Psychiatrist To The Stars

Dana Goodyear profiles Barry Michels and Phil Stutz, who apply Jungian psychology to Hollywood's troubled creative class:

Using esoteric precepts adapted from Jungian psychology, he and Phil Stutz, a psychiatrist who is his mentor, have developed a program designed to access the creative power of the unconscious and address complaints common among their clientele: writer’s block, stagefright, insecurity, the vagaries of the entertainment industry.

“The Jungians I’ve always been uncomfortable with, because they kind of drift,” Stutz says. “They say that the dreams will tell you what to do, and that’s bullshit.” Instead, he and Michels tell their patients what to do. Their brand of therapy is heavily prescriptive and not always intuitive. “I had one guy who was terrified of public speaking,” Michels says. “He had to learn to make more passionate love to his wife. If he could expose himself to his wife and really let go, I knew he’d be able to speak publicly.”

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