Psychotropic advertising

“When read psychoanalytically, their ‘success’ depends on a troubling slippage between transference and countertransference, conscious and unconscious. . . . beneath the surface, the message of the advertisements has little to do with women at all. Instead, a discourse insisting to be about women is instead an oversimplified discussion of the anxiety of men as doctors and doctors as men looking at women. . . . Anxiety is also the inquietude in the doctor, made uneasy by the threat that these symptoms [re women/marriage] come to represent. . . . psychotropic advertisements thus promote the message that male doctors – so construed by looking at the ads – can react to various forms of anxiety by the act of writing a prescription. Prescription writing is, in this system of not entirely chemical imbalance and rebalance, presented as a relationally gendered, if not entirely stable, form of power” (Metzl, 158,159).