Keeping in Touch: A Viscott Primer : With Hugs and Quick Answers, Radio Shrink Has Built Himself a Mini-Empire

Dr. David Viscott dispenses hugs like he does psychiatric advice: without much say from the other person. Offer a handshake and he quickly counters with a bear hug. Tell him you’re no longer feeling anger toward your abusive mother and chances are he’ll tell you you’re wrong, wrong, wrong.

With his teddy bear looks and mensch personality, he makes up for his touchy-feely ways.

“If you get to know me personally,” he says, “I’m a good guy.”

The world has gotten to know David Viscott MD in many ways. The 49-year-old Boston-born psychiatrist is a mini-empire unto himself.

He is best known for his live call-in syndicated radio show broadcast from KABC three afternoons a week, piloting the airwaves for two hours to counsel the desperate, the hopeless, the guilt-ridden and the anxious. Until recently, he also hosted his own syndicated television show.

‘Natural Therapy’

He heads the Viscott Center for Natural Therapy, which he just moved from Sherman Oaks to Beverly Hills, where four therapists counsel patients using his trademark method called “natural therapy,” a short-form confrontational treatment that stresses facing the truth. (It is a method that Viscott has spent years perfecting, borne out of his exasperation with therapists who kept their patients on couches for 15 years.)

And he maintains contact with the common man through seminars, lectures and “discovery weekends” around the country. (Recently he chartered the Love Boat for a Mexico cruise with 600 passengers and himself as the main draw.)

In addition, he is a prolific author (he’s about to start his 10th self-help book and has published one novel and two autobiographies) and even has his own line of “In Touch” greeting cards, with messages like “There’s no one quite like you . . . There’s no two quite like us!”

Then there’s a magazine called Feelings, which may finally make it to newsstands this fall after being in the works for years.

“It talks to people the way I talk to people,” says Viscott, the man who will be editor. For those who can’t get enough of him on the radio, Viscott sells audio cassettes through mail order.

Although he appears to stretch himself like Silly Putty among his projects, Viscott says, “Somehow or other, with all this hard work and this energy and honesty and openness, it’s made me a very honest, sane person at a time that does not know its sanity. And one of the things I’ve been able to do is be emotionally communicative and to reach people inside in a way that makes them safe because they’re no longer so hostile.”

Viscott’s hubris ebbs and flows through hours of conversation held in a study of his enormous Hancock Park home. After a hug, he leads a tour of the house and grounds, which include a tennis court, pool, guest house and sunny rooms decorated by his wife, Katherine, a clothing designer. He points out a small room adjoining the kitchen, reverentially saying, “You know what this was for? A room just for cutting flowers.”

He can tell you every detail about the antique rugs he collects with a passion, from the kind of deep red dye used to where he bought them and how much he paid.

He likes to talk a lot, especially about himself. Ask him about his new book and he segues onto a dozen tangents that include a public relations executive he knows, why composers use four flats in music, his recent lecture in New York, his hair style, his middle-class upbringing, the fact that people don’t stick with anything, finally landing, 20 minutes later, back at the New York lecture.

“And by the way,” he says in the midst of it all, “I’m feeling a lot of love for you.”

Sometimes when Viscott tries to simplify things, it doesn’t come out all that clear. Ask how he assesses his impact on people, and he replies: “Well, you know there are some people in whose presence telling the truth feels like an enormous risk? And there are other people who you feel telling anything less than the whole truth is a risk, and not because you’re going to be pursued, but because the person regarding you will change because they can sense the truth and it doesn’t frighten them. High people. High. Meaning evolved.”

In the next breath, he adds: “It’s so hard to talk in California because everyone has used the words and they don’t know what the hell they mean, do you know what I mean? That’s one of the great troubles I have. I try to speak a simple language. But it’s been so widely claimed by so many people for the wrong reasons.”

He says he’s “basically a family man who runs a business,” but then adds, “my style is basically no different from any other European aristocrat.”

Is this how he sees himself?

“That’s how I was born. I had habits, my family used to sit around the table and watch. If we had strawberries I’d take the sugar and pile it up in the center of the plate, take some sour cream, put some on the plate. And they would wonder where I would learn these things. They’d take me to the symphony, and if there was an exceptionally beautiful solo I’d ask to meet the instrumentalist afterward. I’d say things like, ‘I’ve heard that passage before, but I’ve never heard it played so lovingly.’ I was 10 years old. I mean, that’s how I was!

“I don’t know how much time you spent with him, but what you see is what you get,” says former Playgirl publisher Nils Shapiro, who is Viscott’s friend and his publisher for Feelings.

“Without a doubt, and I say this from the bottom of my heart,” Shapiro added, “he is the most honest, gentlest, most caring, most giving, most loving human being I’ve ever met in my life. Look, I’ve written articles, too, and I would be highly suspicious of someone saying those kinds of things. But it’s the truth.”

Adds Lee Holloway, who does astrological counseling privately and over KGIL radio: “His genius is to bring the most profound truths to the simplest terms. I did his chart, and it shows astrologically that he’s a genius. It clearly shows up in his chart that he’s an extremely gifted visionary. And, truly, I think he is a wellspring of ideas and information. I don’t think you can stop that from expressing itself. It’s like trying to shut off a lightening bolt.”

As a child, Viscott would go to museums and stare at paintings for hours. Feeling he couldn’t make a living at being a musician even though he showed great promise (“I discovered the clarinet and as they say, it was just like magic. . . . I had a fully developed concert tone in a year.”), he opted for medical school at Tufts University after graduating from Dartmouth in 1959.

There he began a career in hematology cancer research, but gave that up because the research “didn’t feel right.” But psychiatry did, especially after he worked with patients in an electroshock hospital.

“I really felt like I had this talent. I hadn’t felt that way in medical school at all.”

Pulls Out Book of Poetry

He pauses to pull out the original manuscript of poems he wrote at the time of his residency and reads one aloud about a disturbed 16-year-old girl who was one of his patients.

“I showed it to a friend, he said it was astonishing. He shows it to his editor, who says he and his wife were up all night reading sections aloud to each other. A phenomenal talent.”

Viscott taught at University Hospital in Boston, set up private practice in 1968, and moved to Los Angeles in 1979. In between those years there were books, “The Making of a Psychiatrist” in 1973, “The Language of Feelings” in 1975.

He met his second wife in a ski lift line (he has four children from his first marriage). They married in 1982. Of their union, Viscott says, “If ever two people were meant to have a relationship, it is us.”

In 1984 he set up the Viscott Institute and in 1980 made his radio debut.

Got His Own Show

Through a contact, he got on “AM Los Angeles,” which led to substituting for fellow radio shrink Dr. Toni Grant on KABC radio. Eventually he got his own show, bringing him into contact with a public hungry for quick-hit advice or a chance to listen in on someone else’s problems that sounded much worse than their own.

In his early training, he says, he read psychiatric works voraciously; now he dismisses Freudian ideology with a wave of his hand and says he isn’t up on what his peers are writing.

There are, however, no “What ifs” for Viscott about his choice of medical school over music school.

“I wouldn’t have made a major contribution to the literature,” he says. “I’m not averse to the idea of someday getting together a quartet, taking a few lessons. It would take me six months to get into really good shape. I could see making a recording of some of the less technically demanding stuff.”

At His Best on Radio

Perhaps Viscott is at his best, his purest, when he is on the radio. On a Friday afternoon he races from his Jaguar into the cushy KABC radio studios minutes before he settles in for his two-hour stint. He hugs a visitor who has come to hear the show, and already the entire board of phone lines is blinking.

“You see that?” Viscott says proudly. “And we haven’t even given out the number yet.”

His producer, Jon Dosa, screens the calls that come in from around the country from a separate room. He then gives Viscott a one-line description of the next caller on a computer screen, something like “Mary, 28, wants to know why her husband won’t sleep with her anymore.”

Viscott’s voice, thick with long Boston vowels after almost a decade in California, is soothing, father-like, even when he’s being “confrontive.” Perhaps that’s why most of his followers and callers are women.

Pointed Answers

“Don’t tell me you’re not a controlling person,” he tells a woman. “You ahhh a controlling person!”

The next caller is in tears, hysterical, telling Viscott her boyfriend beats her and she is terrified of him.

“Get out of the house right now,” Viscott replies. “Get yourself and your children to a shelter. Do you have someone who can pick you up?” The woman, no longer crying but sniffing, says she will go.

Another woman says she can’t handle her husband’s nit-picky demands. Viscott probes further and discovers that the man lived with his mother for seven years before the couple married. He rolls his blue eyes at the news.

Listening through headphones in the studio, one is struck by the intimacy of the calls. A cry for help seems more desperate when the distance that a car radio affords is removed.

Viscott Retains Energy

Still, Viscott remains happy and energetic through it all, even after counseling the woman who is being beaten by her boyfriend. During breaks he discusses the format with his producer and the engineer or runs off to get a Diet Pepsi.

Heady stuff this must be, this on-the-spot crisis-solving heard by a million listeners?

“I don’t concern myself with that,” he says, shrugging off the notion. “I just go out there and be myself. And try to get my time cues straight.”

Do the blinking phone lines represent callers dependent upon him for advice?

‘Interesting Problems’

“I don’t see that. I’m looking for people who offer representative interesting problems to address, which gives me the opportunity to address problems for a lot of other people. I do my best. That’s not a cheap answer. That’s all I think about. And that’s enough.”

He seems a man born for the medium. With his technique of reaching into a caller’s psyche and pulling out the apparent core of the problem, Viscott has won raves for his insight and criticism for what some see as a shallow approach to complex issues.

“Sometimes a quick fix is all that’s needed,” offers Hyla Cass, a Sherman Oaks-based psychiatrist. “On the other hand, people’s lives and emotions are far more complex than can be covered in a brief call-in situation. Both the callers and the listeners may be deceived about what the real solution is.

“Life isn’t that simple. He particularly tends to give pat answers as far as I can see, to simplify things to the bare bones. While simplifications are useful, when you have the complexity, you may also be off the mark.”

Simplicity, Truth, Love

With proper insight, Viscott has said in dismissing his detractors, he can address in a minute what other therapists may spend months or years on. Simplify the process, demystify therapy, speak the truth, come from love.

His first attempt at his own television show--”Getting in Touch with Dr. David Viscott,” in which he confronted people with their problems just in time for the next commercial--ended recently when it was dropped from its 2:30 a.m. slot on KNBC after taping 94 episodes that aired over 26 weeks in 72 markets.

“The idea of the therapeutic process revealed,” he explains--”so that people could partake in it and see it happen--had enormous value because people who watch the process also become part of the process within themselves.”

He is the pioneer of TV therapy; in 1982 local psychiatrist Walter E. Brackelmanns did a show called “Couples” where he did on-air counseling (he’s careful not to call the 22-minute session therapy). And Dr. Ruth Westheimer has been chatting up people about sex since 1984.

Why Do They Do It?

Why would people want to spill their guts on camera, before a studio audience and in front of millions of viewers?

Walter and Gloria Allen of Pasadena were asked if they had a problem they wanted dealt with on the show after they contacted Viscott about his cruise.

“We didn’t think about millions of people watching, we thought about David Viscott,” said Gloria Allen. “We both had been listening to his radio show, and we did have a problem, and we wanted to discuss it.”

The problem had to do with Walter Allen disowning his daughter years ago and being separated from his grandchildren.

‘He Was Right’

“He told me things I didn’t want to hear, and I disagreed with him on some things,” Walter Allen recalled, “but in retrospect, he was right about on the money. . . . (On the show) we were involved with ourselves and with David. He has such piercing blue eyes and he never looks away from you. You feel the caring, you feel he empathizes with you.”

The couple took Viscott’s advice, Walter patched things up with his daughter and the family is together again. The family was reunited on a subsequent show.

When asked if they were prepped at all for the show, Gloria Allen said: “We were just briefed on what not to say, like not to gush, ‘Oh, Dr. Viscott, you’re so wonderful.’ ”

“And he knows how wonderful he is,” Walter added.

“I don’t think he cares about that sort of thing anyway,” Gloria said.

Wants Them to Believe

Viscott shies away from accepting the adulation of his fans.

“I only use that to get them to believe in me when I tell them I believe in them,” he says. “I think that’s the only fair usage of it. I may display as a peacock sometimes displays, but that’s my weakness.

“I write well, and sometimes I write beautifully. I am, after all, a gifted poet and I have a way with words. I don’t mean that to sound like that. But if I do, it’s done to reflect on the other person and be poetic about their life and convince them it’s worth living.”