Media Column From Elephant Man to Jerry Springer The Rise of the Psychological Tele-Spectacle Esther J. Dechant, M.D. Eugene V. Beresin, M.D. Jeff Q. Bostic, M.D., Ed.D. In the circus sideshow, people with physical deformities were exhibited for profit and entertainment. The circus sideshow itself is no longer socially acceptable, but it has taken a different form. Television programs like The Jerry Springer Show make spectacles of psychological afflictions and variations in human behavior. On the one hand, these shows provide participants with attention, recognition, an outlet for masochism, and an identity. To the viewer, they offer both reassurance and an outlet for unacceptable thoughts and feelings. They also explore society’s collective subconscious. On the other hand, these shows approximate psychological interventions without concern for the result, have potentially negative consequences for vulnerable viewers, and blur the boundary between fantasy and real life. (Academic Psychiatry 2002; 26:262–266)

I just put on the acts. —Jerry Springer on The Tonight Show, February 1999

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n the heyday of the circus, people with elephantiasis, supernumerary body parts, and a plethora of medical conditions sometimes earned their wage by displaying themselves as spectacles in what was called the circus sideshow (Figure 1). The public would come to gawk, point, and gasp, to ridicule, and to wonder at people who looked, but for disease or birth defect, like them. Since the rise of television in the 1950s, Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey no longer occupy prime time. Sideshows have fallen into disfavor. It has been noted that “the wave of interest in human

Dr. Dechant is a resident in child and adolescent psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH)/McLean Hospital, Belmont, MA. Dr. Beresin is Director of the Child and Adolescent Residency Training Program at MGH/McLean and Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA. Dr. Bostic is Director of School Psychiatry at MGH and Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Address correspondence to Dr. Dechant, WAC 725, Massachusetts General Hospital, 55 Fruit Street, Boston, MA 02114. Copyright  2002 Academic Psychiatry.

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oddities that P.T. Barnum rode to fame and fortune in the 19th century has disappeared. Today, many people feel it is wrong to display deformed human beings for profit, and numerous cities and states have laws prohibiting it” (1). On closer inspection, however, the sideshow has not disappeared, but rather taken a different form. Television programs like The Jerry Springer Show still stage human anomalies. But now, instead of exhibiting physical aberrations, these shows make spectacles of psychological afflictions ranging from personality disorders to sexual fetishes, inviting mockery and scorn of variations in human behavior. In a recent Jerry Springer episode, Springer begins by asking the camera, “Hey, do you think you are a freak when it comes to sex? My guests today are here to reveal their freaky sex fetishes.” The first attraction is a young man who reveals his fish fetish to his girlfriend. The girlfriend, who is onstage, watches a tape of her boyfriend going into a fish store, fondling and French-kissing a fish, and walking out with the fish in his pants. She reacts with disgust, and when her boyfriend appears onstage, disrobes, and offers her the fish taped to his body, she promptly breaks up Academic Psychiatry, 26:4, Winter 2002

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with him amid screams and accusations. Another guest has sex with stuffed animals but now just “can’t keep it” from his girlfriend any longer. He looks worried and sincere, but, predictably, his girlfriend calls him “a moron” and ends their relationship, angrily yelling at him while he scurries offstage with his stuffed animal. The audience joins in the taunting. The episode includes sexual titillation. Clad in lingerie, a man with an ice fetish (he makes love to ice sculptures) tells the camera, “You need to leave because she is melting and we don’t have much time left.” He tells Springer that he has never had a girlfriend and that his mother used to soothe him by rubbing his belly with ice. Subsequently, a young woman wants to have a mud bath with her boyfriend on FIGURE 1.

screen. The embarrassed boyfriend declines, until she pulls another man into the bath with her and provokes her boyfriend into joining in. The audience chants, “threesome, threesome.” WHY ARE SUCH PROGRAMS SUCCESSFUL? WHAT FUNCTION DO THEY SERVE? From a participant’s standpoint, the guests gain 15 minutes of fame, attention, and recognition. The shows seem superficially to be about the masochism of the guests, the provoking of an attack by the audience through self-disclosure. Springer says to the guest with the stuffed animal fetish, “And you felt compelled to tell your story on national television?”

Circus poster, 1899: “The Barnum & Bailey Greatest Show on Earth. . . The Peerless Prodigies of Physical Phenomena and Great Presentation of Marvelous Living Human Curiousities.” Washington, DC, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division (reproduction number LC-USZ62-110212).

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But while mocked and humiliated, the guest is also standing up and establishing an identity, proclaiming, “I am a plusher.” It may be a countercultural identity, but it is a special identity, distinguishing him from the masses. For the viewer, there is psychological gain as well. This is a forum where we can observe unfortunate beings, concluding that our own lot in life is not so bad. The old circus shows offered reassurance to viewers that no matter how bad their own lives were, they were better off than the “freaks.” Springer asks, “Do you have sexual fetishes? Well, yours are nothing compared to. . . .” The forum is even safer for us, the television audience, than for the visitors to the circus sideshow, who directly viewed and reacted to the display. In these shows the live audience is another layer between the show and us. As they unite against the guests, we feel our guilt assuaged and even justified in castigating them as well. We watch the audience watching, and their presence permits us to deal with our own need to watch. This displacement allows us to be voyeurs of the forbidden and the titillating, testing our horizons with anonymity while minimizing our shame and guilt about looking. Hosts like Springer are not afraid to look, and they encourage us all to look together. These shows also provide an outlet for urges, feelings, thoughts, and desires that are unacceptable to direct expression. We can identify with the victorious aggressor as the host or a member of the audience browbeats a guest. We can safely grapple with our sadistic impulses to punish or shame an innocent victim, or to wield unmitigated rage against an individual who has betrayed or bullied a vulnerable person. We can also identify with the guests (or perhaps more often with the boyfriend, girlfriend, or relative who is told about the aberration for the first time in front of a national television audience) while our masochistic impulses are safely dealt with in displacement. Where else can we imagine what it must be like to feel the pain of a defenseless victim? In short, these shows permit us to experience sadomasochism and a range of fantasies we would normally find unthinkable if not through our projection and identification with the perpetrators and victims viewed on the air. From a societal standpoint, these shows explore our collective subconscious. We may pretend to be 264

disinterested or offended, but humanity is curious about humanity, its primitive side and its hidden subcultures. These shows appease that curiosity by exploring taboo topics. Compared with these expose´s, to see two women come out on national television as a lesbian couple would seem passe´, almost mundane. Threesomes barely capture our attention. Do these shows expand our cultural dialogue? WHAT ARE THE COSTS OF THESE SHOWS? The appeal of The Jerry Springer Show certainly reveals that personal, intimate psychological issues and dialogue have entered our cultural mainstream. Other recent television shows such as Friends, Seinfeld, Sex in the City, Frasier, and The Sopranos also reflect that interest. Talk shows like Springer’s, however, capitalize on that interest and take it to a potentially destructive end. In psychiatry, we say that if something is bothering someone, he or she should talk about it— share, and the pain will diminish. The topics of these shows are issues that often cause distress and impairment, issues that psychiatrists deal with in private offices with sensitivity and the aim of ameliorating suffering. The hosts of these shows, however, conduct interviews approximating psychological interventions, but without sufficient concern for the result. The only anticipated result is an affective explosion, either from the participants, the audience, or both. Springer, for example, seeks his future guests, advertising during the commercials: “Are you raising your kids to be racist?” and “Are you a prostitute and want to tell your story? If so, call Jerry Springer.” Many of these guests appear psychologically vulnerable; they often have primitive character styles, few coping skills, little apparent ability to resolve conflict productively, and a lack of concern for their own or other people’s privacy and dignity. Springer exposes the guests in a framework within which they are provoked to act out and tell all. He begins with curiosity, with wonderment, as if conducting a social therapeutic experiment. But rather than assuming a supportive or containing position, he encourages the show’s most common outcome: escalation of pain and misery as verbal or physical assaults accumulate. The media have always captured people’s reallife oddities. But the television shows People Are Funny and Candid Camera adhered to socially sensiAcademic Psychiatry, 26:4, Winter 2002

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tive boundaries and revealed people’s foibles in a charming way. The current shows expose in a way that often degrades and humiliates. The spectacle, in fact, is often the boundary violation, be it coaxing a guest to reveal all aspects of his or her private life or taking a camera into a public place to catch the unrehearsed spectacle. As Springer mockingly quips about an episode on sexual fetishes, “How unlike our show to deal with a topic like this.” The guests are difficult to empathize with because the hosts never tell their complete stories. Similarly, Time magazine in September 1927 published a photograph of the “world’s ugliest woman” without elaborating on her story (2). In a later issue, the renowned endocrinologist Harvey Cushing chastised Time, chronicling how this previously “vigorous and good-looking young woman,” a widowed mother of four, developed acromegaly and turned to circus work to support her children (2). In elaborating her disease and story, Cushing created empathy for this woman. In contrast, these shows, by presenting only the titillating or controversial parts, caricature the very aspects of people’s lives that cause them, and those near to them, psychological pain and anguish. Are hosts like Springer, in essence, depicting mental illness and trauma in a way that reinforces stigma? Guests on these shows are frequently characterized as “crazy,” even by the hosts, although it’s unclear if this conclusion emerges because of the guests’ unusual thoughts or because of their interest in exposing such thoughts on television. But perhaps those who choose to appear on such shows are not representative; most people maintain some degree of privacy about matters that they correctly recognize will make others uncomfortable. These shows describe no process to determine whether guests can reasonably benefit from appearing or if they will remain safe after their experience on the show. The fatality that followed a Jenny Jones episode clarifies that crowd reactions to these expose´s are not without consequence. In that program, guests came on the show to find out about high school peers who had “crushes” on them, and one guest was publicly offended and humiliated when he discovered that he was the object of a peer’s homosexual crush. Within the week, he murdered his high school peer. While talk show hosts claim they are not trained to recognize such vulnerabilities in their guests, should they Academic Psychiatry, 26:4, Winter 2002

be exonerated from responsibility for the spectacles they orchestrate? Among the saddest observations about these episodes is the frequency with which guests appear to believe they will emerge on the show as vindicated, triumphant. Particularly in the infidelity episodes, guests frequently bare themselves (physically), expecting the audience to validate their attractiveness in a “contest” of who is the better “catch.” Almost invariably these guests receive hostile affronts from the audience, who chant “whore, whore!” or “pig!”, and so the guests then turn on the spectators. Rarely is there any meeting of the minds or useful validation. To what extent do the guests appear cognizant of their ultimate defeat and humiliation? Surely they have watched the show before and are well aware of the pattern of abuse these guests often experience. And one has to wonder to what extent they are truly in denial about the harm that will inevitably result from their actions — to themselves and to others with whom they have relationships. Given their previous viewing, this denial must be enormous for some. For others, perhaps the denial is minimal and the awareness of harm well understood. In either case, one thing is certain: the producers and hosts exploit these people for their own purposes, not unlike the circus sideshows. Ironically, any benefit that does emerge from this tabloid television appears to occur when guests see how badly they appear. That, more than the intervention du jour, appears to motivate real change. During an episode of Sally Jessy Raphael, wayward juveniles were shown in their oppositional splendor, including video taken in their natural environment. (Consent to this taping was never described.) Then they railed at parents on the set and were taken to a “boot camp.” Three of these adolescents were shown as success stories on a subsequent Sally Jessy Raphael episode (November 30, 2001), all of them appearing to have made significant changes. However, none of these adolescents described the turning point as having emerged from comments made on the show or from experiences or interactions at the boot camp. Rather, they all identified feeling embarrassed when they saw how they appeared on the earlier TV episode. This suggests a seemingly unappreciated avenue provided by this medium that could be useful to society. To see oneself objectively, on film, seems to alter one’s subjective appraisal of one’s own behavior. Perhaps 265

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developmentally it is even more important for adolescents to concretely observe themselves with others, and the clinical implications appear substantial. Besides potential harm to the guests, another concern is the potential for a negative impact on viewers. Shows such as Jerry Springer’s and Jenny Jones’s model primitive defenses, disinhibition, black-andwhite thinking, and poor conflict resolution. For healthy observers, they are quite benign—deranged, disturbing, if not comical or sad commentaries. But for vulnerable viewers, they arouse and kindle primitive defensive psychological functions. What do these shows teach the viewing audience about how to thrive in the new millennium? They demonstrate that being a victim or victimizer warrants televised coverage, that verbal and physical aggression are tacitly sanctioned, and that there is no boundary defining the types of issues that can be presented to an audience interested in seeing multiplied levels of human misery. Perhaps the most disturbing effect of these shows is that they blur the boundary between fantasy and real life. Fantasy and fiction allow us to lose ourselves, to explore that which is disturbing, titillating, and controversial, but to rely on the comforting notion that it is not real. The premeditated attempted murder of Hansel and Gretel, ordered by a wicked stepmother, is the stuff of fairy tales. The true stories of child murders are among the most macabre. Violence of all kinds is experienced very differently when it is part of the evening news than when it is part of a narrative drama on the screen. Art and dark humor also provide outlets and are often over the edge, but again we know they are not real. However, shows like Jerry Springer’s are “real life” and force us to confront what is real, or at least conveyed as real. Such shows

blur the boundary between truth and fiction—they take away our cushion of fantasy. The viewing experience here is disquieting, as if we had walked in on the primal scene. Did we really want to see and know this, or would it have been best left to the imagination? Have we seen too much? We are curious, we want to see and maybe even to explore, but these shows provide us no path, no direction, no resolution. They appease primal interests, but only that. They allow full immersion of the id, but no cultivation of the ego. Springer’s attempts to facilitate ego growth come in the form of his “Final Thought,” a sensitive commentary on the theme of the day’s commotion. Although his thoughts are eloquently stated, they are empty. It is unclear whether Springer and his staff make any real effort to help these people, too often in wretched states, to alter their circumstance or even to think differently about their predicaments. Perhaps most telling, these final comments are directed to the viewer, since even Springer knows the guests are not ready to hear or apply them. This semblance of an effort to make some poignant social commentary is as hollow as the now fortunately archaic method of parading around Elephant Man during medical rounds and justifying this “sideshow” by describing the aberrations in scientific medical terms. Although our culture would not tolerate someone making money by exploiting the Elephant Man today, we allow these tele-spectacles to regularly exploit those with psychological disfigurements. The authors thank the following for their contributions: Sarah Hall, Michael Jellinek, M.D., Susan Mahler, M.D., Martin Miller, M.D., Paula Rauch, M.D., and Steven Schlozman, M.D.

References 1. Schwartz JG, Kagan-Hallet K: Fascinating anomalies of the circus side show. Tex Med J 1984; 80(10):57–63

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2. Cordingley GE: Harvey Cushing’s circus friend, the “world’s ugliest woman.” J Lab Clin Med 1991; 118:297–298

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