HOUSE: … I convinced her she’d be better off without me.
WILSON: You’re an idiot. You don’t think she’d be better off without you.
HOUSE: Right.
WILSON: You have no idea why you sent her off!
HOUSE: —Don’t do this—
WILSON: This was no great sacrifice! You sent her away because you’ve got to be miserable.
HOUSE: That kind of psycho crap get your patients through the long nights? Or’s it just for you? Tough love make you feel good, helping people feel their pain?
WILSON: You don’t like yourself. But you do admire yourself. That’s all you’ve got, so you cling to it. You’re so afraid if you change, you’ll lose what makes you special. Being miserable doesn’t make you better than anybody else, House. It just makes you miserable.
House, M.D. is my guilty little pleasure. I don’t own a TV, and as a rule I don’t watch television. But between this and 24 the small screen has me locked in, at least when it hits DVD. Anyway, I enjoy House because of moments like this in which I not only love/hate the main character, but identify with him to the point that for a second I don’t know whether the look on my face is a grimace or a smile. I think many in academia (and diagnosticians on this character’s level are inevitably still academics, whether abiding in the ivory towers or not) fall prey to this; or at least, I have. This sense of being damaged and proud of it, jaded and happy about it. “Better because I’ve hit bottom.” Tyler Durden syndrome, or something. I wonder: is this a problem for psychologists or theologians?
