Pub Date : 1900-01-01DOI: 10.1215/9781478002444-001
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
20世纪50年代中期，一名男子在被送进精神病院前不久向家人宣布，他现在是一名“电视专家”。显然，这一专业技能是通过这个男人“一次看几个小时”家里的新电视机而获得的。他的精神科医生在1955年为《门宁格诊所公报》(Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic)撰写了这个案例，描述了这种专业知识的本质:“在一则广告中，播音员说，‘用_____牙膏刷牙’，而图片上是一个男人在刷牙;病人冲进浴室刷了牙。后来，据说这位病人在看到一个护发液广告后，从金鱼缸里舀起了水。精神科医生给出了一个相当清醒的诊断:电视视觉的命令自动行为和回声恐惧症。毫无疑问，这位病人会对他的诊断结果感到惊讶:当我只是在做电视清晰地希望我做的事情时，我怎么会“疯了”呢?为什么这个简短而看似无关紧要的案例会引起像《公报》这样受人尊敬的精神病学出版物的关注?毫无疑问，编辑们的动机部分来自于新媒体的新颖性，这项技术正成为美国人生活的核心，因此每个人都对它感兴趣——甚至包括精神病学家。但这种对精神病和电视的模糊滑稽描绘，也证实了一种在本世纪中叶已经普遍存在的怀疑:电子媒体试图控制我们，甚至可能达到占领神经系统的程度。毕竟，企业和政客们每年要花多少美元，希望在他们的目标受众中培养这种毫无疑问的命令自动化?对于一家广告公司来说，还有什么比创造一个能引起观众共鸣的口号更伟大的成就呢?因此，可乐是真正的东西，你无法阻止它。一位执业的临床医生在《公报》上发表了这个案例，但人们很容易想象f·r·里维斯(F. R. Leavis)的笔下发表了类似的评估，并出现在《审查》杂志上——或者，就此而言，威廉·盖恩斯(William Gaines)的脑海中涌现出了类似的评估，并发表在《疯狂杂志》上。这个病人也会熟练掌握哈罗德·拉斯韦尔的宣传技巧:in T R O D U C T O O N
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