When you think of it, the life of a psychiatrist is an ideal subject for a sitcom — the repeated encounters with the irrational and neurotic provides a rich landscape for both humour and melancholy. But the life of two psychiatrists — and a Freudian and Jungian at that — is even better, because nothing makes a story like conflict, the two men inextricably entwined by the deeply personal, the childhoods they shared, while each having the professional skill and distance, where possible, to analyse the motivations of each other. At times, each can become a sort of audience surrogate, allowing one to explain in detail his motivations in the context of a therapeutic session, and as siblings they share both an absolute trust, and an implicit ability to sabotage the other.
After Frasier advises some asshole, Marco, to set his girlfriend free from his commitment issues, said girlfriend arrives at the studio, furious, and worse, gorgeous. He ends up dating her — a serious breach, and Niles soon reminds him — of his professional ethics as a psychiatrist. But Dr Frasier Crane the psychiatrist is only half the man, and Frasier Crane the man desperate for love and companionship is the other half. Frasier is laced through with a classic literary device, that of the Jekyll and Hyde, one driven by a social character reliant upon status and respectability, and another driven by a deeper libidinal force, a lycanthropic Frasier who emits a powerful, blunt sexual drive. Call Me Irresponsible is one of the first episodes where we these twin impulses battle for supremacy; perhaps we can see one as a social force, and the other as an embodied one, or one as a rational and the other as irrational, given the professional stakes. Another way to encounter it is in a motto used by Samuel Pepys to describe the inability of the King, a notorious lothario, to put country above, erm… As Pepys writes in Italian, Cazzo dritto non vuolt consiglio: “A hard cock doesn’t want advice”.
Yet the idea that Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, or Dr Crane and Frasier, represent the battle between the civilized and barbarous impulse is a curiously Victorian one, a racialised idea wrapped up in justifications for colonialism and imperialism. It’s also, unsurprisingly, deeply classist, resisting the idea that the well-mannered and the abusive can not only exist in one person, but be interlinked, rather than kept split into two distinct personalities. As a Freudian, there is surely no way Frasier could believe that the conscious mind was exempt or distinct from the unconscious? To engage in such risky professional practices hints at something else in his life — a self-destructive urge to realise a different identity perhaps? To destroy the professional life that delivered him all the things he seemingly wanted — wealth, self-esteem, social respect? It’s Frasier’s libidinal urges that deliver him into the most dangerous positions in the show, unlike those that deliver him into merely embarrassing situations, and often where the two main comedic themes of the show — a comedy of errors, and a comedy of manners — diverge.
Indeed, the two hemispheres bleed into each other before long. Both Frasier and Niles suffer from psychosomatic conditions — in Frasier case, a sickness in the stomach, in Niles, bleeding from the nose — whenever they come close to breaching their professional ethics. It seems, however, that the vomiting and bleeding begin only when they become conscious of the breach: prior to Niles convincing him that he knows he’s wrong, Frasier exhibits no symptoms. Once aware, his passionate affair is ruined, his libidinal urge to ejaculate superceded with the need to regurgitate, to expel from his stomach — a classic physical reaction to poisoning. How is Frasier caught in this mind between desire and status? In the words of Jean-Paul Sartre “People. You must love people. Men are admirable. I want to vomit—and suddenly, there it is: the Nausea”
Niles, on the other hand, experiences his breach not as his body performing a ritual purging of what is ingested, but in a nosebleed. A psychosomatic nosebleed as the response to a breach of medical ethics is a painfully melancholic condition for a psychiatrist — it was an attempt to deal with recurrent nosebleeds in one of his patients, Emma Eckstein, that resulted in a serious act of medical malpractice that seems to have haunted Freud with guilt for his role in the affair. Replayed in Niles, it adopts a curiously neurotic role, a telltale visible mark of a wounding rather than an expurgation of an alien poison. Vomit must be brought out, but blood must be kept in.
In the end, the sensitive balance must be maintained withinFrasier in order to prevent a dangerous weighting towards the libidinal drive. To reform his psyche, to bring forward the sexual urges, must be done incrementally. To throw everything into a new relation with a woman, to realise his sexual desires, he must disrupt his social role, his personality, even his stomach, until, in the end, he has no urge except to vomit on her, to defile her. For Frasier, like Marco, the feelings, desires and emotions of the woman play no role in his vision of his own sexual desire. Catherine’s initial response was right, and is the same as Frasier’s realisation about himself — you disgust me, you parasitic fraud!
Check out my non-Frasier writing at utopian drivel.