Screen psychiatry inherited much of the cinema’s older mythos of medicine. Young Dr Kildare, old Dr Gillespie, and their myriad colleagues easily switched from homey simplifications of the medically arcane to palatable psychoanalysis, the old soap-opera science keeping up with progress, prescribing Freud’s protean penicillin.

Of course, the new language had to be learned. And sometimes, the screen refracted the careful terminologies with disconcerting imprecision. The language of the couches and clinics, often beclouded enough, seemed to have been imperfectly absorbed by the popularizers themselves, emerging like the spirited garblings of matrons describing their illnesses and operations over tea—or Thurber’s triumphantly inexact maid, Della, whose sister, she confided, ‘got tuberculosis from her teeth, and it went all through her symptom’.

Much of the difficulty had to do with the importunate imperialism of the new depth psychology, whose revelations, formulated in the special language of its own province, could usurp so easily the imaginative essences of works of imagination. Dostoievsky had written psychological novels, and Goethe and Coleridge had projected the turmoil of personality upon creations of action and symbolic meaning. But their terms were always those of the novelist and poet; their characters were not case-studies masquerading as fiction; their claims to universality were persuasively inspired, not dogmatically pre-supposed.