In that seminal work of 20th century cinema, “What About Bob?” (1991, Director: Franz Oz), Bob, a multi-phobic personality played with sensitivity and insight by Bill Murray is visiting his psychiatrist, Dr. Marvin, played by Richard Dreyfuss. On learning of Bob’s phobias, Dr. Marvin prescribes Bob a copy of his latest book, Baby Steps. In this work, the patient—Bob—is urged to conquer his phobias step by step, thus in the classic behaviourist manner, demystifying and desensitizing the initial source of his anxiety. At the centre of his Baby Steps philosophy is a dissection of Bob’s phobias. Instead of treating the phobias as a unified expression of Bob the subject, Dr. Marvin’s book attempts to convince us that Bob can free himself of his phobic self through overcoming the empirical obstacles that activate each phobia.
Thus, when Dr. Marvin is introducing Bob to the notion of baby steps, the psychiatrist tells him to think only of the immediate goal – of leaving the office, or entering the hallway, of descending the elevator, and so forth. As Bob complies with Dr. Marvin’s instructions, he is elated and empowered to find himself able to walk around the office with ease—albeit while still holding a tissue in his hand to avoid being contaminated by any potential germs. In another scene, having tracked Dr. Marvin down in his vacation home, a close up shot of Bob apparently sailing on a yacht(“I’m sailing, I’m sailing!”) gives way to a wider shot, which shows Bob harnessed to the mast with rope, his body fixed in place. The list goes on.
Oz’s film is a testament to the paradoxical nature of behavioural therapy. At stake in this paradox is an experience of psychic freedom in spite of the body’s retention of phobia. Each euphoric outburst Bob experiences is thwarted by another manifestation of his phobia, as though no bodily affliction were expressive enough to discharge the phobia of its power. Thus, despite his gradual adjustment to the world of things, Bob’s phobias are never successfully confronted, but instead transformed into different bodily responses and affects. Indeed, Oz’s film confronts a common criticism of cognitive and behavioural therapies: that they never “deal with the problem” but only attend to the symptoms. But it is not immediately obvious why this should be a problem. After all, what is at stake in the presupposition that symptoms are less important than causes?
In his lectures on anxiety and phobias, Freud characterises “true obsessions” as involving an “emotional state which remains constant in [people]; the idea changes.” For Freud, the emotional state is generally justified, as it responds to an original cause. The pathology of the obsession is that the “associated idea is no longer the appropriate original one, related to the aetiology of the obsession, but is one which replaces it, a substitute for it.” A history of symptoms unfolds, each with an increasingly opaque relationship to the original cause, each pushing the original conflict deeper into the intra-psychic unconsciousness as it becomes substituted.
Freud’s reliance on unconscious substitution is modified in his account of phobias, he writes: “Substitution is no longer the predominant feature in the [phobias]; psychological analysis reveals no incompatible, replaced idea in them.” Instead, what remains consistent is the emotional state, anxiety, which is not derived from memory but from the accumulation of sexual tension. Freud’s point here is one we can apply to “What About Bob?”
Even if we hold in brackets the notion of sexual tension as the cause of phobia, then what nevertheless remains intact is the impression of a libidinous force—a Schopenhauerean will—shaping and giving rise to phobia in the first place. For psychoanalysis, the force would reside in the unconscious. For phenomenology, it would reside in the lived body. In each case, it is clear that the removal of symptoms means that we lose sight of the conflict that gave birth to the symptoms in the first place. If the symptom carries with it a hermeneutic rather than incidental manifestation to it, then the symptom must be acted out in order to be understood. That is to say, the symptom must be attended to on both a phenomenological and hermeneutic level—as both lived and interpreted.
How does Bob overcome his phobias? After hunting Dr. Marvin down to his holiday home, he befriends the family, earns their trust and becomes an accepted member of the unit. All of this involves notable resistance from Dr. Marvin, whose preoccupation with the vanity of his public appearance leads him to reject Bob’s pathological attachment lest it ruin that appearance. In the end, Bob becomes a sort of demonic gadfly for Dr. Marvin, forever turning up, intruding upon his phantasies, and fragmenting the order of domestic life. At a surprise party late in the film for Dr. Marvin, his sister is introduced before Bob then enters the scene. Disgusted that he’s touching his sister, Dr. Marvin lashes out at Bob, the two of them fighting in the midst of the birthday crowd. In the next scene, Dr. Marvin has become the patient. Visited by a medical doctor, Dr. Marvin is prescribed Prozac. The camera then moves to Dr. Marvin lying in bed, his eyes twitching in an anxious state. At this point, a key turn in the movie occurs. Bob intervenes, questioning if Prozac is the best solution, suggesting that Librium might be a more suitable alternative. The doctor concedes; effectively fulfilling the dialectic engineered at the beginning of the movie, whereupon the two characters would swap identities while retaining their bodies.
The critical question is as follows: Is Bob an imposter assuming the appearance of a non-anxious angel or is he an anxious demon, whose symptoms have been covertly displaced into the body of Dr. Marvin? Oz leaves us guessing, and Bob’s “redemption” from anxiety is located in this ambiguity. Dr. Marvin, on the other hand, is reduced to a primal manifestation of the id: the final scenes show us the doctor in a hunting shop seeking the best weapon to murder Bob with. It is not by chance that he elects explosives. For if we take Bob to be not only a neurotic patient, but also a symbolic representation of anxiety itself, then we can understand this act of aggression on behalf of Dr. Marvin as a concession to his failure as a psychiatrist. In his treatment of Bob the patient via the baby steps methodology, Dr. Marvin fails. His failure is evident in the repetition and reprise of anxious symptoms (Bob’s very appearance at the summer house can be seen as a return of the repressed).
The dynamic conflict thus remains firmly in place no matter how desensitised Bob is the surrounding world. This last act of desperation by Dr. Marvin—not simply to shoot or stab him, but to literally remove all trace of Bob by killing him with explosives—is the logical expression of his flawed therapeutic methodology: to avoid the original conflict and erase the symptomatic matter that remains, as he says to Bob when tying him up: “You understand, don’t you? You won’t go away.” Is Dr. Marvin talking to Bob or to (his own) anxiety? Even here, Dr. Marvin is unable to terminate his therapy with Bob. Having freed himself from the ropes, Bob makes his way back to the home—back to the heart of domesticity—with Dr. Marvin outside reflecting on his success. Like a spectre on the horizon, Bob appears against the backdrop of the house with a cake, congratulating him on being cured by Dr. Marvin’s new model of therapy, “death therapy.” Thus, Dr. Marvin turns Bob the patient into an anxious force that not only returns from a state of repression, but also from the grave.
Thus, when Dr. Marvin is introducing Bob to the notion of baby steps, the psychiatrist tells him to think only of the immediate goal – of leaving the office, or entering the hallway, of descending the elevator, and so forth. As Bob complies with Dr. Marvin’s instructions, he is elated and empowered to find himself able to walk around the office with ease—albeit while still holding a tissue in his hand to avoid being contaminated by any potential germs. In another scene, having tracked Dr. Marvin down in his vacation home, a close up shot of Bob apparently sailing on a yacht(“I’m sailing, I’m sailing!”) gives way to a wider shot, which shows Bob harnessed to the mast with rope, his body fixed in place. The list goes on.
Oz’s film is a testament to the paradoxical nature of behavioural therapy. At stake in this paradox is an experience of psychic freedom in spite of the body’s retention of phobia. Each euphoric outburst Bob experiences is thwarted by another manifestation of his phobia, as though no bodily affliction were expressive enough to discharge the phobia of its power. Thus, despite his gradual adjustment to the world of things, Bob’s phobias are never successfully confronted, but instead transformed into different bodily responses and affects. Indeed, Oz’s film confronts a common criticism of cognitive and behavioural therapies: that they never “deal with the problem” but only attend to the symptoms. But it is not immediately obvious why this should be a problem. After all, what is at stake in the presupposition that symptoms are less important than causes?
In his lectures on anxiety and phobias, Freud characterises “true obsessions” as involving an “emotional state which remains constant in [people]; the idea changes.” For Freud, the emotional state is generally justified, as it responds to an original cause. The pathology of the obsession is that the “associated idea is no longer the appropriate original one, related to the aetiology of the obsession, but is one which replaces it, a substitute for it.” A history of symptoms unfolds, each with an increasingly opaque relationship to the original cause, each pushing the original conflict deeper into the intra-psychic unconsciousness as it becomes substituted.
Freud’s reliance on unconscious substitution is modified in his account of phobias, he writes: “Substitution is no longer the predominant feature in the [phobias]; psychological analysis reveals no incompatible, replaced idea in them.” Instead, what remains consistent is the emotional state, anxiety, which is not derived from memory but from the accumulation of sexual tension. Freud’s point here is one we can apply to “What About Bob?”
Even if we hold in brackets the notion of sexual tension as the cause of phobia, then what nevertheless remains intact is the impression of a libidinous force—a Schopenhauerean will—shaping and giving rise to phobia in the first place. For psychoanalysis, the force would reside in the unconscious. For phenomenology, it would reside in the lived body. In each case, it is clear that the removal of symptoms means that we lose sight of the conflict that gave birth to the symptoms in the first place. If the symptom carries with it a hermeneutic rather than incidental manifestation to it, then the symptom must be acted out in order to be understood. That is to say, the symptom must be attended to on both a phenomenological and hermeneutic level—as both lived and interpreted.
How does Bob overcome his phobias? After hunting Dr. Marvin down to his holiday home, he befriends the family, earns their trust and becomes an accepted member of the unit. All of this involves notable resistance from Dr. Marvin, whose preoccupation with the vanity of his public appearance leads him to reject Bob’s pathological attachment lest it ruin that appearance. In the end, Bob becomes a sort of demonic gadfly for Dr. Marvin, forever turning up, intruding upon his phantasies, and fragmenting the order of domestic life. At a surprise party late in the film for Dr. Marvin, his sister is introduced before Bob then enters the scene. Disgusted that he’s touching his sister, Dr. Marvin lashes out at Bob, the two of them fighting in the midst of the birthday crowd. In the next scene, Dr. Marvin has become the patient. Visited by a medical doctor, Dr. Marvin is prescribed Prozac. The camera then moves to Dr. Marvin lying in bed, his eyes twitching in an anxious state. At this point, a key turn in the movie occurs. Bob intervenes, questioning if Prozac is the best solution, suggesting that Librium might be a more suitable alternative. The doctor concedes; effectively fulfilling the dialectic engineered at the beginning of the movie, whereupon the two characters would swap identities while retaining their bodies.
The critical question is as follows: Is Bob an imposter assuming the appearance of a non-anxious angel or is he an anxious demon, whose symptoms have been covertly displaced into the body of Dr. Marvin? Oz leaves us guessing, and Bob’s “redemption” from anxiety is located in this ambiguity. Dr. Marvin, on the other hand, is reduced to a primal manifestation of the id: the final scenes show us the doctor in a hunting shop seeking the best weapon to murder Bob with. It is not by chance that he elects explosives. For if we take Bob to be not only a neurotic patient, but also a symbolic representation of anxiety itself, then we can understand this act of aggression on behalf of Dr. Marvin as a concession to his failure as a psychiatrist. In his treatment of Bob the patient via the baby steps methodology, Dr. Marvin fails. His failure is evident in the repetition and reprise of anxious symptoms (Bob’s very appearance at the summer house can be seen as a return of the repressed).
The dynamic conflict thus remains firmly in place no matter how desensitised Bob is the surrounding world. This last act of desperation by Dr. Marvin—not simply to shoot or stab him, but to literally remove all trace of Bob by killing him with explosives—is the logical expression of his flawed therapeutic methodology: to avoid the original conflict and erase the symptomatic matter that remains, as he says to Bob when tying him up: “You understand, don’t you? You won’t go away.” Is Dr. Marvin talking to Bob or to (his own) anxiety? Even here, Dr. Marvin is unable to terminate his therapy with Bob. Having freed himself from the ropes, Bob makes his way back to the home—back to the heart of domesticity—with Dr. Marvin outside reflecting on his success. Like a spectre on the horizon, Bob appears against the backdrop of the house with a cake, congratulating him on being cured by Dr. Marvin’s new model of therapy, “death therapy.” Thus, Dr. Marvin turns Bob the patient into an anxious force that not only returns from a state of repression, but also from the grave.
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