On the Spectrums

Abstract

shortly before his admission to a psychiatric ward in the mid-1950s, a man announced to his family that he was now a “tele vi sion expert.” This expertise had been acquired, apparently, through the man’s ability to watch the family’s new tv set for “hours at a time.” Writing up the case in 1955 for the Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, his psychiatrist described the nature of this expertise: “During a commercial the announcer said, ‘Brush your teeth with _____ toothpaste,’ while the picture showed a man brushing his teeth; the patient rushed to the bathroom and brushed his teeth.”1 Later, the patient is said to have scooped up water from a goldfish bowl in response to a hair tonic commercial. The psychiatrist supplied an appropriately sober diagnosis: commandautomatism and echopraxia to tele vi sion. No doubt this patient would be surprised at his diagnosis: how can I be “crazy” when I am simply doing what tele vi sion so clearly wants me to do? Why did this brief and seemingly insignificant case merit attention within a venerated psychiatric publication such as the Bulletin? The editors were no doubt motivated in part by the novelty of the new medium, a technology becoming central to American life and thus of general interest to every body— even psychiatrists. But this vaguely comical portrait of psychosis and tele vi sion also confirmed a suspicion already ubiquitous at midcentury: electronic media seek to control us, perhaps even to the point of commandeering the ner vous system. After all, how many billions of dollars do corporations and politicians spend each year hoping to cultivate just such unquestioning command automatism in their target audiences? For an advertising firm, what greater achievement is there than creating a slogan that evokes an echopraxic response in the viewer? Coke is thus the real thing, and there is nothing you can do to prevent it. A practicing clinician contributed this case to the Bulletin, but one could easily imagine a similar assessment issuing from the pen of F. R. Leavis and appearing in the pages of Scrutiny—or, for that matter, sprung from the mind of William Gaines and published in the pages of Mad Magazine. This patient would also be at home in Harold Laswell’s propaganda technique, IN T R O D U C T IO N