Popularizing Psychiatry in 1950s Comics
Jonathan Frome, University of Florida
In 1955, EC Comics published an extraordinary comic book series that
depicts patients undergoing psychoanalysis. While the comic's tone
pretends to authority, with a realistic artistic style and relatively
complex dialogue, the bizarre psychiatrist acts in ways that violate
Freud's recommendations and fail to mirror common psychoanalytic
techniques of the era. He aggressively confronts his patients, who are
"cured" with miraculous efficiency. In this paper, I discuss the
narrative choices made by the comics' creators as they relate to both
the chosen medium and historical context of the comic. An unusual
intersection of forces explain both the topic, extremely unusual for a
1950s comic, and some of the specific ways psychiatry is misrepresented
in this text. The comic's creators explicitly state that some of these
misrepresentations were deliberate and necessary for the comic's
"entertainment value". Understanding the meaning of that phrase requires
an exploration of the theoretical narrative issues confronting a
storyteller attempting to portray the science of psychiatry in comics.
Keywords:
psychoanalysis, media theory, Freud, comics, 1950s
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