"Durrrr Bob Hartley" Orders More Goo to Go

After a Thanksgiving dinner that couldn’t be beat, I sit down now to gather my thoughts together (but not in numbers so great as to alarm the CDC) in order to give final consideration to the question of Dr. Bob Hartley and his ever so problematic patient, Mr. Carlin.

The first ethics code of the American Psychological Association in 1953 clocked in at 170 pages. The most recent iteration, an amended version of the 2002 code was released in 2010, and revised again in 2016 is a svelte 16 pages of content. There is no reason to believe the ethical principles of the APA are less stringent, rather they are simply more succinctly put.

The fictional Dr. Bob as, of Thanksgiving 1975, would have been following the 1968 revision, which would have been relatively unchanged since the 1959 version. Since older iterations appear to be exceedingly rare, likely filling up landfills surrounding large urban areas where psychologists have been thick upon the ground for decades, we are left to examine Bob’s presumed shortcomings through a modern lens.

Ethics, as a former professor of mine once said, “are aspirational goals." (Note: In addition to countless CEs over the years, I have at this point taken ethics as a college course three times. This is not to suggest I failed it twice and the third time turned out to be the charm, but rather that I took such a course at the undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral levels—I claim no expertise, just reasonable proficiency; I got a “B” or better on each occasion. I frequently consult guidelines, confer with colleagues, and put my pants on one leg at a time just like anyone else.)

Ethical codes also serve as an effort to self-police a given profession to avoid problems for which governments might otherwise decide to place remedies in civil or criminal procedure. As such, they are often more stringent than actual laws. Clearly, none of the events in the apartment of Dr. Bob and Emily Hartley on one melancholy Thanksgiving Day can be considered to have violated any laws.

Last time, I made a crack about Bob’s patients not seeming to get better very fast, or very much at all. As anyone who has participated in therapy, as either patient or therapist, knows, “getting better” doesn’t always occur rapidly or smoothly, or sometimes, even at all. It doesn’t adhere to a set schedule, or look precisely the way it might have been envisioned and anticipated at the outset. This can be quite frustrating for all involved (especially the managed care companies, who can sometimes be rather quite impatient). For the most part, his patients do well learning to deal with their problems, gaining insight and improving a little or a lot, and most importantly, enduring. Mr. Carlin is just a special case. A very, very, very, special case. He's full of surprises — who'd've guessed, for example, that he was a fan of the Mills Brothers?

That said, it’s just a really bad idea to get drunk with your patients. The therapeutic alliance is a delicate and highly complex one, it is ever so easy to damage it if a therapist isn’t careful. The risk of doing harm to the patient and the alliance is far too great when inhibitions are lowered, and a big "no-no." That’s one of the reasons ethics codes and other types of instructions for proper conduct exist, so that a therapist might keep a lodestar easily at hand with which to reestablish their bearings when feeling a bit lost.

In the end though, this sitcom episode — that’s all it is, albeit a great one — is less envelope-pushing than say, a naked Fritz Perls languorously loafing in a hot tub as he conducts a Gestalt group session on California's Big Sur coast (a story quite possibly apocryphal). Rather it’s more a leisure-suited Bob Hartley, tipsily trying to be a good host to a bunch of sad sacks on the shores of Lake Michigan.

Watch the complete episode (free with ads) at Dailymotion.