The Patient Gloria
A gloriously ballsy meditation on therapy, misogyny and female desire.
California 1964.
A nine year old girl, Pammy, asks, ‘Mommy, did you ever go to bed with anyone besides Daddy?'
The child’s mother, Gloria, recently divorced and uncomfortable with her sexual desire, lies ‘No, honey’
Gloria later wrote in her diary ‘What was I supposed to say? Of course dear, everyone does? Oh shit.’
This exchange became central to the 1965 films Three Approaches to Psychotherapy or The Gloria Films. The project was the idea of psychotherapist Dr Everett Shostrum, who directed and produced, enlisting three eminent psychotherapists to work with a thirty year old, chain smoking, loquacious divorcee named Gloria.
His avowed intention was to show the films to college psychology students to give them an insight into what's usually a private process but he subsequently released the films in cinemas and on TV, betraying the privacy of the patient Gloria.
A punky mash up of re-enactment, actual footage and lived experience, The Patient Gloria is a gloriously ballsy meditation on therapy, misogyny and female desire. And it grabs psychotherapy where it really hurts.
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