The rotating cast of colorful characters who inhabit the Seinfeld world would’ve all benefited greatly from some therapy (Elaine Benes can attest to this), but have you ever imagined them as being potentially therapeutic? One professor thinks so, and is using them to help teach his students about psychiatry. Seriously, the course of study is known as Psy-feld. Let’s not even pretend for a moment that’s not awesome.
The professor’s name is Anthony Tobia, and his connections of the Seinfeld world to the psychiatry world could be called “brilliant” (while there will undoubtedly be people who see him as a quack, too). His thinking behind it all was very simple. Using unique and somewhat troubled characters to help teach students about the personality types they will most likely be dealing with in the fields they are pursuing:
“You have a very diverse group of personality traits that are maladaptive on the individual level,” said Tobia, an associate professor of psychiatry at Rutgers-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. “When you get these friends together the dynamic is such that it literally creates a plot: Jerry’s obsessive compulsive traits combined with Kramer’s schizoid traits, with Elaine’s inability to forge meaningful relationships and with George being egocentric.”
When speaking of some of the minor characters, he delves even deeper:
“Newman’s sense of self, his meaning in life, is to ensure that he frustrates Jerry,” Tobia said. “We actually have talked about Newman in that context and related him to Erik in ‘The Phantom of the Opera.’ The Phantom, while he starts out as being the tutor to the Prima Donna, actually has his life change and he is bent on revenge and that becomes who he is… and that’s Newman.”
How awesome is that? Newman is the frickin’ Phantom of the Opera! When people question his integration of television into his teachings, the professor’s response is simple:
“In order for a surgeon to teach from a movie or TV show, there has to be surgery,” Tobia said. “In order for an internist to teach from a movie or TV show, there has to be the portrayal of an illness. Well, every movie, every TV show has human behavior, so a psychiatrist should be able to teach.”
He went onto say something about how important the show was and yada yada yada….
Via NJ.com
