It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood: The Reluctant Psychoanalyst finds Mr. Rogers to be (gulp) creepy.

I have a confession.  Mr. Rogers always creeped me out.  When I was a kid, his Kingdom of Make-Believe just plain gave me the creeps.  Lately, I feel like I’m the only one that experienced this.  I’ve been talking with all kinds of people about him as we’ve toyed with idea of going to see Tom Hanks’ portrayal of him and everybody I talk to seems to be a fan.  The Reluctant Wife is enthusiastic about Mr. Rogers, as are the Reluctant Stepdaughters.  The Reluctant Son has never seen Mr. Rogers.  Which makes sense.  We didn’t watch much live TV.  We watched lots of video tapes.  Mostly of Dinosaurs and Construction projects but also the Sound of Music.  Over and over again.  My students, though, light up when they talk about Mr. Rogers.  One, in particular, remembered the music on the show – music that was largely improvised on set by Jazz musicians whom Fred Rogers supported in their creative efforts.

So you’d think that the movie, “It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood”, would be about Mr. Rogers.  And it is, sort of, but mostly it is about Tom Juno, who wrote a piece on Mr. Rogers for Esquire Magazine’s 1998 edition called “Can You Say Hero”.  It is a beautiful piece.  It positively glows.  And if you just read the piece, you’d think it was written by a fan – maybe even a sycophantic fan.  But the movie, where the fictional Lloyd Vogel replaces the real life Tom Juno so that there is license to tell a story that includes make believe, is the backstory about the irascible, angry and hard-nosed journalist who interviewed Fred Rogers because his editor assigned him to write a puff piece on the beloved children's television host.

The man who came to write the puff piece – 400 words – was angry at his father who had left him and his sister and his mother when his mother lay dying.  He was angry at his editor, because he was a serious journalist who did investigative reporting – and exposed the men he wrote about as being anything but who they presented themselves as being – he didn’t do puff pieces.  He was angry at Fred Rogers because Mr. Rogers, instead of answering his questions and telling him about himself, asked Lloyd/Tom about himself.  And he was lost because he was a new father – and angry enough to recreate for his son the kind emotional distance and pain in their relationship that characterized his own relationship with his father.

So this is a coming of age film for a middle aged man.  He comes of age under the guidance of a kindly guy – Mr. Rogers.  And it has a happy ending.  And along the way, we get to know both of these men, and their families, at least a little bit.  And we see what a kind, sweet, but also self-indulgent man Mr. Rogers is.  Mr. Rogers is the kind of man who will keep a whole crew and studio waiting for an hour as he entertains a kid who has come for his make a wish moment and won't stop trying to attack him.  He is also a kind of idealized father figure – the kind of father figure whom Eddie Murphy could send up on Saturday Night Live as being nothing like the father figures in the hood.  And we, who came from the suburbs, could resonate with Eddie Murphy’s portrayal because our fathers were nothing like the father figure on TV either.  That said, when I became a father, I very much wanted to resonate with aspects of Mr. Rogers.  I think that I missed an opportunity by not watching Mr. Rogers more frequently with my son – I didn't get to reacquaint myself with Mr. Rogers and I wasn't able to talk with the reluctant son about the complex issues - things like divorce and death, with which we were dealing in our lives with Mr. Rogers as a foil which we might have done had we seen the show together.  Instead, we had to muddle through, talking about them on our own.

Now, before I go any further, I want to be clear.  I cried through this movie.  I was moved by it and by the relationship between these two men and by the transformation that takes place in the Lloyd character.  I found Mr. Rogers to be an admirable person and I was moved by his ability to bring the best out of people in general and Lloyd in particular.  When they are riding together on a subway car and the kids on the car recognize that Mr. Rogers is with them and they don’t quite know what to do about that, as kids are want to do, and, they start singing “It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood”, the song that Fred Rogers wrote and sings at the beginning of every episode, this could go either way.  It could be cruel mockery – Eddie Murphy on 6^th grade steroids – but it turns, instead, into an homage.  Not only do the kids sing, but the hardened New Yorkers, on their way to office jobs and janitorial work all join in and the car becomes, for a moment, the shared space of Make Believe and everyone is aware that they live in the same neighborhood and that they care about each other and about life.  It is a wonderfully Disney – or Mr. Rogers – moment.

So I say all this to acknowledge that I admire this man and this movie.  But I think it is important to assert there is still something deeply creepy about him and about it.  And part of what is creepy about it, I must admit, is something that I worry about and find creepy about myself – something that is related to the reluctant aspect of my being a psychoanalyst – and perhaps to my being reluctant about most everything that I do.  What is creepy about this movie and, I think, about Mr. Rogers, is that Mr. Rogers is a True Believer.  He believes deeply and powerfully in what he is preaching – and he is preaching. 

At a particularly poignant and difficult point in the film, he says “What’s human is mentionable and what’s mentionable is manageable.”  This is a lovely idea.  It is something that I believe in deeply and I think that it comes from the traditions that inform the work that I do – Mr. Rogers counts Erik Erikson, an important psychoanalyst who helped reframe the psychoanalytic tradition to include the impact of people on each other, not just Freud’s imagined unrolling of an underlying biological mandate. 

By the way, Erik Erikson was not Erik Erikson’s given name.  Erikson called himself that to clarify that he was his own father – he disavowed his biological father and his father’s traditions.  Mr. Rogers – and Lloyd – also do this.  Mr. Rogers was brought up in a home where feelings were not talked about.  And he worked to figure out how to articulate his feelings and help others do that.  When he was working with Lloyd to help him figure out how to manage his anger at his father and ultimately to let go of it, to forgive him, he pointed out that many of Lloyd’s positive qualities – his ability to stand up to powerful men and to write the truth about them – came out of the relationship with his father – not just his relating against him, but his modelling himself, in part, after who it is that his father was.  Fred Rogers was, of course, also talking about himself - and by extension Erik Erikson.  Mr. Rogers, if he would have talked with Eddie Murphy about the father figure Murphy portrayed on Saturday Night Live, would have admired that father figure as embodying and caricaturing and celebrating something real and positive about the father figures that we have had, including my own not-Mr.-Rogers father.

The creepy part, here, is that Mr. Rogers believes that his adoptive fathers – the ones he has read about – including, I’m sure, Dr. Rogers – Carl Rogers – the son of a preacher (Fred Rogers is an ordained minister himself), who also cast off the repressive mantel of a non-feeling life to embrace a life of deeply felt feelings and helping others to tap into them – the creepy part is that Mr. Rogers has carried within himself the evangelical zeal of the religious tradition.  He firmly believes that Lloyd will be a better person for embracing his father rather than rejecting him.  He believes – and the movie is set up to show us that Lloyd is a better person for learning how to forgive his father – a task that seems impossible at the beginning of the film.

The task seems impossible for two reasons.  One is because Lloyd’s father is a louse.  Lloyd sees him for the first time in at least ten years at this sister’s third wedding.  He introduces his father to his wife and his son – his father’s first grandson.  His father, drunk and surly, refers to Lloyd's wife as “doll” and asks for some time alone with his son.  Lloyd, who has been seething all night about his father, explodes – and we join him in righteously feeling that his father deserves to be the focus of his wrath – even if that spoils his sister’s wedding. 

But the second and more intractable reason is that Lloyd appears to have no interest in reconciling with his father.  He is intent on nursing his anger – holding onto it – making it his own and justifying his anger at the world through the righteousness of his anger at his father.  He shows up on Mr. Rogers set to do a puff piece on Mr. Rogers – perhaps to expose Mr. Rogers as a fake good father – but not, in any way, to reconcile with his own father.  But Mr. Rogers doesn’t see it that way.  Mr. Rogers understands him to be a person who is in pain – whose anger is separating him from the world and Mr. Rogers decides to save him.  Mr. Rogers decides that this guy needs some loving – even though he isn’t asking for it.

And this is the creepy part.  Mr. Rogers imposes his view of the world on those around him.  He says, in effect, “This is what you need to do in order to get better.”  It is the same thing that he does in the studio when he decides unilaterally that the most important things - more important than everyone getting home for dinner on time - is this kid and his relating to him.

But don’t I do that as a psychoanalyst?  Even more importantly, haven’t I profited from the many people who have helped me with things, even when I haven't asked, in my life?  What is so creepy about this, you might ask.  

Well, my thin defense of myself as an analyst is that people come to me wanting to change.  More precisely, they decide that they want things to be different.  And the difference between those two statements is what collapses my thin defense.  In fact, most people who come to see me don’t want to change.  They want my help in changing the world – in altering their friends or figuring out how to help their spouses change.  And I do something tricky and a little creepy – I say, “I can’t help the world change, but I can help you change.”  In other words, I say something like – “Do as I say, not as I do.  Make the hard and difficult changes that are part and parcel of having a different attitude towards the world while I sit her unchanged and unchanging.”  And this sounds remarkably like what Fred Rogers does.

So this film does not portray what many films about psychotherapy movies portray (Don Juan DeMarco, for instance).  In these films, the person in treatment’s change is contingent on the psychotherapist’s change.  Mr. Rogers does not change.  He knows – from the beginning – what is best for Lloyd.  In fact, the movie begins at the very end, we just don't know it yet.  Rogers imposes his treatment on Lloyd.  

Psychotherapy in general – and psychoanalysis in particular – can, I think, be guilty of this sin.  We can decide, whether based on theory or on empirical evidence, what is right for this person without taking that person into account.  And I call that a sin.  We cannot know what is best for another without getting to know them.  In fact, it is not our place to know what is best for them – and I think Mr. Rogers would agree with me about this – they must come to know what is best for them.  What we can do is provide a space in which they can come to know that for themselves – but also from within themselves.

An illustration of a moment where Rogers creates a space for Lloyd to do this kind of work occurs when Mr. Rogers takes Lloyd out to lunch in a Chinese Restaurant in Pittsburgh.  Mr. Rogers suggests that Lloyd observe one minute of silence so that he can reflect on all the wonderful things that people have done that have led him to become the person that he is.  The beautiful and creepy part of this particular moment is that everyone in the restaurant recognizes that this is what Mr. Rogers is doing and they support him in creating the silent space so that Lloyd can inhabit it.

Mr. Rogers comes to know Lloyd in profound ways.  And Lloyd profoundly profits from it.  The real life Lloyd – the tough guy who was softened by Mr. Rogers, Tom Juno, is part of the P.R. team hyping this film.  Juno sees the film as capturing the essence of the life changing experience that he had in his relationship with Mr. Rogers.

When Freud called Psychoanalysis an “Impossible Profession”, he compared it with education and politics as the other impossible professions.  Mr. Rogers was an educator and, in the moment when he convinced congress not to cut funding to public television, a politician.  But he was also a member of a profession that Freud notably didn’t include – the clergy.  And it is ironic that Freud didn’t include the clergy as an impossible profession.  On the surface, Freud’s position makes sense – he derided religion as trying to reassure us rather than help us face what is essentially difficult about the human condition.  But it is ironic because Freud’s creation of psychoanalysis has often been likened to a religion – and treated by psychology, for instance – as a religion rather than a science.

Freud wanted his adherents – his believers if you will – to have faith that the principles he articulated would serve them well as they worked to engage with the terrible forces that his technique unleashed in the people that analysts serve.  He wanted the folks he enlisted to treat the human condition to know that they were doing the right thing because their patients would experience them as doing something violent to them.

I think that Mr. Rogers, in his own quiet, patient way, was every bit as violent in his interactions with Lloyd/Tom as Lloyd/Tom’s father had been with him.  It is Mr. Rogers certainty that this is best for Lloyd/Tom that I find creepy and perhaps enviable.  I don’t feel as certain as Mr. Rogers, or Dr. Freud when I am helping people uncover the powerful feelings that stir inside them.  My lack of certainty may, then, do them a disservice.  At times I may shy away from something that needs to be said because I am not certain that the pain of hearing what I have to say will be outweighed by the relief that the exposure of the feared experience will bring.  Or maybe I want to respect my patient's ability to articulate what they believe to be their own truth in their own time.  Or maybe that last statement is just a justification – a way of distancing myself from my own belief system that may be somewhat fuzzier or more flexible than that of Mr. Rogers and Dr. Freud, but underneath every bit as hard and unforgiving.  

So I end up in a paradoxical spot.  I need to have faith to do what it is that I do.  My patients trust me to know what I am doing.  But too much faith - too much certainty - puts me in the camp of being an evangelist - imposing my beliefs on others.  I think Juno would object that he is better off.  He has stated that he has finally figured out what Mr. Rogers wanted - he wanted us all to pray.  And for some of us, this is the answer.  But is it the answer for all of us?  Would Mr. Rogers have been OK with a wide range of prayer?  I'm sure he was, at least on the surface.  But I think there is something creepy about all of us striving to be helpful to others, ostensibly by helping them broaden their range of freely being themselves - but the risk is that they may become as much our puppet as Rogers' King Friday the 13th.  This continues to give me pause, and continues to give me the same creepy feeling I got as a kid.

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