of any. In non-fantastical mainstream movies, yes, plenty--I remember liking Analyze This because the hero was a shrink, and he was the sole voice of reason in a mad world, partly because he was a shrink. But right now, I'm considering classic horror, recent horror, and SF and fantasy of all stripes. It's probably a subset of the idea that science is evil; in a movie with unreal creatures/monsters/shapeshifters/mutants versus men in lab coats, you know who the villains are going to be. The treatment of psychologists, though, is a whole discussion unto itself.
Here's a list of the only psychologists, analysts, or what have you (I'll just say "shrink" for brevity) that I can think of in genre films. Please add your own contributions.
1. Dr. Creepydude in Cat People. He has a name, but I've blanked it out of my mind. Our heroine, Irina, is sent to him by her husband, to clear her mind of this crippling delusion that she's a were-panther and can't ever make love. Dr. Creepydude gives her a session of therapy. It consists of hypnotizing her, making her lie on a couch with a bright light shining in her eyes in a "We have ways of making you talk" fashion, and forcing her to spout all her secrets in a single session. Perhaps forcing tranquilizers on her as well, I don't recall for sure. Then he stalks her to her favorite place, the zoo. And eventually he decides that the only way to end this silly delusion of Irina's is to force her to have sex with him, thereby proving that it's only in her silly little head. His subsequent attempt to rape Irina ends in his death, I am happy to state. The sad part is that he winds up destroying her, too, stabbing her with his swordcane. (Overcompensating for anything?) The unintentional (perhaps) message is that therapists will ruin your life.
2. Dr. Gogol in Mad Love. OK, he's a surgeon, not an analyst. But then again, perhaps the concept of "psychology" as a major or a medical field wasn't even around back in 1935, when Mad Love came out. In any case, Dr. Gogol engages in a splendid scene of pseudo-Freudian bullshit in a movie that was made back when Freud was state-of-the-art. As I'm sure I've discussed here at some point, the plot of the movie revolves around one of Gogol's patients, Stephen Orlac (played by the highly strung and very funny Colin Clive). Orlac's hands are crushed in a railway accident, and when Dr. Gogol gets the case he replaces the crushed hands by grafting on a pair of good-quality hands from a fresh cadaver. The transplant succeeds, Orlac is able to regain his mobility--but there are two things wrong. One: the cadaver belonged to a murderer whose M.O. was knife-throwing. Orlac starts spontaneously throwing knives, letter-openers, his fountain pens, etc., whenever he gets upset. Two: Dr. Gogol doesn't tell anyone that he replaced the hands at all--as far as the patient and his family know, these are just the original hands, and Orlac is turning into a sociopath. Of course, Stephen Orlac shows up, distraught and shouting, "What have you done to me?! You and your black magic!" But Dr. Gogol is master of the situation (because he's played by Peter Lorre, who was awesome that way). With barely a hint that he is making it up as he goes along, he tells Orlac that he, Orlac, must be acting out a repressed desire from his childhood--perhaps he saw another boy throwing knives skillfully and envied him, and the recent accident brought that desire to the forefront of his mind once again. Even Orlac, vulnerable as he is, doesn't quite buy that, but he doesn't figure out the real answer until much later. Refreshingly, somebody later asks Gogol, "What did you tell him, Doctor?" and Gogol answers, "Oh, a lot of nonsense I don't believe myself." Those transplanted hands wind up killing Dr. Gogol eventually, and serve him right.
3. Dr. Seward in the various versions of Dracula. He's not technically a shrink either, but, like Gogol, he's a character who was written before the idea was codified in popular culture. Seward is head of an insane asylum, so for all intents and purposes, he fits the mold. Unusually, he's not a villain--far from it, he's a very likable man. But he's painfully ineffectual to do anything against the villains in their first few moves in the game; his patient, Renfield, runs around spilling clues to the plot right and left, and we understand their import while Seward doesn't. This has the effect of making him look stupid, even if most of us would be as clueless in his situation. The movies usually take it further: Seward becomes Mina's stodgy old father, the one who refuses to believe in the supernatural and comes out with lines like, "Oh come now, Van Helsing, surely in this day and age you don't believe in those outmoded superstitions...?" And, of course, there's the medical care. Oh my God. Plenty of other Dracula fans have winced in horror at Seward and Van Helsing's practices. I will just note that they give Lucy blood transfusions from four different guys in an age before anyone understands the concept of blood types fully; put an "anemic" girl into a warm bath to relieve her condition; and when they find a man with a depressed skull fracture and an obviously broken back, they pick him up and put him on his bed. (Stoker didn't know a blamed thing about first aid or medicine in general, it seems. He should have asked Conan Doyle for advice.) I'm reminded of a parody of Dracula in The Five-Minute Iliad, where Seward makes notes on the behavior of Renfield: "Diagnosis: batshit insane. Treatment: morphine."
4. Dr. Jonathan Crane in Batman Begins. Dr. Crane is a charming and soft-spoken young man, in a position like Seward's--he's the superintendent of Arkham Asylum. In his secret identity, he is (dun dun DUNNN) the Scarecrow, my top pick for most disturbing Batman villain. He has sane people committed to his care, then drives them crazy by giving them hallucinogens and asking sweetly, "Would you like to see my mask?" Hey, that's just a burlap sack with a face on the front, what's so scary about a HOSHIT NO oh christ get it away from me THERE IS NO GOD. Oh, and he has a very good evil laugh. And that's just his first scene.
5. I think that Sir John Talbot from The Wolfman (1941) counts as an honorary shrink. With the best of intentions, Sir John manages to screw everything up hideously. His big dope of a son, Larry, has been acting strangely, claiming that he's going to turn into a wolf. Obviously the thing to do is talk some sense into him, and make him see that it's all in his head. He must just be depressed after that strange accident a couple of nights ago. When Larry fails to be reassured, Sir John comes up with an even better solution. He ties Larry up in a chair by a window, through which the moon will be visible when it rises. Tough love. We'll prove to him that it's all in his imagination. And then he leaves poor scared Larry alone in the room and goes back outside, to hunt for the real wolf which must be out there somewhere, mustn't it? (To do Sir John justice, he starts feeling badly about it a few minutes later, and heads back to the house to check on Larry. He's not a very good father, but he's not a heartless brute, either.)
And, most recently:
6. Dr. Honnegger, in The Wolfman (2010 remake). Holy lobotomies, Dr. Honnegger was wonderful. Where do I even start?
Well, this version is set in the 1890s. Lawrence Talbot (never Larry), our dark and brooding hero, had some kind of childhood trauma long before the movie begins. We understand that his mother committed suicide, and that young Lawrence saw her body with a slashed throat. His father dealt with the whole mess by putting Lawrence in an insane asylum for a year. No explanation as to exactly why--did the boy become violent, try to kill himself, threaten his father, what?--but after that, Lawrence was packed off to America to live with relatives, and never permitted to return home. (In this version, the grown Lawrence is an actor, which feels right given that so many actors have similar toys in their attics.)
Of course, he goes back to his father's house as a grown man when his brother dies. Shortly thereafter all hell breaks loose, also of course. To sum up: in this version, Sir John Talbot is a werewolf, and Larry gets in the way of one of his rampages, gets bitten and infected, and goes on his very own killing spree in monstrous form later on. The authorities aren't willing to believe in monsters, but they are willing to believe in psychopaths, and when they find Lawrence waking up under a tree the next morning, shaking, confused and covered in blood, that's all the evidence they need. Lawrence winds up taking the rap for his father's crimes as well as his own. Maybe Sir John is a mastermind who set this all up in advance; maybe he's just good at turning a situation to his advantage. In any case, he is a nasty old coot.
More on the overall movie, later on. I promised you an evil shrink, and an evil shrink you shall have. The police club Lawrence on the head, and the next thing he knows, he's regaining consciousness in a grotty insane asylum. In a straitjacket. Buckled onto a chair, above an immersion tank full of water and ice chunks. And, facing him...
Dr. Honnegger. Who looks like evil!Freud. Who represents everything that people dread about psychiatrists. Who has a pointed black vandyke beard, and slicked-down black hair, and little wire-rimmed glasses worn high on his nose, and big, sad eyes, and impeccably cut clothes. Who speaks (bless him!) with a rich and sinister Austrian accent, uses a sickeningly sympathetic bedside manner, and clasps his well-manicured hands in front of him. (Who is played by a character actor I know and like, incidentally--Antony Sher, who is best known for playing Richard III and writing a good book about the process, Year of the King. I've felt rather proprietorial towards him ever since reading his book, and when I recognized him here I wanted to stand up and cheer. Remember the scene in Shakespeare in Love where Will goes to see his therapist, Dr. Moth? Same guy. He's made a career of playing shrinks and villains, and here he gets to do both at once. From the tenor of his performance, he had the time of his life doing The Wolfman.)
And his first words are (paraphrased), "Oh... Meester Talbot. I am sor-ry to see you here again, after all these years. I am... disappointed. I feel I have failed with you. Fortunately, the medical profession hass made great strides forward in the treatment of... cases like yours... since you were here last. Yess. Great strides." Yep. It's the identical doctor who worked on him when he was a boy. And then he nods to an assistant. While Lawrence is still going "Buh... wha... hunh?", Dr. Honneger stands gravely aside, and Lawrence is cranked up and down into the water and half-drowned in a ghastly form of hydrotherapy. (The immersion system works on a nifty setup of cogwheels, levers and pulleys. Nice touch: the guard who throws the lever is a big, ugly lout, and he's grinning from ear to ear as his victim starts to scream. He enjoys his work as much as the doctor does. I was delighted when I looked up the cast list on IMDB and found that this guy is listed in the credits as "Creepy Guard".)
Scenes of pseudo-therapy/torture follow. I think that hydrotherapy may have been regarded as outdated in the real world by the 1890s, but electroshock therapy has persisted into modern times (think Sylvia Plath). Lawrence is pretty much reduced to a quivering wreck and spends most of his time hallucinating. The real corker comes with this movie's version of the "Tie him up and put him in the moonlight" scene, which takes place in a lecture hall/amphitheater full of medical men. Dr. Honneger's speech is worth quoting in full:
(as Lawrence is brought in, drugged, gagged, and strapped to a wheelchair:) "Ah, Mr. Talbot." (to the audience:) "We are here tonight to illustrate conclusively that Mr. Talbot's fears are quite irrational. So, we will remain in this room together, and once Mr. Talbot has witnessed that the full moon holds no sway over him, that he remains a perfectly ordinary human being, he will have taken his first small step down the long road to mental recovery. We are all aware that Mr. Talbot has suffered quite traumatic personal experiences. He witnessed his mother's self mutilations. His young mind, unable to accept it, created a fantastical truth, that his father is to blame. That his father is literally a monster." (Pitying voice, to Lawrence:) "But, your father is not...a werewolf. You were not bitten by...a werewolf. You will not become...a werewolf, any more than I will sprout wings and fly out of that window."
Cue grisly transformation scene, in a well-lighted lecture hall in front of two hundred witnesses. For most of which, the, er, good doctor has his back turned, lecturing to the audience. Only when said audience starts yelling, "Dr. Honnegger!" and pointing behind him does he turn quizzically around. And it's werewolf o'clock. Three guesses what wolf!Lawrence throws Dr. Honnegger through, very shortly thereafter. And the first two guesses don't count. Oh, and the doctor winds up impaled on a pointy iron railing--I give wolf!Lawrence ten out of ten for style. The werewolf also takes some time to catch Creepy Guard, rip his liver out and eat a big bite. Just this once, wolf!Lawrence's kills are downright heartwarming.
So... the overriding message is that modern science can't deal with the supernatural. That most modern of sciences, psychology, is already regarded as evil and untrustworthy by a lot of people in the real world, and has been since it began. It's hard to test and define according to the methods of "hard" sciences, and it deals with soft, mutable things that are hard to quantify--emotions, senses, memories, dreams, the unconscious. No wonder the whole concept frightens people. It was invented by scary people like Sigmund Freud. Freud may not actually have been a scary person--I find him likable and sympathetic, from what I've read of his personal life--but as far as popular culture is concerned, he was a menacing figure who wanted to pry into your innermost secrets, humiliate you, and tell you that your problems arose from your wish to sleep with your mother and murder your father. Then maybe he would send you to have a frontal lobotomy.
As far as the supernatural world in fiction is concerned, psychiatrists can try to fight on the side of reality, ordinary human life--but they're corrupt, incompetent to deal with anything villainous. They make effectual villains themselves, but they can't do a thing to help humanity, because of their refusal to believe. They're always the smart-alecky skeptics. Despite believing in all manner of kooky things, they can't admit that unnatural monsters, old gods, etc., really exist and can do harm. They represent a discipline that nobody trusts, opposing a force that they don't understand themselves. It all seems a tad harsh, especially given the good work that psychology has done for the human race in reality. I'd welcome a few instances of heroic shrinks, incompetent shrinks who learn their errors in time to do some good in the world, or shrinks who fulfill the role of Wise Old Stranger to the heroic characters.