I was talking to my friend Jamie about therapy a few months ago and he recommended the “Psychiatry” chapter in Michael Crichton’s 1988 memoir, Travels.

Around 1971, Crichton was separated from his wife. She suggested he see a psychiatrist. “I refused,” Crichton wrote. “I didn’t think psychiatry did any good for people. It was just a lot of hand-holding.”

Then his wife gave him the name of a prominent psychiatrist at UCLA but suggested that the doctor was probably too busy to see him. Crichton took offense at the idea he wasn’t important enough to be seen, and made an appointment. (It’s a very funny chapter.)

“I now found myself in a peculiar situation,” he wrote. “I didn’t really believe in psychiatry, I didn’t want to see a psychiatrist, and I didn’t think there was anything wrong with me, but I was challenged to present myself to Dr. Norton in a fascinating way.”

After a fine performance, Dr. Norton took Crichton on as a patient.

But I still wasn’t sure psychiatry did any good. And it was expensive, sixty dollars an hour. Anything that cost so much must surely be an indulgence. Rich lazy people went to psychiatrists.

I decided to keep track of how much it was costing me to see Dr. Norton, and I assessed each session when it was over to determine if it had been worth the sixty dollars.

I found Dr. Norton puzzling because he was so normal. I’d tell him my story and he’s say things like ‘Time will tell’ or ‘You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.’

I thought, Sixty dollars an hour to hear you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs? What good is this?

But Crichton enjoyed “complaining about my life” and kept going back.

On the fifth session, “three hundred dollars down the drain,” as he put it, they had a breakthrough: it turns out that Crichton was an insecure person.

I felt amazed. Just as amazed as if he had shown me that I had a third arm coming out of my chest, an arm I had never noticed before. How could I not have noticed this before? But I never thought I was insecure. If anything, I saw myself as astoundingly confident.

Could I really have held such an incorrect view of myself?

Dr. Norton tried to soften the blow, and explained that many things about ourselves were difficult to see without outside help. That was the whole point of a therapist. He was an objective outsider.

This was a new idea to me, that there might be some things about myself that I couldn’t see without outside help. But it obviously was true.

I never kept track of how much I was spending again.

Crichton then goes on to tell a funny story about getting involved with several women and how Dr. Norton warns him that things are going to go very badly. Crichton doesn’t think so. He thinks he can handle it.

“Time will tell,” Dr. Norton says.

And it does: things go very badly for Crichton.

“What a mess” I said.

“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” Dr. Norton said.

By now I saw the point of these homilies. Dr. Norton was trying to get me to understand that certain rules of life had been around for a long time and that life probably wasn’t going to make an exception for me.

Crichton gets divorced, goes to a psychic, becomes totally depressed after achieving all his goals in life (it happens!), reads Ram Dass’s Be Here Now, and starts traveling again.

But he never really talks about psychiatry again in that chapter.

So I searched around, seeing if anything came up about Crichton and psychiatry.

The first thing that surfaced was this 1970 clip of his appearance on The Dick Cavett Show to promote his first non-fiction book, Five Patients:

Around 5:26, Cavett asks Crichton about psychiatry.

Cavett: What’s happening in psychiatry these days? There’s always something peculiar going on there. The latest thing I heard about is they’re using computers as psychoanalysts.

Crichton: There is a computer program which I put in the book because it was mostly amusing. It was done as a joke by a fellow named Weizenbaum at MIT several years ago. What he set out to do is to see if you could program a computer to interact in something approaching a conversation with a person. And he did it by a series of kind of tricks. So for example, the computer will pick up something in your sentence and play it back to you. If you mention parents it’ll pop something back, “Can you tell me more?” or “Why do you say that about [blank]?” and put in the parents. But it turns out in practice to be kind of successful, kind of frighteningly successful.

Cavett: It sounds ludicrous to begin with. I mean, it would seem like the idea of therapy would be that the genius of the therapist would be that he treats every person as individual and finds out what this individual’s problems are and he’s unlike any other individual. But how can a machine do that?

Crichton: That particular point is why this thing is kind of frightening the psychiatrist.

Cavett: Because it’s succeeding?

Crichton: Yeah!

There are at several things that are interesting to me about this clip.

• This was filmed 56 years ago.
• Crichton, seen here, is about one year away from going to therapy himself.
• Cavett sort of completely gets wrong what therapy is about, which Crichton later discovers for himself: seen through the eye of an attentive but impartial observer, your problems aren’t actually that unique  at all.

But by far the most interesting is the story of MIT professor and computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum himself, and how his experience ELIZA caused him to turn against AI.

From his MIT obituary:

Weizenbaum was shocked to discover that many users were taking his program seriously and were opening their hearts to it. The experience prompted him to think philosophically about the implications of artificial intelligence, and, later, to become a critic of it.

In 1976, he authored “Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation,” in which he displayed ambivalence toward computer technology and warned against giving machines the responsibility for making genuinely human choices. Specifically, Weizenbaum argued that it was not just wrong but dangerous and, in some cases, immoral to assume that computers would be able to do anything given enough processing power and clever programming.

“No other organism, and certainly no computer, can be made to confront genuine human problems in human terms,” he wrote.

“‘Computer Power and Human Reason’ raised questions about the role of artificial intelligence, and spurred debate about the role of computer systems in decision making for many years,” said Eric Grimson, head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT.

Weizenbaum’s initial wariness about computers — and humanity’s reliance on them — later evolved into a deep resentment. By the early 1980s, he was railing against the concept of computer illiteracy, saying it was a form of “mass hysteria” drummed up by computer manufacturers as a way to sell more product. The real focus, he said, should not be on computer literacy but literacy itself.

In a 1985 interview with New Age journal, he proudly described himself as a heretic of technology.

“The dependence on computers is merely the most recent — and the most extreme – example of how man relies on technology in order to escape the burden of acting as an independent agent,” Weizenbaum told the journal. “It helps him avoid the task of giving meaning to his life, of deciding and pursuing what is truly valuable.”

I was telling this all to my friend Marty on the phone and he was like, “Wait, I just heard a guest talking about this guy while listening to On Point this morning!”

That guest was Sherry Turkle, who’s making the rounds promoting her book Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines. 

When Turkle arrived at MIT in the 1970s, she was one of the only psychologists there, and Weizenbaum wanted to meet her because he was trying to figure out why people were so into this ELIZA program he had written.

She told Weizenbaum’s story on The Ezra Klein Show:

They wanted so much to believe that it was a thinking creature that they would ask it questions in a way that, with practice, they knew would cause it to give the most humanlike response… And again, that was one of the early things I learned, that it’s not just that we come to a machine and say: “Oh, is this intelligent? Does this understand me?” But we come to these conversations wanting it to be there for us. And that really concerned Weizenbaum because he thought that was a very dangerous road, because the machine really understood nothing.

And that was my afternoon on the internet!