CELEBRITY SHRINKS
The love-filled story of Mildred and Bernie, analysts to the stars.
One of the first cults I ever heard about was that of Mildred Newman and Bernard Berkowitz. So many celebrities extolled their magical abilities, and so many people around me were reading their books. Swearing by them. One of their patients, Nora Ephron, plugged them relentlessly, and based the character of the shrink in her novel Heartburn on Mildred. (Maureen Stapleton played the role in the 1986 film version.)
Here is the 1977 article from Esquire, by Susan Edmiston, that I remember reading when I was in high school.
*****
Back in 1973, Random House published a fifty-six-page book called How To Be Your Own Best Friend, by Mildred Newman and Bernard Berkowitz. The book was slender, in content as well as size, and not likely to appeal to an intellectually sophisticated audience. “What Love Story is to The Brothers Karamazov, How To Be Your Own Best Friend is to The Interpretation of Dreams,” commented one psychoanalyst. The book packaged a few good old American ideas—a belief in willpower, being on your own team and the power of positive thinking—in a new, seemingly psychoanalytic context. What it seemed to be saying was, “You can change your life and be happy. All you have to do is decide to do so and be your own best friend.” The book eventually sold three million copies, taking up a long-term residency on the best-seller lists.
Two months ago, Mildred Newman and Bernard Berkowitz, who are married to each other, gave us another book. This one, called How To Take Charge Of Your Life and published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, elaborates the anti-masochism, pro-narcissism theme voiced in the first book. It says, please yourself, be for yourself, be on your own side.
“If you are on their side
And if they are on their side
Who is on your side?”
ask the authors in their aphoristic form. Since the new book had already sold 125,000 copies before publication, chances are that by the time you read this, it will have become another big best seller, making the names Mildred Newman and Bernard Berkowitz, were they not familiar before, known throughout the country.
But in New York—in certain literary and show-biz circles, anyway—the Berkowitzes are known simply as Mildred and Bernie. If you turn to the back of their first book, you’ll find endorsements by a list of celebrities and demicelebrities that includes Tony Perkins, Neil Simon, Paula Prentiss, Dick Benjamin, Rex Reed and Dan Greenburg. These people know the Berkowitzes not as authors but as shrinks. In fact, all of them, at one time or another, have been patients. Since they have talked so much—in person and in print—about Mildred and Bernie, the couple has begun to take on the aspect of a phenomenon.
Part of the phenomenon is that Mildred and Bernie seem to possess extraordinary powers. As one patient explains, “It’s like they go zap! and all of a sudden people who go to them are translated into successes.” He recites the litany of success stories known to every Mildred and Bernie observer: Actor Tony Perkins goes to Mildred and after years of bachelorhood gets married to model Berry Berenson and has two babies! “They have got to be the happiest, most wonderful couple,” the patient comments. “I mean, if that’s not real!” Gael Greene, a New York magazine writer, goes to Mildred and writes a novel! “I mean, she has the courage to write this novel. She takes a lot of lumps for writing it and it gets on the best-seller list!” Nora Ephron goes to Mildred, leaves her unhappy first marriage, gets a book on the bestseller list and marries again! “But mainly, forget all that, Nora suddenly . . . like, she’s this national personage!” Fashion designer Joel Schumacher reads Mildred and Bernie’s book, consults Mildred, writes Carwash and becomes a hot Hollywood screenwriter! “And he’s not even a writer!” Cosmopolitan magazine movie reviewer Liz Smith goes to Mildred and becomes a nationally known gossip columnist, syndicated in sixty papers around the country! Movie director Frank Perry goes to Mildred, loses a lot of weight and gets happily remarried! The list goes on and on.
At various times, these and at least a dozen other celebrities have made their way downtown to a down-at-the-heels apartment building on a quiet block in Greenwich Village, where Mildred and Bernie have their seventh-floor office. (When he was in treatment, Neil Simon considered the elevator so unreliable that he preferred to walk the six flights of stairs.) There is a tiny vestibule, hardly big enough for two people, with a pile of obsolete magazines on a table, a room for group therapy with a refrigerator and a big, round table, and a room each for Mildred and Bernie to practice individual therapy, his with a leather couch, hers with a table covered with bottles of perfume and hand lotion that give the room the effect of a boudoir. Nor are the analysts any more stylish than their surroundings. Mildred is a warm, vital-looking woman with a strong, handsome face and an envelopingly maternal, if rather voluminous, body. “Earth mother” is the irresistible image for most people. “Aging Bennington graduate,” someone says. Bernie is cooler, grey-haired, and tends to remind people of some authoritarian figure in their past. “My father,” says one patient. “My high-school principal,” says another.
But this homey, unprepossessing couple turns out regularly at movie screenings, Broadway openings, fashionable parties and historic glamorous events like Woody Allen’s 1976 New Year’s Eve bash. Often they appear in the midst of a clutch of their celebrity patients—proud parents surrounded by a flock of beautiful, talented children. Reports fly: They take their patients out to dinner, hold receptions for them when they marry, invite them for weekends at their Woodstock country home. And their patients invite them back. “I see them at a lot of things,” says Rex Reed. “It’s all part of their work to support the people they help. They are not just professional guidance counselors. I mean, I’ve spent weekends with them and everything. They’ve come to my apartment for dinner. I’ve gone to Europe with them on the France. We’ve gone to dinner in London. I visited them at a country inn where they were staying in the South of France. They visited me in the South of France. They’re just genuinely concerned about all their patients.” As a result of being seen around their celebrity patients so often, Mildred and Bernie have begun to be regarded as celebrities in their own right. “I walked into one party and I knew at once it was a chic party,” says one patient, “because the first people I saw were Mildred and Bernie.”
What this all means is not immediately clear. Are Mildred and Bernie, like the masseuse, the astrologer and the hairdresser, additions to the traditional showbiz retinue? Are they variations on the “in” weight doctor, cosmetic surgeon or other society doctors? The Dr. Feelgoods of the psyche? Or are they variants of the fashionable guru? Are Mildred and Bernie a kind of chicken-soup version of Mme. Blavatsky or Gurdjieff or Swami Muktananda? What is going on here?
By all accounts, the story of Mildred and Bernie as celebrity shrinks begins with the dramatic cure of Paula Prentiss. The actress had attempted suicide during the filming of What’s New, Pussycat? in 1966 and had been hospitalized in New York’s Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic for seven or eight months. “Oh, yeah, sure, I tried to do myself in, about a thousand times!” she told The New York Times. “I could not enjoy myself, did not love myself, I was terrified people would see my true thoughts.” A friend sent her to Mildred. “And now! Wow!” she continued, “I am me! I am happy, beautiful, funny—people love me! I am my own best friend!”
Paula’s husband, Dick Benjamin, star of Goodbye, Columbus, The Diary of a Mad Housewife and Portnoy’s Complaint, followed her into analysis after suffering anxieties over the opening night of Neil Simon’s play The Star-Spangled Girl, and from then on the Berkowitzes’ fame spread from actor to actor and movie set to movie set. In the spring of 1969, at least five then and future analysands were together on the set of Catch-22—Paula Prentiss, Dick Benjamin and Tony Perkins were in the movie and Nora Ephron and Dan Greenburg were covering the shooting for The New York Times Magazine and the Los Angeles Times respectively. Perkins went into analysis with Mildred late in 1969. When Rex Reed interviewed Perkins nine months later for The New York Times, he went home with Mildred’s phone number. Reed started analysis that very week. Nora and Dan, who were then married to each other, had met Mildred in 1969, when Paula Prentiss was starring in the off-Broadway production of Dan’s play Arf, the story of a dog that wants to be a woman. In 1972, when Nora decided she needed a shrink, she went to Mildred, and Dan followed.
The Mildred-and-Bernie phenomenon got another boost on the set of Play It As It Lays in 1972. “We were in the middle of the desert—in Pear Blossom, California—shooting the suicidal climax of the movie,” remembers director Frank Perry. “It was near Death Valley. I mean it was just dreary beyond belief. Their book was being passed around in mimeo form. I had a chance to read it on a day off and I thought it was a batch of simplistic homilies.” Yet two years later, when Perry was in Montana shooting Rancho Deluxe, he bought a copy of the book. “I suddenly thought all that stuff I was dismissing as simplistic homilies was really quite marvelous. So when I got back from Montana, I called Mildred.” Tony Perkins, the star of Play It As It Lays, gave a copy of How To Be Your Own Best Friend to Joel Schumacher, the costume designer, as a Christmas present. “I loved the book a lot,” says Schumacher. “It was about feelings.” He wrote to Mildred and when he got back to New York went to see her. It was through Play It As It Lays that Perkins met Berry Berenson, whose apartment was used as a set for the film.
(A small interjection is necessary here: Although Mildred and Bernie went everywhere together, it was Mildred who had the charisma and the miracle-worker reputation and who ended up with all the celebrity patients. Mildred would then encourage them to go into groups led jointly by herself and her husband.)
Meanwhile, the book. Tony Perkins says that on the set of Play It As It Lays, it was called simply THE BOOK. The book had been written almost by accident. In the middle of 1971, the Berkowitzes’ friend Jean Owen, a researcher for the Elmo Roper public-opinion firm and sometime free-lance writer, interviewed them for a magazine article. Miss Owen spent three days and three nights at the Berkowitzes’ Woodstock house. “She took books and books of notes,” they told a reporter, “and just kind of organized and reorganized our philosophy and point of view that we had built up through the years.” As she took notes, Jean Owen repeatedly exclaimed, “This is too good for a magazine article!”
The Berkowitzes decided to turn it into a book. They invested $20,000, had it printed, bought a couple of newspaper and magazine ads and distributed How To Be Your Own Best Friend out of the garage of a friend in Connecticut. Rex Reed was co-hosting a television show in Boston and invited them on as guests. Rex asked Liz Smith, who was not a patient but would become one, to be on the show, too. “Here were these nice-looking, ordinary people, and they were promoting their book, How To Be Your Own Best Friend,” recalls Liz. “They were telling the audience to send five dollars to one of the longest addresses you ever heard, like something, something Wilton Road, something, something, Connecticut. So I said to them, ‘You must be nuts. Why don’t you have this book printed professionally? No one will ever order this book because no one will ever have time to get down all the information.’ I had read the book and, at the time, I thought it was so silly and simplistic and ridiculous and childish. But my promotion instincts took over, and I started asking them, ‘Why hasn’t it been in the Reader’s Digest?’ and things like that. They said, ‘Well, it’s too late now; we already did it.’ I said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous; nobody’s ever heard of it. Take it and sell it. Get an agent. It’s a natural.’ In the meantime, they went back to their distinguished patients and started asking them, ‘What do you think about this idea?’ and everybody said, ‘Sure.’”
Up until now, Mildred and Bernie had kept their professional life as psychoanalysts and their business life as authors separate. Many of their patients had been helped enormously by them; now the patients began to help Mildred and Bernie. Nora Ephron took home a stack of books and began giving them out to people in publishing. One of the first was her friend Nancy Hardin, a Paramount vice-president who was then an editor at Bantam Books. “Nora said to me, ‘This is either the best book I’ve ever read or the worst. In any case, you ought to take a look at it,’” recalls Nancy. “I immediately saw commerce written all over it. Each maxim and anecdote is a truism. There are little flashes of truth saying what you already know but particularly want to remember. It succinctly sums up what it would take you many sessions with an analyst to go through. If I hadn’t found it personally useful, which I did, I would have been interested in it anyway because I just thought it would have a huge sale.” Nancy took the book to Bantam editor in chief Marc Jaffe, who authorized her to make an initial offer of $10,000 for it. But by then Nora had already given it to one of New York’s most powerful literary agents, Lynn Nesbit.
Nora had also given it to Nan Talese, an editor at Random House. On opening night of Neil Simon’s play The Sunshine Boys, Nan noticed a woman in the audience who didn’t have the usual chic opening-night face. “It was the most remarkable face, very warm, a rather earthy face, with a sense of great centeredness,” remembers Nan. “I was walking over to the opening-night party with Nora Ephron and I asked Nora who the woman was and she said, ‘That is a wonderful woman named Mildred Newman and she is my analyst. She’s written a book, privately printed, and I’ve given it to Lynn, but maybe I should give it to you, too.’ The next morning I called Nora and got a copy.”
When the book arrived, Nan took it in to Random House editor in chief Jim Silberman. Three or four years earlier, he had been at a party and met a woman psychoanalyst named Mildred Newman. “She talked about her work and I said, ‘You really ought to write a book.’ She was a woman of remarkable energy and it sounded as if her point of view was unique.” There was a picture of the Berkowitzes on the back of the book and when Silberman saw it he said, “My God, it’s Mildred!”
On January 17, 1973, Lynn Nesbit sent out a letter saying that bids for How To Be Your Own Best Friend were due in her office by Thursday, January 25. Bantam had improved its offer to $62,500, but the Berkowitzes accepted Random House’s offer of $60,000 for hard-cover rights only, anticipating that the paperback rights would prove to be valuable. (They eventually sold for $885,000.) Random House reset the type and redesigned the book. The Berkowitzes told newspapers that protecting what they believed in, they hadn’t allowed the publisher to change even a comma. But one word was changed. Instead of “by Mildred Newman, Bernard Berkowitz and Jean Owen,” the author line now read, “by Mildred Newman & Bernard Berkowitz with Jean Owen.”
When Random House set about promoting the book, they were met with a rude surprise. “I had thought because they were such striking people we would have an easy time with publicity,” recalls Jim Silberman. Despite all efforts, the publicity department was unable to get many reviews, interviews or TV appearances for the Berkowitzes. It was reduced to calling in personal favors. The sales department began to worry. “It was a disaster,” recalls Silberman. But meanwhile, the advertising department had been working on an ad. The ad ran as a full page in The New York Times Book Review on Sunday, June 17, 1973. On Monday the phones started ringing. By the end of the week, the New York booksellers and jobbers were sold out. “I’ve never seen an ad have that strong an effect,” says Silberman. “In most publicity campaigns, you try ten different things and you can’t really tell what’s responsible for a book’s success. Here, nothing else was working. It was absolutely clear the ad had done it.”
The ad?
The ad featured a photograph of the book, four short paragraphs of introductory copy and endorsements by Nora Ephron, Paula Prentiss, Rex Reed, Neil Simon, Anthony Perkins, Richard Benjamin, Berry Berenson and Dan Greenburg. Across the top was a headline taken from Rex Reed’s quote: “This wonderful book can solve your problems by helping you to like yourself.” The ad proved that Mildred and Bernie’s best friends weren’t Mildred and Bernie. They were Nora and Paula and Rex and Neil and Tony and Dick and Berry and Dan.
The endorsements fanned the controversy taking place among what Liz Smith calls “the chic community of detractors that hang out at Elaine’s.” Wasn’t it exploiting your patients, who were in a vulnerable and dependent relationship to you, to allow their endorsements to be used to promote your book? Wasn’t there something unprofessional about socializing with your patients? Weren’t the Berkowitzes risking their professional reputations for social and financial advancement? Feelings ran so high and arguments became so passionate that dinner parties broke up over the subject of Mildred and Bernie.
Patients shrugged off these objections, even turned them into virtues, and seemed to feel the Berkowitzes could survive on their merits. “I have friends who are outraged by Mildred and Bernie,” says Liz Smith, “but I keep saying to them, ‘Look, I don’t give a shit. You may be absolutely right.
“I don’t think that would change what they did for me and what I’ve seen them do for other people. While I don’t think they are Jesus jumping off the cross, I think they are incredible. They are great human beings. They are dedicated and honest. They are doing what they love. They are this perfect example of two people who have melded their lives socially and professionally. They just didn’t draw the line between the people they loved and worked with in therapy and the people they wanted to see socially.”
Liz had first seen Mildred professionally in the midst of a terribly unhappy love affair. “I thought, ‘Oh, I’m really in for it now . . . ninety-nine years in the electric chair of love again.’ I just wanted to talk; I didn’t have any idea of going into therapy. I was in such bad shape that there wasn’t any question of anything except immediate amelioration of pain and I thought the whole thing was ridiculous and would never really help me.
“Mildred told me that I was suffering from narcissistic mortification, which I just thought was the greatest . . . I mean, it was so true. I was suffering from this incredible love rejection. A friend of mine had gone off with my lover. And Mildred said to me one day, ‘Liz, you are such a wonderful person. You’re so good and marvelous and you deserve to be loved.’ She said, ‘Can’t you just accept the fact that neither one of these persons really cares about you?’ And that was just like Saul being struck down on the road to Damascus. I mean, that was such an illuminating, electrifying thought to me that I was just able to accept what had happened and quit obsessing about it and carrying on and writing letters and doing all the ridiculous, self-destructive things that everybody has done at one time or another. So I immediately began to recover.
“Anyway, the end of this story is that time passed and I began to get things out of therapy, whether I wanted them or not. I think Mildred makes herself into this fabulous mother substitute. She’s just this earth-mother type, very warm and loving and understanding. I’ve been in it about three years with her and about a year and a half ago my life began to open up like a flower. The whole process has been totally magical to me and I said to my friend Gerrie Stutz, who’d been in therapy with a real Freudian for years, ‘I guess this all sounds ridiculous to you because your analyst is so kosher and mine is very personal and never forgets my birthday and brings me presents when she goes off on trips’—here’s something she gave me for my birthday [she opened a box with a brass heart in it], and she’s given me antique pins and a beautiful little necklace for Christmas and stuff like that—‘and has this intensely personal thing about her,’ and Gerrie said, ‘Lizzie, I don’t care if she’s a witch doctor and dances around you and throws dust and voodoo dolls at you. The important thing is it seems to work.”
Although Rex Reed was sick in bed, he spoke to me over the phone. “I just felt I had made an instant friend,” he said. “I felt I had met someone instantly compassionate and sympathetic and very understanding and very mature. She inspires an instantaneous confidence that’s very rare. I don’t think she’s a textbook analyst. I think she feels the only way she can help you is on a personal basis. . . .
“She breaks down all the things you think are so terrible about yourself and then she shows them to you, like on a plate, and says, ‘Look at this, I mean, look at this. Is this so terrible?’ I would see an article about myself that would be really nasty and I would just fall apart. ‘That person is writing these things and they don’t even know me,’ and she would say, ‘But exactly. Don’t you understand that they’re writing these things because they’re jealous?’
“If it seems familial, it’s because everybody has sooner or later recommended somebody else. They have a friend who is so famous they’re afraid to be seen in an analyst’s waiting room, so they say, ‘Well, listen, go and see Mildred.’ It’s like going to somebody’s apartment. I mean, Mildred makes tea for you and you raid the icebox. I eat and talk at the same time. They always have fruit and fresh vegetables and candy and strawberries and fruit juices and soft drinks, tea, hot chocolate, soup—instant soup—cheese, melon . . . I don’t know what any other analyst serves.
“Mildred likes most of her patients to be in a group, too. But I didn’t work out in a group. I was going to go into a group and get a novel out of it. But they were all just nice people. Some of them didn’t really relate to their children; some of them were housewives who didn’t feel they had enough free time. I wanted to go into a group and sit there with Blanche DuBois and Lizzie Borden and Richard Speck and Tennessee Williams . . . but these were all just nice people. They weren’t in such serious trouble that I needed to spend money to hear their problems.”
Joel Schumacher was living in an apartment in an East Side town house owned by interior designer Angelo Donghia. The apartment was furnished with chaise longue, sofa, chairs, screens and walls all covered in blue fabric printed in a giant plaid. Six feet three and gangly, Joel was working on the screenplay for The Wiz on a huge dining table covered in yards of the same material.
“I was a drug addict for four years,” he said. “I was on speed and I was shooting up about six times a day when I stopped. I weighed one hundred thirty-two pounds. I had lost five teeth. I had blown my career. I owed a lot of money. I had just absolutely wrecked everything. I gave up drugs in 1970 and decided to live instead of die. One of my friends suggested that would be a good time for me to go into analysis. I went to a doctor that his doctor recommended. It was the classic Freudian analysis. I poured out my life to him from the couch and every once in a while he asked me a question. You know, I read this great thing of Woody Allen’s once where he said he had been in Freudian analysis for fifteen years and had never seen the doctor and finally one day he looked over his shoulder and there was a stickball bat with a grapefruit on it. Well, that’s exactly how it felt.”
When Joel went to see Mildred after writing to her, he had to decide whether to go back to California, where he knew nobody, and try to become a screenwriter or to stay in New York, where all his friends and job contacts were. “Mildred, of course, was on the side of me taking the risk and doing what I believed in. At the time I did not have any money. I just had the money I made on my first movie and I needed that as my little nest egg to go back to California. I didn’t have the money for analysis. She said, ‘You can always call me when you want to talk and, whatever it costs, I will be able to carry that until you can pay it.’ I went back to Hollywood and I did costumes for more movies and wrote at night. I would make frequent trips to New York and see Mildred as much as I could. She not only made room for me, but she carried me for two years until I said to her in the office one day, ‘Now is the time I can clear up my debt.’
“With Mildred, it’s a learning and growth process on both ends. She’s not interested in people who aren’t also interested in her—in giving to her and in her growth. I feel there are some sessions when Mildred speaks a lot about herself—her discoveries, her interests, her knowledge. That is a very thrilling balance to me. She is sincerely, I mean sincerely, excited by my life and my success. And yet, sometimes when I have a very big decision to make about business and I might be weighing certain things, she says to me, ‘It’s very important that you realize that I will love you whether you do this or not.’”
Such ecstatic views are not limited to Mildred’s celebrity patients. A writer and editor who has been in therapy since 1968 told me, “God is female and Jewish. It’s Mildred.”
In interviews with patients it became clear that what was going on inside the analysis was as unorthodox as what was going on outside it. The Berkowitzes weren’t witch doctors: Bernie had a Ph.D. in psychology from New York University and had trained at the Alfred Adler Institute; Mildred held a master’s degree in psychology from Hunter, had completed training in the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis and made much of her relationship with Theodor Reik, who had founded the N.P.A.P. after being denied membership in the American Psychoanalytic Association. Reik, not to be confused with Wilhelm Reich of orgone-box fame, was an early disciple of Freud who lacked a medical degree, and the N.P.A.P. was one of the first nonmedical institutes offering training in psychoanalysis. Yet what was happening between Mildred and her patients was different in certain respects from what was taught by analytic institutes.
The general pattern was this: Future patients, often on the rebound from what they called Freudian shrinks, would meet Mildred and Bernie socially. At a moment of crisis in their lives, they’d go to Mildred just to talk and would gradually enter therapy with her. Either immediately or eventually, they would accept a relationship with her in which she was an idealized, bountiful mother. Mildred’s warmth and demonstrativeness were sometimes an element in establishing the relationship. A woman who was once one of their most impassioned critics tells this story. At a movie event, she was introduced to Mildred and Bernie. “Oh, I’m so glad to meet you. I’ve heard so much about you,” Mildred said, swooping down upon her and kissing her. “I knocked over a glass, I was so startled,” the woman remembers. “But what it did was it got me. It worked. Forget about whether being kissed appealed to me or didn’t appeal to me. It got me.” Mildred and Bernie took her out to dinner along with the celebrity patients with whom they’d attended the screening.
The relationship, once established, fulfilled every analysand’s fantasy. Mildred provided food, presents, hugs and kisses. She dazzled the patient with stunning insights. One described her as “more psychic than psychoanalyst.” She made phone calls when she thought patients might be depressed. She made house calls when necessary. The patient became open to suggestion and when Mildred told him how wonderful he was, he believed it. When she told patients to go home, look in the mirror and tell themselves they were wonderful, it worked. Coming from Mildred as a powerful and benevolent authority figure, the philosophy expressed in the book—be your own best friend, be yourself, like yourself, don’t downgrade yourself, don’t care what anybody else thinks—became powerful medicine. “It occurred to me,” said Neil Simon, “that if you accept the philosophy of her book, you don’t even have to go through therapy.”
Mildred helped people with the strategies and tactics of living and gave them advice. She sent one patient to a voice coach (a patient of Bernie’s) and called another’s agent for him. “The only mistake Mildred ever made was my daughter’s summer camp,” said one patient. “Oh, yes, she recommended this dumb summer camp in Maine and I sent my daughter there. She just hated it.”
Part of the treatment was that the patient immediately became a member of a glamorous extended family. “All the things that are so unorthodox are what’s valuable,” said one writer, a patient of Bernie’s. “It’s a wonderful, little, spreading group. What they’re doing is creating a family. Once you become part of their family, it stands behind you.”
“I wouldn’t go diving into that kiddy pool of big, happy family,” said Frank Perry. “But there’s certainly a communal feeling . . . I think there’s a bond. That’s a slightly more sober expression. But since I may be writing a film about it, I don’t want to explore it with you.”
But most of all, there was love. Patients were constantly talking about how Mildred loved them, how they loved her, how they loved one another. Actor George Segal told Liz Smith in an interview in Cosmopolitan magazine: “Mildred Newman taught me how to love. She loves me. You either know love or you don’t or you feel that you want to know about it; but what she does is love you, and therefore you are loved, and you see what those juices are like . . . you are having the experience. It’s real.”
In the late Twenties, Sandor Ferenczi, one of Freud’s disciples, began some experiments in the technique of psychoanalysis. He reasoned that neurotics were people who had never been loved or accepted as children. In order to remedy this, Ferenczi would hold his patients on his lap, cuddle them, kiss them and talk baby talk to them. When he heard of these experiments, Freud was slightly taken aback. “I see that the differences between us have come to a head in a technical detail . . .” he wrote to Ferenczi. “You have not made a secret of the fact that you kiss your patients and let them kiss you.” In a spirit of where-will-it-all-end, Freud went on to conjure up visions of “pawing,” “demi-viergerie and petting parties.” However, the central issue was not that it was scandalous, but whether or not the therapist could help the patient by attempting to give him the love his parents had failed to provide. According to Reik, “Ferenczi soon found that he could not give enough love to the patient, whose demand for love is insatiable.” In Erika Freeman’s book, Insights: Conversations with Theodor Reik, she discusses this very question with him:
“DR. FREEMAN: What is the personal relationship between the patient and his analyst?
“DR. REIK: AS Freud said: ‘Analysis has to be led in abstinence.’
“DR. FREEMAN: Does the abstinence resemble in a sense whatever deprivation the child has had. . . ?
“DR. REIK: It means the patient wants to be loved by the analyst, perhaps because of his deprivations as a child. . . . Freud . . . said that you have to repeat the frustration which the patient had as a child in his insatiable thirst for love. And then let him go beyond that, you know.
“DR. FREEMAN: Assuming the child’s need for love is insatiable, shouldn’t there be some measure of fulfillment—a small measure—not as much as it wants, but enough to keep the child growing?
“DR. REIK: You are friendly to the patient, you show interest in his welfare, no? That’s enough . . .
“DR. FREEMAN: If a patient gives a gift, doesn’t that invite the analyst to give a gift also?
“DR. REIK: Yes, so what? I met Freud in the street in Vienna and he said: ‘What a nuisance this is. A patient gave me a book and now I have to look for a book to give him.’ In other words you could accept a small gift and thank the patient and also get his associations [as to why he’d given the gift] as well.”
Mildred and Bernie are fond of citing the story about Freud and the book as a justification for giving their patients presents. But there is a clear difference between reluctantly reciprocating a patient’s gift and initiating gift giving. Psychoanalysts would say that what the Berkowitzes do is opposed in spirit to the thrust of Freud’s thought: gratifying the yearnings for love created in the patient by his transference to the analyst is inconsistent with analyzing him.
According to classic psychoanalytic theory, the patient in therapy or analysis develops a “transference” to the analyst. This transference, in the definition of Dr. Ralph R. Greenson, an expert in analytic technique, “is the experiencing of feelings, drives, attitudes, fantasies and defenses toward a person in the present that do not befit that person but are a repetition of reactions originating in regard to significant persons of early childhood, unconsciously displaced onto figures in the present.” Or, to put it more simply, the patient feels toward the analyst the way he felt toward his parents when he was a child. His feelings come in two varieties, usually referred to as the positive transference and the negative transference. What love and presents do is to intensify the positive transference, strengthening the patient’s view of the analyst as an extremely powerful mother or father figure. Under these circumstances, it becomes extremely difficult for the patient to work out the negative feelings—hate, loathing and rage—that are part of his neurosis. “I would think that gratifying the patient would arouse guilt and fear of losing the mother figure,” says psychoanalyst Edwin C. Fancher. “The patient would probably repress the negative side of the transference and wouldn’t be able to work it through in the therapy situation.” (“I never felt any hostility to Mildred at all,” Rex Reed said in an interview with Richard Stelzer for his book The Star Treatment. Other patients made similar remarks.) The patient in this situation is also likely to become unusually dependent on the analyst, with the result that his ego is weakened rather than strengthened. The therapist as loving, supportive parent acts like an auxiliary ego and the patient becomes dependent on that extra engine.
The classical psychoanalytic idea is that the analyst refrains from playing the parental role so that the patient’s “neurotic instinctual wishes” become conscious and can be seen as inappropriate. For instance, if the analyst will not gratify the patient’s yearnings for love, these cravings will become stronger and more demonstrable. If the analyst will not play the role of parent, these wishes, which derive from the patient’s childhood relationship to his parents, will be seen as clearly inappropriate. Then they can be analyzed. The abstinence and frustration Freud and Reik were talking about were supposed to spur an often painful growth process, the goal of which was profound change, self-knowledge and autonomy through rigorous truth telling. In psychoanalysis, as defined by the majority of the profession, love is not the treatment of choice.
But love is the key element in the therapy of Mildred and Bernie. It is a therapy that appears to be enormously successful in its own terms. By all evidence, Mildred is a person who is insightful, intuitive, knows how to talk to people, gives good practical advice, has good judgment and can establish rapport. Mildred and Bernie are clearly generous and dedicated to their patients and appear genuinely to love them. And they may have developed means of being particularly helpful to the group of patients they treat, people who exhibit themselves publicly, either as actors or writers, and are therefore constantly subject to public criticism. From Mildred and Bernie, there are no bad reviews.
Their therapy, however, would not work for everyone. It depends on a certain fit between patient and therapist. “There are certain very intuitive, charismatic people who have a way of establishing emotional contact with certain other kinds of people,” says Dr. Joel Kovel, associate professor of psychiatry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and writer on the social implications of psychoanalysis. A person may be critical in general but have a certain space within him that responds to a Mildred Newman. “World literature is full of that sort of person. Think of Death in Venice. Von Aschenbach is a very critical person, but beneath his critical exterior he’s yearning for a certain kind of love and he finds it. The secret of a certain kind of therapy is to be able to provide a relationship that meets deep emotional needs. Not that it’s necessarily as deadly as it was to Von Aschenbach.”
Dr. Donald M. Kaplan, associate clinical professor of psychology at New York University, says, “Intellect is not a hedge against gullibility. Saul Bellow was involved for a while in Reichian orgone therapy. Gullibility is an aspect of hysteria; the obsessive-compulsive isn’t suggestible at all. Also, it’s not that hard to be charismatic. After you sit behind a couch for ten or fifteen years, you know every trick there is to know. The task is to resist them.”
But when the fit isn’t right, you get a disillusioned patient. “I think it’s the emperor’s new clothes,” says one woman who left therapy with Mildred Newman. “It was all too simplistic. There were no ambiguities. She’s got formulas for everything.” The same patient was offended by the personal aspect of the therapy. “Mildred would spend ten or fifteen minutes out of every session trying to get my advice on how Random House was handling her book. She was always asking me if I liked her dress and where I got my shoes and if I thought she was pretty.” And she found the symbiotic celebrity relations trying. “There was no question that the patients who were in the movies or the media were the favored ones. I really think they suck up to those people. There’s no questioning it if you’re witnessing it. They can’t do enough for them. When Paula Prentiss had a baby, Mildred flew out to see the baby. She never came to see my baby. You’d go to an opening or something and all the patients would be at a table with her, and if you weren’t at that table you’d be really upset. She made the time to see --------- [she named a glamorous young movie star], but she wouldn’t make the time to see Jane Smith. And I know she gave a much better necklace to --------- than to me.”
Sour grapes, perhaps, but a more serious problem with Mildred and Bernie’s sort of therapy is that although the short-range results might be good, particularly in a crisis, the therapy would seem never to end. “The crucial difference,” says one analyst, “is that the patients never become independent of the therapist.” Does anyone ever graduate from Mildred and Bernie? I was unable to find out. But Rex Reed says, “That’s a good question. I haven’t quite been able to tear myself away yet. Most of the people who have have just simply moved to California. That’s the only way they do it and even then they call them or see them when they’re in town.”
And then there’s the truth-in-advertising issue. This understandably upsets other analysts, who view their own work as demanding, laborious and painful. “They don’t say on their book jacket, ‘Mildred Newman and Bernard Berkowitz were once practicing psychoanalysts and went on to develop a therapy of their own,’” protests one analyst. Another analyst, Donald M. Kaplan, adds, “They substitute a glib, prepackaged supermarket wisdom for the arduous task of listening to patients day in and day out. The worst part of analysis, both on the part of the practitioner and the patient, is the mutual renunciation of interactional pleasure. It’s marvelous if you can hold hands and give encouragement, but it’s not psychoanalysis.”
So who cares? The N.P.A.P., the institute with which both Berkowitzes are affiliated, is hardly likely to object. Its president, Elizabeth Thorne Ph.D., is currently doing the ultimate unintentional parody of analysis on a New York morning TV show. One recent Friday, the show’s host, Stanley Siegel, lolled on a couch in his Pierre Cardin suit and ankle-high boots and talked about how he “likes to have sex” with women who are not “givers.”
“You’re beginning to get a handle on it,” responded Elizabeth Thorne reassuringly. “It’s bound to change. How could you continue to do that when it’s so patently absurd to your adult mind?”
Who were Mildred and Bernie before they became Mildred and Bernie? Mildred was born Mildred Rubenstein, the daughter of Russian immigrants, on April 7, 1920. She attended Hunter College High School and Hunter College, earning money while in school as an artist’s model and graduating in 1947. She was married to Philip Newman, a post-office employee, and had two children—Sandy, now a sociologist in Florida, and Neal, now a psychologist at the Ohio State University Student Health Center. After getting her master’s degree, Mildred began training at the N.P.A.P. and was in a monthly seminar led by Theodor Reik for about ten years. Although she was not a member of Reik’s inner circle, she had a good relationship with him. “He was very positive toward her,” recalls psychoanalyst and Reik biographer Dr. Murray H. Sherman, who was also in the seminar.
Bernie was born a year and a half earlier—his parents were immigrants from Transylvania—and went to City College, graduating in 1939. He got a master’s degree from the Columbia School of Social Work in 1949 and a Ph.D. in psychology from New York University in 1965. He was married and had two children. William is a systems analyst and Bob works as a radio announcer in Washington, D.C.
The Berkowitzes first met on line at a free Carnegie Hall concert as teenagers. Years later, they met again professionally. Their romance blossomed in the late Fifties. Around 1960, Mildred, who was then rather thin, had a heart attack. “Bernie took very good care of her,” says someone who knew them then. “I was very impressed by that. He nursed her back to health.” In June, 1962, they were married. “Mildred had an imperious, controlling sensibility,” the acquaintance continues. “She always knew what she wanted. She was never passive or receptive in social situations. She topped you all the time. Her way of holding onto power is not to need anything but to be in a position to give to the needy. It’s an immensely civilized power position. She must be in the position of giving you the favor, of having the supplies.
“Bernie’s wisdom was less aggressive. It was represented by silent, quiet passivity . . . circumspection. Bernie has lived in a position of staid knowledge.”
In the late Fifties and early Sixties, the Berkowitzes worked for various social agencies and clinics—Mildred for the Community Guidance Service, the Long Island University Guidance Center, the Theodor Reik Clinic, and Bernie for the Community Guidance Center, the Stuyvesant Polyclinic, the Youth Consultation Service of the Diocese of New York. Gradually their private practice and their books came to absorb all their time.
Today Mildred and Bernie live two blocks from their office, in a corner apartment that overlooks Washington Square Park and is furnished in what one visitor called a motherly way—“It’s strictly the kind of furniture your mother would have.” They eat out frequently in the neighborhood’s best restaurants—La Petite Ferme, the Coach House and One Fifth Avenue. Mildred, more chic since exposure to her stylish patients, wears Halston clothes, Bal à Versailles perfume, and drinks Ladoucette.
Early on in the research for this piece, I called Mildred Newman and asked if she and Bernie would see me. She said she would talk it over with Bernie. She called back several days later to say that they had decided they would talk about how they work—something they had never done before—if no patients’ names were mentioned. At first I misunderstood. “Of course I wouldn’t expect you to mention your patients’ names,” I said. But it turned out Mildred was talking about not mentioning any patients’ names anywhere in the article. “But what about all of those who have already talked about you in the press?” I asked. “If they want to talk about us, it’s up to them,” she said. “But we can’t appear to be endorsing the revelation of our patients’ names.”
I discussed the situation with my editor and called the Berkowitzes back to say that we felt it would be journalistically unsound to ignore the record as it already stood, and besides, then there really wouldn’t be any story. But I would be happy to express their distress and disapproval that people had revealed they were their patients. Mildred said that would not do. “I guess you have your professional ethics and we have ours,” she said.
In the meantime, I had begun to pursue the story anyway, calling patients and asking them to talk with me. Some were autonomous enough to decide on their own whether or not they would. Many said they’d have to ask Mildred or Bernie. Of those who asked, none agreed to be interviewed. They were beginning to make me feel as if I were prying into some covert operation. In the weeks that followed, the aura of paranoia intensified. Rumors that I was doing a “hatchet job” began to materialize out of thin air. Finally, someone I had interviewed called up and angrily told me that what I was doing wasn’t very nice and that I was making myself very unpopular. “Is it really worth it?” she asked. It turned out that three people had chided her for talking to me and she was responding to pressure.
I began to wonder whether the Berkowitzes had come to terms with the choices they’d made in their lives. There seemed to be an inconsistency here. On the one hand, the Berkowitzes allowed their patients to endorse their book by name. On the other, they refused to discuss their work in an article containing these same patients’ names. In their new book, How To Take Charge Of Your Life, they make much of being “your own person,” being true to yourself and making the decisions that define you. “To choose one goal means to give up others,” they write. “For example, if you decide to take a vacation in Florida, that means you have given up California.
“If you affirm yourself in a certain way, that means you are turning your back on all other ways of being.
“It means you can’t have everything.
“It means you can’t do everything.
“It means you can’t be everything.”
The story of Mildred and Bernie, it seems to me, is the story of people who are trying to take a vacation in Florida and California at the same time. Or more precisely, it’s the story of people who are already on the plane to Florida but are still pretending they are going to California.
When they chose to go the pop route, the Berkowitzes left behind certain values associated with traditional psychoanalysis. This does not mean that the help they have given their patients has not been of value. “The truth of the matter is that gifted therapists are very rare,” says Joel Kovel, and there is every evidence that the Berkowitzes are gifted therapists.
“The truth is,” Kovel continues, “that it’s really unusual to find a therapist who has ‘touch,’ and when one comes along, he or she can be very helpful to people. And you don’t have to be helpful by being psychoanalytic. But there’s a big difference between being psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytic. To me, the word ‘psychoanalytic’ should be reserved for pursuits compatible with Freud. That doesn’t mean that Freud was right and everybody else was wrong. It does mean that Freud stood for something important and definable. You can define a Freudian approach, not in terms of what ‘official’ Freudian psychoanalysts do, but a Freudian attitude to life and the world, and the one thing that Freud absolutely insisted upon was reflection and truthfulness about the darker side of your nature. Anybody who hugs and kisses patients is not being psychoanalytic. Freud once said, ‘A love that does not discriminate does an injustice to its object.’”
Whether or not the Berkowitzes should call themselves psychoanalysts is a matter best left for other psychoanalysts to determine. The issue that confronts the reader is a larger one; there is a context in which the Berkowitzes’ work, at least as expressed in their books, can be viewed. We live in a time of the proliferation of certain anti-intellectual, narcissistic therapies. These therapies, as sociologist Peter Marin has summed up, have in common “the refusal to consider moral complexities, the denial of history and a larger community, the disappearance of the other, the exaggeration of the will, the reduction of all experience to a set of platitudes.” It is almost impossible for the pop psychologies, by their very nature, to escape these deficiencies. They must oversimplify in order to be intelligible to mass audiences. They must exaggerate the power of the will in order to make the consumer feel he can change through their help. They must appeal to our feelings of being exploited and victimized to sell their product.
But they offer a view of the world that is questionable. It is a world like the one described by Renata Adler in Speedboat, in which words have lost their meaning, traditional values and logic are obsolete and, “in every city, at the same time, therapists earned their living by saying, ‘You’re too hard on yourself.’” Some people are too hard on themselves, but is everybody? Proponents of these therapies would say that they aren’t selling a value system. But by not considering values other than self-interest, they are elevating self-interest to the status of an ultimate good. It may well be true that enlightened self-interest makes people richer, happier, more successful. But most of us know there is another realm of values, and these books never deal with that realm.
Theodor Reik is provocative when he writes about the masochism of great men. Socrates, Beethoven, Jesus and Freud—all were self-sabotaging and self-damaging, according to Reik. None was his own best friend. Or was he? What is the difference between being neurotically critical of oneself and hewing to high standards? If you’re less critical of yourself, you may feel better, but do you write better or give a better performance? Might not some of Mildred and Bernie’s patients ultimately be better off if they were a little harder on themselves? What is the difference between acting out of healthy self-esteem and being selfish? These are very difficult questions and the answers to them become ever more confused as the anti-intellectual, presumably value-free psychotherapies proliferate.
The Berkowitzes’ simple pamphlets—and apparently their therapy—offer relief from the conflict engendered by these difficult questions. Here are authority figures, benevolent mamma and papa, “psychoanalysts,” plunking themselves down firmly on the side of self-interest. They tell us to stop criticizing ourselves and instead to reassure ourselves with steady pats on the back and admiring glances in the mirror. This may help people to move forward for a while, but it doesn’t make the questions go away.
It’s fascinating today to contemplate the appealing openness of the privately printed version of How To Be Your Own Best Friend. On the back cover is a sunny picture of the Berkowitzes. Mildred confronts the camera with her frank, open face, her hand on Bernie’s arm. Bernie’s eyes crinkle. On one flap is a cheerful photo of Jean Owen, “Benjamin Franklin’s first cousin seven times removed.” On the other flap are brief biographies of the couple’s four children, their real family.
The Berkowitzes called the company they established to publish the book Lark. But what began as a lark ended, no matter how you look at it, quite differently. Did this fragile little book lead the Berkowitzes into a series of choices they never foresaw? Or did they take charge of their lives and succeed beyond even their wildest expectations?
I hope Frank Perry hurries. I can’t wait to see the movie.
DAN GREEENBURG: “. . . should be read and reread at least once a week.”
“A disarmingly brilliant book that should be read and reread at least once a week. Before reading it I was a depressed, jumpy person who wouldn’t even give himself the time of day. After just one reading I felt definitely calmer and peppier.”
REX REED: “It will change your life.”
“. . .This wonderful book can solve your problems by helping you to like yourself. Written with guidance, wisdom and compassion. . . . Everyone I know who has read it has become a better person because of it. Read it. It will change your life. It has certainly changed mine.”
“PAULA PRENTISS: “This book demands you give up responsibility to anyone but yourself.”
RICHARD BENJAMIN: “It is for people who do not love themselves enough. Everything changes when you are your own best friend.”
BERRY BERENSON: “. . . its useful wisdom is nearly part of me.”
“At a time of trouble and confusion in my life this book seemed to be a deep breath of mountain air. Now, having reread it so many times, its useful wisdom is nearly part of me.”
ANTHONY PERKINS: “On a remote movie location the cast and crew who passed around a simple mimeographed copy of this manuscript called it simply THE BOOK. Appropriate title, I’d say.”
NEIL SIMON: “It has never failed to uplift me.”
“If I’m gloomy, I read it twice a day with a glass of water. It has never failed to uplift me. A positively inspirational book.”
©1977 Esquire Magazine