ANALYSTS UNSPOOLED.("Psychiatry and the Cinema")(Discussion)

When it comes to unflattering portraits of mental-health professionals on film, Glen O. Gabbard, as they say, wrote the book. Gabbard, a psychoanalyst and a professor of psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine, in Houston, is the author of "Psychiatry and the Cinema," a study of Hollywood's transference issues. Gabbard's book offers a catalogue of pompous quacks ("Mr. Deeds Goes to Town"), swingers with Prince Valiant hairdos ("What's New Pussycat?"), sadistic enforcers of social conformity ("One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"), love-starved lady doctors ("The Prince of Tides"), and serial killers who eat their patients ("Silence of the Lambs"). "I wouldn't say that I'm angry about it, but I sometimes feel a little annoyed," Gabbard said the other day. "It's the buffoonery that gets to me."

Gabbard, a balding, avuncular man in his fifties, was in town for the American Psychoanalytic Association's Winter Meeting, at the Waldorf-Astoria, where he moderated a symposium about the latest cinematic assault on his profession, a comedy called "The Treatment." The movie, which opens in May, stars Chris Eigeman as an anxious Manhattan private-school English teacher, and Ian Holm as his bullying and meddlesome psychoanalyst.

The panelists included Daniel Menaker, the Random House editor and the author of the novel on which "The Treatment" is based, and Oren Rudavsky, its director. Menaker wrote the book after ten years in analysis. "I love analysts--they're the salt of the earth," he told Gabbard. "Well, maybe the cardamom of the earth." Rudavsky is back on the couch after a three-year hiatus. He optioned Menaker's book during his first go-round, after abandoning a plan to film actual sessions in his analyst's office.

Gabbard opened with a joke ("I tend to start on time, because I was toilet trained in utero, and my patients deeply resent me for it"). Then he introduced Rudavsky, who, before screening clips from "The Treatment," announced that he had dedicated the film to his own analyst, Jay R. Greenberg. "He's probably somewhere in this hotel, but he promised that he wouldn't come in here," he said.

After the clips, some of ...