Towards the end of Issui Ogawa’s 2003 The Next Continent we learn something about Tae Toenji’s true motives in establishing a moon base. I briefly noted this revelation in my recent moon base essay and commented that seeking therapy would have been far healthier and more cost-effective than the course of action Tae actually embraced. I then realized that this was an idea on which I wanted to follow up….
People will do ambitious but wildly irrational things (set up a moon base, try to conquer the world, etc.) rather than admit they have emotional problems they just cannot face without help. We see this in real life and we see it various science fiction and fantasy works. Here are five examples.
Detective Comics #33, by artist Bob Kane and writer Bill Finger (1939)
Having resolved to rule the world with the amassed scientific genius of the so-called Scarlet Horde, Napoleon-wannabe Krueger begins with a fatal misstep. Of all the cities he could select as a base of operations, he chooses one under the protection of the costumed vigilante, the Bat-Man. Success is therefore not only not guaranteed, it is assuredly impossible.
Although the cowled figure known to Gotham City’s underworld as the Bat-Man had appeared in Detective Comics #27, it was not until issue 33 that readers learned what motivated seemingly indolent playboy Bruce Wayne to spend his nights crime-punching in a bat-themed costume. The answer is anger and grief at his parents’ violent murders. That his preferred methods don’t seem to be making any headway against Gotham’s crime problems, or might even be making them worse, does not seem to occur to Wayne.
Wayne does have a legitimate excuse for eschewing conventional therapy, although he may not have been aware of it when he resolved to become a bat. For reasons that escape me, virtually every named therapist and mental health professional in the DC comics universe ultimately turns out to be deranged, criminally inclined, or both. At least Marvel superheroes can turn to Doc Samson.
Space Viking by H. Beam Piper (1962)
The wedding of Lady Elaine and Lucas, Lord Trask would have been picture perfect. Too bad that rejected suitor Lord Andray Dunnan interrupts things with an assassination attempt. Trask survives but Lady Elaine is killed. Dunnan flees in a stolen starship into the depths of the old Federation (which has left behind a slew of settled but poorly defended planets).
Trask heals from his injuries and vows revenge. He recruits a crew for his own well-armed starship and sets out to track down Dunnan. Dunnan has gone a-viking, holding planets to ransom and looting the defenseless. Trask engages in a bit of piracy himself. He must, after all, pay his crew and stock his starship. Tens or hundreds of millions die.
Trask might well have benefited from the services of a trained mental health professional. It’s certain that the multiple continents-worth of victims he hellbombed would have been better off had he made that choice.
Dragon Sword and Wind Child by Noriko Ogiwara, translated by Cathy Hirano (1993)
Orphan Saya is wooed by divine Prince Tsukishiro. Although this is the first time in her life Saya has encountered Tsukishiro, it is not their first meeting: Saya is the reincarnation of the Water Maiden Sayura. The prince has wooed many of Saya’s previous incarnations. The relationships always end badly for Saya. Or so it seems.
The conflict driving the plot: the wife of the God of Light, the Goddess of Darkness, suffered grave injury when she gave birth to the God of Fire. The God of Light killed the Fire God, sealed his wife into the Underworld, and launched a bold scheme which will lead to the death of all mortals.
I am not going out on limb here when I suggest that consulting a trained therapist would have been a far superior choice than the ones the God of Light actually made. The Goddess of Light, for her part, could have used a talented divorce lawyer, another profession in woeful short supply in fantasy.
The Quantrill Trilogy by Dean Ing (1981 – 1985)
A fortuitously timed Boy Scout outing saved Ted Quantrill from being one of the hundred million American casualties of World War Four. A talent for killing helped the boy, soon a man, survive the horrors of war and the excesses of the peace that followed. How long Ted will survive confronting danger after danger at the behest of his employers is an interesting question. The truncated life spans of his fellow operatives suggest that his will be a brief but interesting life.
Unlike most of the examples on this list, the issue here isn’t that there are no therapists (this is the US of the future, so they probably exist), or that Ted shuns therapy (it’s never offered). The issue is he is far too useful to the American government as a trauma-numbed survivor for anyone to consider allowing him access to such services.
The trilogy (Systemic Shock, Wild Country, and Single Combat) does show Ted inching toward a healthier life, development that will in no way be due to his bosses.
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin (2010)
Summoned from her distant satrapy to the Arameri world empire’s capital of Sky, Yeine learns that she is now one of her grandfather Dekarta’s three designated heirs. Wealth and status are hers… at a cost.
Dekarta is a high-ranked Arameri, ruling the world on behalf of the god Itempas. Being his successor is a goal worth killing for—thus the corpses of several heirs whose prudence proved insufficient to guard against their rivals’ homicidal creativity. Can Yeine prevail in this unfamiliar city? Or is she merely a walking corpse to be?
As with Dragon Sword and Wind Child, the backstory to the conflict highlights the dire shortage of therapists qualified to provide marriage counseling to quarreling gods.
***
One hopes this essay does not come off as needlessly jocular or in any way making light of the value of therapy and counseling. There are many, many reasons to consider seeking the services of appropriate mental health professionals, and all of them are valid. And of course, there are plenty of examples of fictional characters who fulfill their narrative role while also attending to their mental health. (Well, maybe not “plenty” of examples, but they exist!) That, of course, is a matter for another essay.
In the words of fanfiction author Musty181, four-time Hugo finalist, prolific book reviewer, and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll “looks like a default mii with glasses.” His work has appeared in Interzone, Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis) and the 2021 and 2022 Aurora Award finalist Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by web person Adrienne L. Travis). His Patreon can be found here.
There’s a number of characters in the Vorkosigan books who could use more therapy than they end up getting. Preferably before starting a mercenary company or going shopping for severed heads.
I would use Robins as the DC example rather than Batman. They make their mentor’s decision to adopt a fursona and punch bad guys look positively restrained.
Is Dick Grayson all that bad? Jason Todd, sure, but he’s kind of an extreme case.
In Space Viking, Dunnan getting therapy would have saved several hundred million lives as well, in addition to the lives saved by Trask not going out and blasting planets.
@3 He did end up going to a city that was worse than Gotham. And became a cop. Not sure if starting a gang of teenaged superheroes counts.
The next list. 5 SFF characters who did benefit from therapy.
Robinette Broadhead from Frederik Pohl’s Gateway, who sought out therapy after leaving his shipmates stuck in a blackhole.
That sounds like a premise for a potentially really funny and/or grim book.
Gully Foyle, anyone?
Alfred Bester excelled at bent and twisted characters, but Foyle from The Stars My Destination is, by now, a well-worn template of anger issues and focused psychopathy.
7: There was a novel about Satan’s therapist and as I recall, it did not go entirely well for the therapist.
It goes much better (?) on the Lucifer TV show.
Pretty much everyone in Julian May’s “Saga of Pliocene Exile” and its prequels (Intervention and the “Milieu” trilogy) could have used some therapy. Well, all the human characters, at least. Probably some of the aliens as well. And at least one inanimate object.
(One major character is a therapist. And still needs therapy.)
I’d like to point to the Stormlight Archive. The whole main cast is in need of therapists to the point,that some are on the verge of ceasing to function. For some of the main villains the same could be said (Raboniel, Moash, Taravangian…). Kaladin even tried to invent therapy, until the plot sent him off super-heroing. The sanity of the demi-gods (the shard-bearers) must be questioned too.
That said I have two observations:
Who can therapy a god besides an other god? Would not the confrontation with a mentally-deranged god affect the psychic (and physical) state of the therapist very badly? There are no nurses to restrain them. Ok, Oree Shoth, in Jemisin’s The Broken Kingdoms (the follow-up of The hundred-thousand Kingdoms) is a rare exception, but that makes her certainly a super-heroine.
And a bad state of mental health is of course a great plot device. All kind of bad decisions can be derived from that. Or is SFF only retelling real life?
Another great example is of course Rand al’Thor from the Wheel of Time. Here with amateurs trying to help, but compounding the problem. And he set out quite sane.
Yes the more I think on it, I realize modern Epic Fantasy is full of people benefing from therapy.
Daenerys and many others of A Song of Ice and Fire
Lilia of Kameron Hurley’s Worldbreaker Saga
El of Naomi Novik’s Naomi Novik’s Scholomance (though I love that prickly hedgehog)
…
@10: To be fair, one character in the Pliocene did get effective therapy, but other factors still caused problems
There’s at least one fanfic about the demon Crowley (from Good Omens) going to a therapist. The story goes into the meta-problem of a super-powered entity seeking therapy, namely that the therapist is predisposed to assume that the patient is delusional and not actually a demon or super-powered sort-of-human.
The patient is making implausible claims about themself, and has some sort of psychological problems sufficient for them to have sought therapy. “I have PTSD, and I’m a demon–but my belief that I’m a demon isn’t a PTSD symptom.”
@12: Ah, I remember them. The therapist found that Sane ≠ Good.
@13 Lucifer in the TV show also got therapy with… mixed results.
Rand al’Thor. Especially after book 6.
…so much therapy needed. So much.
Roland Deshain, The Dark Tower series needed serious therapy to help him get over his obsession.
Ah, that would be the book that opened with the observation that Iran was the US’s most stable and important ally in the Middle East when WWIII began, which statement earned it a fling across the room and relegation to the recycling bin when my friend started reading it sometime after 1980.
Anyway …
Certainly any number of Star Fleet Academy graduates who rise to starship command are in serious need of some kind of mental health assistance. Ron Tracy massacres thousands of Yangs, violating the Prime Directive to a degree Jim Kirk can only dream of aspiring to; Garth of Izar tries to annihilate the population of Antos IV (to be fair, he did wind up in an asylum afterward); Matt Decker obviously suffers from PTSD and should have had a lie-down and a tranquiliser or two instead of driving his shuttlecraft into the planet-killer.
And those are only the Academy graduates. Run-of-the-mill space jockeys such as Robert Merik are out there sacrificing their crew to gladiatorial combat or otherwise interfering will-he-nill-he in the civilisations of other planets (cf ‘The Return of the Archons’, ‘A Piece of the Action’, ‘Patterns of Force’, etc.).
Doctor McCoy being a specialist in space psychology should have had a lot more to say about all this, methinks.
never mind – ninja’d
15: as I recall, Lucifer did not so much listen to his therapist as use conversations with her to jump to completely unwarranted conclusions.
To be fair, in the Pliocene Exile saga, therapy is available and even offered to most of the human characters before their time travel. These are the people who have explicitly rejected that therapy for one reason or another or proven remarkably resistant to it, and the Milieu has those pesky ethical rules against just psychically reprogramming people. Rules that don’t apply in the distant past, of course.
@9: that would be Satan: His Psychotherepy and Cure by the Unfortunate Dr. Kassler, J.S.P.S.
J.S.P.S. stands for “Just some poor schmuck.”
I remember it as being pretty funny, but no The Devil character has been as funny as Peter Cook — and that character could have used serious therapy.
As for characters who did benefit from therapy, Arthur C. Clarke has several: Martin Gibson, the protagonist of The Sands of Mars; Walter Franklin, the protagonist of The Deep Range; and Edith Craig in The Ghost From the Grand Banks.
I’ll have to go the obvious route and note that one can only imagine just how different things might have been if Thomas Covenant had been able to see a good therapist. Along those same lines, any of the main characters in Donaldson’s Gap Series would have benefited from a LOT of time with a good therapist or twenty. I’m still not sure which of Nick, Morn, and Angus was the most broken.
@23 And that should induce some head-scratching. Thomas Covenant was meant to be a contemporary American citizen (and Lindon Avery). Didn’t the author know or didn’t he want to know there are psychiatrists?
Not seeing a therapist would seem to be standard, then.
@2: Cordelia didn’t go shopping for severed heads; she set out to rescue her son, and found that the way to him was through rather than around the pretender who was holding him. In fact, Cordelia is a counterexample, as an extended form of @13; if she had returned to Beta, she would have been “therapied” out of the belief that there was at at least one person on Barrayar worth marrying. As for Miles — would you “therapy” everyone with energy? If you’re looking for a rheostat (as Simon tells Ekaterin he sometimes wanted for Miles) where do you set it?
Therapy is a major industry and practically required for any sort of career in Greg Bear’s Queen of Angels. A major plot line of the novel is the investigation into the murders committed by Emmanuel Goldsmith and the efforts to understand his reasons for committing them through an advanced form of therapy, which perhaps should have been applied to him before he became a murderer.
@24: “How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?” “Just one, but the light bulb has to really want to change.” From the little of the series I could stomach, ISTR that Covenant was too [self-?]isolated to have anyone suggest therapy, and too focused on making sure all his peripherals were still there to think of larger-scale issues; ISTM that’s one mistake Donaldson didn’t make.
@25 Both of them murdered a prisoner. Ethical therapy would have let Cordelia emigrate regularly to Barrayar and kept her from assaulting a government official. Therapy might have let Miles have a career that wouldn’t leave him dead at 60 (IRRC).
Harry Potter, Albus Dumbledore and Tom Riddle all desperately need serious professional help.
But of course, so does their author.
My favorite SF psychology story is Alfred Bester’s “5,271,009,” which gleefully deconstructs many of the most popular tropes in the genre.
@20: Yeah. Felice and Aiken (and others) could have gotten therapy at home, but chose not to.
Another example of someone who refused therapy is Heinlein’s David MacKinnon, who at least managed to cure himself of his self-centered ways.
Continuity error: “The Goddess of Light, for her part, could have used a talented divorce lawyer…”
A paragraph before, she was the Goddess of Darkness.
@6 In the anime Steins;Gate 0 (the sequel of sorts to the time travel story Steins;Gate), the main character gives up on time travel and goes into therapy. This is helpful, but the universe has other plans for him.
#3: Dick does end up with additional issues in the later continuity, and then there are all the subsequent Robins – Tim Drake, Stephanie Brown, Damian Wayne – each with their own set of traumas. Consider in particular that several of the Robins arguably need couples’ counseling, which in certain cases involves couples who are/were both Robin. And you thought soap operas were complicated….
@34 Harley Quinn is always available…
#35: Yes, but see James’ comment in the essay….
The incredibly successful. …. In Death books by J D Robb feature both protagonists who have benefitted from therapy, and villains who would have too.
The In Death books, at 50 plus novels in the series, have covers that show absolutely no sign that these are SF with some nods at f. Near future police procedural.
A little late to this thread, but Ganta Nakami and Isaki Magari from the manga/anime Insomniacs After School both could do with a course of therapy sessions.
Anakin. Freaking. Skywalker.
There are a lot of good fanfics in which he does get therapy.
Mention of Satan’s therapist reminds me of The President’s Analyst, a 1967 film satire starring James Coburn. It was brilliant at the time of release, and for some decades thereafter. Sadly, by now, the over-the-top satire has been far surpassed by actual history, which makes the whole exercise seem fairly pathetic. I call this process “satire-rot”.
Hari Michaelson/Caine from Heroes Die could probably use some therapy though it might be argued that his travels to Overworld are therapy since he is able to get some rage out of his system there.
@25 – a lot of Miles’ more extreme behaviour as a young man was a desperate attempt to get approval from an abusive relationship – a grandfather who tried to murder him as an infant, resulting in an extended family estrangement, and a culture and society that regarded him as someone who should have been euthanized as a baby. He also attempted suicide as an adolescent, which is certainly a cry for help.
Cordelia’s problem was that her therapist thought she had Stockholm Syndrome, when she was actually holding some major state secrets that couldn’t be shared without disastrous consequences.
Mark does a pretty good job of seeking out some serious Betan therapy for his issues, relating to a really horrific upbringing.
Spider Robinson took a half-written story sketch by Robert Heinlein and turned it into a novel called Variable Star. A final Heinlein book, back from the grave! Except—
One of the plot-points was when the protagonist was forced to attend court-appointed therapy. Even worse, the shrink taught the protagonist to meditate. And it helped. Not something I could imagine Heinlein doing to one of his characters. Another deciding factor is that Robinson could not replicate Heinlein’s voice. Granted, that’s a hard thing to do.
I concluded that Variable Star is closer to a Spider Robertson book than a Robert Heinlein book.
@18: Hence, presumably, why the bridge crew in The Next Generation includes a full-time therapist.
@42 Mark is the poster boy for better living through therapy.
Different government, but this is also the problem for poor Otto McGavin in Haldeman’s All My Sins Remembered.
43: Robinson.
15, 19 – yes, but in the end, Lucifer became a therapist in hell, offering therapy sessions (in an office much like Doctor Martin’s) to the trapped souls in order to help them escape their hell-loop. Though one could also see it as part of the torture.
There is a wonderful novella called “We are Completely Fine,” by Daryl Gregory, which is about a therapy group for people who have experienced the eldritch horrors of the world (a monster hunter, a man partly eaten by a cannibal cult-family, a woman who had messages inscribed in scrimshaw on her long-bones, etc.) and how they were … “coping” with their experiences.
@43: In Heinlein’s first (but last published) novel, the main character is put through talk therapy to overcome his antisocial tendencies (it works)
Nicholas Seafort could have used a lot of therapy. Eventually, I couldn’t be in the room with him any longer and gave up on the series.
It’s a sad day when a lighthearted essay about anything needs to include a disclaimer.
If we are talking about TV shows doesn’t “The Good Place” essentially turn into the best ever extended therapy session for humans and demons?
And can we forget Harrowhark Nonagesimus? That whole universe needs therapy.
See also The Final Girls’ Support Group (2021) by Grady Hendrix. The protagonists are a group of “final girls”–survivors of serial killers, whose stories have become film franchises–who get together to help each other deal with their unwanted fame and cope with the world after what they’ve been through.
Also Seanan McGuire’s “Wayward Children” series, about a boarding school for kids who has gone through “portals” to fantasy worlds, had good (or bad) adventures, and been sent back (usually involuntarily) to the “real world,” and now have to deal with growing up in a mundane world–they, who may have once been Chosen Ones, Champions, etc.–and can’t talk about it with anyone else for fear of being thought crazy.
Mliss Abnethe, from Whipping Star by Frank Herbert.
Of course the problem with Bruce Wayne getting therapy instead of becoming the Bat-Man, is Gotham would pay the price. There’s no reason to suppose that the various supervillains that regard Gotham as a playground would also get enough therapy to change their behavior- in fact in the case of criminals like The Joker or Rhas Al Ghul, it’s doubtful ANY level of therapy would help.
So we’d end up with a Gotham that would be similar to Macapá, Brazil in the best case, and Aleppo Syria in the worst. And if anyone suggests “Can’t the police dealt with the supercrimals?” Part of the justification for Batman is it’s been shown the police can’t handle them.
And of course among the casualties would almost certainly be wealthy industrialist Bruce Wayne; he would be far too attractive a target.
Murderbot. Hands down that SecUnit could use some therapy.
The entire main cast of Kameron Hurley’s Bel Dame trilogy.
Lazarus Long, Kirth Gersen from the Demon Princes series, Sam Harker from Rage.
How many Bat-villains had their origin because of old Bats? Didn’t the Joker fall into that vat of acid while being pursued by the Bat?
#61: That’s the most widely circulated version of the Joker’s origin (and has acquired a number of permutations over time)…but according to Wikipedia, the earliest version of that origin dates to 1951, whereas the Joker himself dates all the way back to 1940, specifically to the first issue of the Batman comic…which was not, of course, the first appearance of Batman proper, that having been in Detective Comics a year earlier.
As to the more general proposition – I think the Joker’s evolution is one illustration of a larger trend, which is to say that over time, the origins of many of the earliest Bat-villains, or those popularized in one way or another, were either fleshed out or outright retconned to include Batman’s involvement for purposes of a particular storyline. FWIW, your original suspicion in the essay proper strikes me as a likelier root cause: that is, something is fundamentally wrong with psychotherapy in the DC multiverse, such that a disproportionate number of its practitioners fall victim to their own darker impulses.
Which theory is in line with a formulation of multiversal cosmology laid out by Diane Duane in her novel Stealing the Elf-King’s Roses, that one of the mathematical components of any given universe is an ethical constant, and that this helps explain the existence of universes where, for instance, the Nazis won World War II. Thus we might speculate that the primary DC universe is way over near one end of an ethical continuum (or sheaf, to use another of Duane”s terms).
Psychotherapy is capable of making individual changes, but the implications of that for social change are dubious. Would psychotherapy for Adolph have prevented World War II? Obviously not. The Japanese had already started and both the Germans and the Soviets were strongly so inclined. It probably would have made some difference in exactly how it started in the West.
Taking Space Viking, successful psychotherapy of Lucas Trask would have left Lucas personally in roughly the psychological state he is in at the end of the novel, but without the political insights he gained living through his transition from space viking to partisan of civilization against the space vikings.
Predictable consequences of therapy for Lucas Trask: Tanith, Amaterasu and Beowulf do not become civilized, space-faring societies. Marduk becomes a sword world and probably decivilizes at the hands of its ruling class, along with the other sword worlds. Andrei Dunnan continues to nuke millions of neobarbarians and “civilized” enemies, with no inclination to stop doing it.
The net result of Lucas Trask receiving psychotherapy, given the premises of the story, would have been disastrously worse for the Terrohuman Universe than the results of Lucas Trask going viking.
If poor, depressed Ineluki had found a good therapist in the nick of time, that whole Memory, Sorry and Thorn debacle would NEVER have happened…
In Yoon Ha Lee’s The Machinations of Empire (Ninefox Gambit, Raven Strategem, Revenant Gun) every single freaking character with a name desperately needs massive amounts of therapy. It’s a brilliant series because non of them get it.
@@@@@ 47. James Davis Nicoll
43: Robinson
Fixed. Thanks.
63: Carr, I think, pointed out in an introduction that Piper was fond of ending books with victories that have vanished by the time of later books. Merlin did not make Poicteseme a power, and the one glimpse we get of the Sword worlds in Empire wasn’t impressive.
Snape needed lots of therapy and a one-way ticket out of the UK. When the top figure in your society connives at your abuse and favors your abusers, book out first, therapy later.
You can’t say SFF characters who need therapy and say John Chrichton. The man’s had his brain literally scrambled, had secret knowledge and a brain friend implanted, tortured, lost in space (more than once) and he could never go home without bringing death and destruction to it.
As a retired therapist I will state the obvious factor missing in this discussion that everyone seems to have missed. Quite simply, you can’t do therapy on someone, the person must want to change for therapy to happen.
Another salient point, the success rate of therapy is rarely above 50% of the number of participants*. That doesn’t mean therapy only has a fifty-fifty chance of success, but rather that 50% of clients will not complete a successful course of therapy (*some figures show this to be the highest success rate only achieved by very expereinced therapist, or new ones who don’t know that what they’re dealing with is hard, and succeed because they get along with the client extremely well).
As for stories written by authors where therapy is the central theme, I can say two things.
The author is not a therapist and has a poor understanding of what therapy actually entails and secong, they’re describing a model of therapy that has been surpassed by research; equivalent to reading EE Doc Smith describing the science of FTL using Newtonian mechanics.
As for writers who psychoanalyze other writers works, the less said the better, for example, L Sprague de Camp springs to mind.
Anyway, enjoyed the article.
@@@@@57: It’s possible that Bruce after therapy might be a more effective crime-fighter in the mass (by helping reform Gotham’s dysfunctional society) than he is as Batman.
@43 – maybe a minor quibble, but in Heinlein’s ‘We Also Walk Dogs’ the protagonists ask that part of their payment be to contemplate the Flower of Forgetfulness, which sounds pretty meditative to me.
Also, re Systemic Shock, when Ted reconnects with the young woman who has escaped from a religious cult, there’s a scene where the two of them engage in therapeutic roleplay as part of restoring her agency in sexual relationships. (I admit it took me a couple of readings to figure out what was going on there.)