Home Office In The Movies – Movie Vignettes And Analysis

 

 

Antwone Fisher

Antwone Fisher, an African-American in the U.S. Navy, has trouble with his anger. An African-American psychiatrist, Dr. Jerome Davenport, helps him work through his extensive childhood trauma.

After several therapy sessions, the boundaries of the therapeutic relationship loosen significantly. Sessions are held in a variety of settings, such as the psychiatrist’s home office, which is located in his living room. The door stays open during their session while Dr. Davenport’s wife is in the house.

Confidentiality and therapeutic container are seemingly compromised because the therapist’s wife might be able to hear what is said between therapist and client. The choice of familial-type environment is clearly done for therapeutic reasons as one way to heal Antwone is through re-parenting. In such situations informed consent should be signed, so the client is aware and agrees that other people, besides his therapist, may be privy to what is happening during sessions.

In general, the increase in self-disclosure that is associated with Antwone’s visit at his therapist’s home office (in his living room) seems an effective means in the re-parenting attempt.

His self-disclosures seem supportive in this context and therefore appropriate. As with any intervention, introducing a client into a therapist’s home or an invitation to do so must take into consideration the client’s presenting problem, personality, history, etc. It should also take into consideration the therapeutic relationship and therapist’s orientation and comfort with the arrangement.

 

Bliss

Maria and Joseph see Alfred for couples’ therapy, while Maria secretly consults sex therapist Dr. Baltazar Vincenza. The latter therapeutic relationship ends when Baltazar starts teaching Joseph “the ways of love.”

Baltazar’s office is almost indistinguishable from his living quarters. He meets Joseph in a room that appears to be a living room or a library. Because there is no separate waiting area, Joseph usually just walks into the therapist’s living/work space. In one of these scenes, the client enters Baltazar’s apartment while the therapist is playing the violin.

Baltazar Vincenza might deliberately let Joseph discover him while he is playing his instrument, because he plans to use his violin playing as a metaphor for teaching harmonic and gentle love-making in their subsequent session. The home office arrangement allows for such clinical opportunities. Obviously, such interventions must always be conducted with the welfare of the client as the primary considerations.

Toward the end of the movie, Joseph encounters his therapist’s new girlfriend when he walks into the Baltazar’s living/work space. He is unclear about the nature of this woman’s relationship to his therapist. Joseph gets even more confused when he learns that the therapist had led her to believe that he teaches the violin for a living. Baltazar had lied about his real profession. This forces Joseph to lie about the purpose of his visit to the sex therapist. After she leaves, the therapist clarifies her role as his lover. He explains to his client that the “healing room,” where he conducts hands-on sex therapy, is different from his bedroom, from which his girlfriend and, later, Baltazar himself, had emerged.

Because the therapy office is integrated into the therapist’s living quarters, a confusing and revealing encounter between Joseph and the therapist’s girlfriend happens. This leads to an involuntary self-disclosure, which might potentially interfere with the efficacy of the therapeutic process. The movie does not show such consequences.

It is inappropriate to allow a client to get into a situation in which he believes that he has to lie in order to protect his therapist. If a client feels compelled to be dishonest on behalf of the therapist, this issue should be addressed in a subsequent session.

This movie depicts the complexities of therapeutic boundaries that are involved in home office situations. Personal and professional aspects of the therapist are often intermixed and their clinical implications are not always predictable. Therapists must be cautious and careful in setting up the home office and careful in screening which clients are suitable for such setting.

 
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Deconstructing Harry

Harry is married to a psychoanalyst working out of their home. When she discovers her husband had an affair with one of her female clients (whom he had originally met in the living room/waiting room) she cannot contain herself. She leaves her client on the couch in the middle of the session, bursts in on her husband in another room, and roundly curses him for his transgression. The client, of course, can hear the screaming and every word of the argument from the couch. The therapist intermittently returns to the therapy session and makes a poor attempt to appear concerned and focused on the well-being of the client.

Although grossly exaggerated for effect, the movie illustrates very well how private information about a therapist’s marriage and emotional life, especially at times of crisis, can more easily be revealed to clients in a home office environment. It highlights the issue of greatly diminished role transition time for the therapist working in a home office setting, and clearly illustrates how therapists may sometimes be so distracted by their personal issues that thoughts of the clients’ well-being recede into the background.

 

Dressed To Kill

After Kate Miller is brutally murdered, Dr. Elliot, her psychiatrist, and Detective Marino try to find her killer. Kate’s teenage son teams up with a prostitute, Liz Blake, who witnessed the murder, to do an investigation of their own.

Dr. Elliott’s office is in his apartment. Before they start a session, he serves coffee to his patient and to himself.

The proximity of the other rooms and people living in the apartment may have a direct or indirect effect on the patient and the clinical work. Some home office arrangements may not be suitable for certain kinds of therapy or certain kind of patients.

If serving coffee at the home office was a planned intervention, possibly to establish a therapeutic alliance, it can be therapeutically valuable; otherwise such a gesture might be ill-advised because the therapist may give the impression that he is focused on a social encounter rather than on psychotherapy. Again, serving coffee at the home office may suit and serve well some types of clients and not others.

 

K-Pax

Dr. Mark Powell is intrigued by his new patient, Prot, who claims to be an alien from the planet K-PAX. In order to evaluate his knowledge in astronomy, the psychiatrist takes his patient to his astronomer friend, Steve Becker, and a group of astrophysicists. Later he brings Prot to a garden party with his wife Rachel, his children, and his friends. Powell’s superior, Claudia Villars, does not agree with his approach.

At his home office, Mark Powell plays a recording of a session with Prot while the door to the living room is open. Family members might be able to overhear what is said between the patient and his psychiatrist on this tape.

Prot’s confidentiality may be compromised when Powell plays a tape of a session in his home office and leaves the door open.

 

Prime

Rafi Gardet dates a younger man, David Bloomberg. After hearing about this relationship in their sessions for some time, her therapist, Dr. Lisa Metzger, finds out that Rafi’s boyfriend is her own son.

Dr. Metzger’s office can be reached through a door right next to the entrance that leads to her living quarters. In one scene, her son walks out of the front door; carefully timing his exit from “home” because his mother tells him a client is arriving at the “office”. The therapist looses track of time and the two narrowly miss running into one another as home and office almost collide.

This home office location can produce frequent accidental self-disclosures, which might not be conducive to the therapeutic process.

Dr. Metzger gets distracted by her personal issues. Consequently thoughts of Rafi’s well being recede into the background.

In another scene, the therapist, seeing the son’s middle school picture displayed, jumps up in the middle of a session to turn it face down.

This personal photo at Metzger’s home office leads to an involuntary and undesired self-disclosure that draws the therapist’s attention away from the therapeutic process.

In a subsequent scene, Dr. Metzger nervously maneuvers her son out of the house, because she doesn’t want him to run into Rafi when he leaves the therapist’s apartment while her client is arriving for a session. At this point before the couple is aware of this fact, Metzger has already figured out that David and Rafi are a couple.

Because of the romantic relationship between a client and the therapist’s son, the fact that Metzger’s office is located in her home can easily lead to all sorts of unavoidable and undesired encounters. Consequently the therapist gets too distracted by her personal issues to focus primarily on her client’s well-being.

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