Psychiatrists seem to be much more obsessed with diagnosing and treating pathology–not to mention they are the ones authorized to prescribe drugs and surgery, testify in court proceedings and influence the arts. Unfortunately, physicians are trained to think like engineers, not as scientists. You have experimental psychologists, but doctors already know all the answers.

I don’t know about pool boys and gardeners, but your coital statistics do suggest an explanation for the conservative obsession with firearms. They must suspect that someone somewhere is always dipping into their stash, and getting more than their share.

It’s a good thing that the field has evolved beyond Freud. He set a marker in his time, and you’re right, in the normal course of things, a generation is just about long enough for a fad to peak and then begin its decline. The 50s and 60s were doomed to be overly influenced by the popular misconceptions about Freudianism. How could “anal retentive” not turn into an epithet? Ten-year-olds just love those poopie references.

Then too, there’s a growing dichotomy between psychiatry and psychology. The former is a branch of medicine, and can’t seem to shake its addiction to powerful pharmaceuticals. The best you can say about psychiatry is that at least it doesn’t consider a lobotomy the treatment of first resort any longer.

Sure psychologists are more touchy-feely today. Unlike psychiatrists, psychologists are in constant contact with their patients, in a form that encourages seeing them as people rather than lab rats. The field has coevolved with society, and is indeed a reflection of the growth of liberal values. You could say, with reasonable precision, that psychiatrists are the conservative branch, and psychologists, the liberals.

Speaking of psychology, and to change the subject only a little, I’ve been doing more reading since our last conversation about the psychology of partisan politics, with a morbid fascination with rightwing pathologies. I’m currently reading “Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences”, which is just as interesting as the provocative title suggests.

Show of hands: Who likes broccoli? Turns out to be a marker for conservatism, because there’s a gene that enhances the sensitivity of taste buds for bitterness, which turns out to be strongly correlated with self-identification as conservative. It was George HW Bush, I believe, who famously denounced the green stinking veggie. Now me, I eat broccoli several times a week. Go figure.

More when I finish the book. For a taste in the meantime, check out neuropolitics.org. Their front page article is currently “Sociosexuality: The Reproductive Dichotomy Theory of Conservatives and Liberals”. That’s got to be a good read!

Oh, one last thought, speaking of sociosexuality: The book reproduces a table of responses by conservatives and liberals to a survey about their sexuality. I was fascinated to see that conservative women report having coitus around four times a week, but conservative men reported coitus only about twice a week. I guess they should have included pool boys and gardeners in that survey…

This is definitely a case of a well-known fictional character suffering from “modernization”. If the portrayal of Bond is any metric, we live in a much sicker world than did Ian Fleming and Sean Connery.

In those days, before “intellectual property” laws and copyright lawyers, borrowing from and improving on, another author, even a well-known one, was considered an homage, not plagiarism. The audience wasn’t fooled, they were quite sophisticated. It would be like a modern band covering a Beatle or Stones tune, but putting their own spin on it. Except there were no royalties.

“Intellectual property” is an oxymoron,

But Holmes is also an icon in a familiar world, not unlike the plots of Shakespeare’s plays. I don’t mind new actors with a different take on the character, but messing with the text is something else. There’s nothing bad about trying it, it’s just a little jarring.

Besides, some portrayals are just definitive, like David Souchet’s Hercule Poirot, or Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe. They weren’t the first, or the last, to portray those characters, but they own the roles.

Gary Oldman did a terrific job in the role of George Smiley, and he deserves credit for the courage of even trying. But nothing, nobody can ever top the Alec Guinness portrayal.

Personally, I never met a remake I didn’t look forward to. Look forward to are the key words. many of them are quite bad. Still, in the same way that each new production of the works of Shakespeare is done with the intent and hope of being the best ever. I have never understood why new productions of Hamlet are different from a remake of Forbidden Planet or Casablanca. I can testify that some people get very testy when speaking of remakes like that.

The BBC production of a modern day Sherlock is more faithful to Arthur Conan Doyle than “House” or the American, “Elementary” and it could wind up being the best of the three.

I can’t imagine that any fan of Sherlock would be offended by “The Hound of the Baskervilles” presented as a government weapons project gone awry, but I suspect that I am wrong.

Now sequels, that is a different conversation.

But at least, Freud was articulate and erudite. The modern versions of psychiatry are just as absurd, but much more touchy-feely and navel-gazing, in keeping with some of the more populist sentiments of our age. There’s more Vegas than Vienna in today’s Science of Mind.

And yes, Jeremy Brett’s Holmes is definitive. It’s a faithful rendering of Doyle’s written descriptions of Holmes, and writing about him. (A pretty good second is a 1940s grainy serial that shows up occasionally on PBS, can’t remember the title.) You’re guaranteed to like Brett’s portrayal to the exact degree that you enjoyed reading Doyle’s portrayal.

But I thoroughly enjoyed the first two seasons of Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock, and thanks for reminding me I should try to watch them again before the third season starts soon. The fidelity of Cumberbatch’s portrayal isn’t an issue for me, and in fact it would be bizarre if he played it like Brett, given the displacement forward in time a century or so. The very familiarity of Holmes makes the intellectual puzzle work: How would such a well-understood quasi-historical (fixed in time) personality interact with our modern world?

I was hooked in the first episode, when Sherlock is at a crime scene, and a policeman bitterly mutters “psychopath!” behind his back. Holmes loudly and angrily declares “I am not a psychopath, I am a high-functioning sociopath! Do your research!”.

Personally, Cumberbatch’s Sherlock seems like an Asberger. That was the consensus I found on a forum for sociopaths (true, could I make that up?) when for fun I searched for that line. But the scene illuminated a huge difference in how moderns look at the world: We’re conscious of psychology; Freud stands between us and Sherlock; and we’re not shy about tossing around psychobabble at the drop of a slight.

And in that Cumberbatch is consistent with canon, I think. Neither Doyle nor Brett ever portrayed Sherlock Holmes as a cuddlebear. In our language he might be called a “sociopath”, in their times he’d be “that cold, arrogant bastard”. Displacing him to the 21st century highlights his maladjustment.

Or maybe it’s just Benedict Cumberbatch, who seems to be taking over the world. I recently saw Star Trek Heart of Whatever, and thought that it was unworthy of Cumberbatch, who seemed to be hobbling his talents to avoid embarrassing the other actors.

So don’t choose one as the “best”. Enjoy all the Sherlock Holmes that the universe can produce.