When Victims Rule (pdf)

JEWISH INFLUENCE IN THE MASS MEDIA (PT. 1)
he tried to project himself as an acting oracle and guru. Some people worshiped
him, but I never knew why.”) [BRANDO/LINDSEY, 1994, p. 85]
Strasberg’s daughter, Susan, notes that her father “sent numerous actors to
psychiatrists, and many doctors sent their patients to class because they felt his
work helped theirs in analysis.” [STRASBERG, S., 31] Susan Strasberg herself
used to argue with Marilyn Monroe about whether she or the famous sex goddess
“needed therapy more.” [STRASBERG, p. 138] As Barbara Leaming observes:
“It was said that the master teacher Lee Strasberg could open inner
doors that one scarcely knew existed. Some admirers called him the Rabbi.
Some compared him to a psychiatrist or a highly judgmental Jewish father
… Strasberg focused on psychology. He ran his workshop as though
they were group therapy sessions… Strasberg often advised actors to enter
psychoanalysis in order to put them in touch with emotionally-charged
material they could use in their work.” [LEAMING, p. 156-157]
“Under [Lee] Strasberg’s influence,” note Stephen Farber and Marc Green,
“Marilyn became an earnest devotee not just of method acting, but of Freudian
analysis as well.” [FARBER/GREEN, p. 83] Monroe’s one-time husband, Jewish
playwright Arthur Miller, also had his own Jewish psychoanalyst: Rudolph Loewenstein.
[WOLFE, D., p. 307] Monroe even had sessions with Sigmund’s Freud
daughter, Anna, also a therapist, in London. [WOLFE, D., p. 300] “The significance
of [Monroe’s reliance on psychoanalysts] for psychoanalysis,” notes Jeffrey
Moussaieff Masson, “was that Monroe left a substantial part of her estate to further
the work of Anna Freud, whom she had seen briefly for analytic help in 1956
(Anna Freud wrote about her that she was paranoid with schizophrenic traits),
and this bequest was undoubtedly achieved through her analysts, who were intimately
connected to Anna Freud.” [MASSON, J. M., 1990, p. 129]
As Masson, a former official at the Sigmund Freud Archives, further notes
about the ethical undercurrent of such funding:
“It is not, in fact, uncommon for analysts to solicit, usually through
roundabout methods, former patients for money to support analytic
projects. Chairs of psychoanalysis in medical schools at various universities
have been partially endowed through former patients. There was
also the case of the Centenary Fund, named for the centenary, in 1956,
of Freud’s birth. [Marilyn Monroe’s therapist] Romi Greenson had organized
this fund for psychoanalytic research in Los Angeles … I felt
then, and still do now, that it is an exploitation of the emotional relationship
with a patient to solicit money, in whatever form, directly or
indirectly. It seems to me that the patient, or ex-patient, is in no position,
emotionally speaking, to refuse … I find it wrong and morally distasteful.”
[MASSON, J. M., 1990, p. 130]
Another Jewish Hollywood therapist, Judd Marmor (born Judah Marmorstein),
candidly wrote an article in 1953 about the trap vulnerable patients
would inevitably find themselves in under the control of a psychoanalyst. Its
theme we have run across before, as being quintessentially “Jewish.” Marmor’s
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