It must be liberating for you to have no particular boundaries on what you can do. You can do everything from not reading a letter to reading a letter and responding to it, or calling the person and deciding to change a person's life one way or another. That's a pretty large range of possible alternatives. And you say you do that only on instinct.
AL: You can't learn this in school. You can't learn it from a book.
PT: When I was growing up in the suburbs, your column was in the local paper and I read it. One of the things I liked about you was the smart, snappy quality of some of the answers. I was convinced, as my mother was, that these letters could not be real.
AL: I hear that so often. I have been hearing that for years. I am hearing it less now. In the beginning, people couldn't believe some of what was said. I can believe anything about anybody now, after doing this work.
PT: How has your view of people changed over the years?
AL: This column has been an education. I didn't realize that I was living a pretty sheltered life. Most people I knew were sane, sober, and fairly well behaved. I didn't know what went on in the lives of so many people until I got into this work. Now I know.
PT: What does go on in the lives of so many people?
AL: A tremendous amount of brutality, sadism, and alcoholism. There's also a tremendous amount of sacrifice, compassion, and love. People are really heroic and have no idea that they are-women who are raising kids alone, holding down two jobs keeping things together; men who are widowed or whose wife ran off and left them with the kids. They're working twelve hours a day keeping their families together. When I see what life is like for so many people, I've got to admire them. I don't know whether I could have survived some of the hardships and tragedies that I read about.
PT: Do you think that life has changed over the course of time that you've been doing the column, or has it always been a mixture of the brutal and the heroic?
AL: I think human beings have been the same for a long time, but the outside forces are changing lives today. For example, television has changed everything. That one invention has had an enormous impact on people.
PT: Talking about television, what about Oprah. She's the best of a certain kind of show. You can describe shows like Oprah's as the offspring of your column. Oprah is somewhat different from Ann Landers in that she moderates as opposed to giving advice. But her show is the same in that perfect strangers are coming together on TV in front of the whole world and revealing perfectly ghastly things about themselves. How would you describe your relationship to that?
AL: Oprah is a phenomenon. She is a very fine human being. I know her. She is a first-class woman in every way. She is real, she is generous, she is compassionate, she is bright. She's had a tough life growing up, sexually abused by a couple of relatives. But she has emerged a magnificent person, and it is reflected in the way she talks to people and the way she gets people to talk to her. There are several other talk shows, but they're not what Oprah's show is.
PT: What is Oprah's show to you?
AL: It's on at nine o'clock in the morning for one thing. I've not seen it a lot, except when I travel. There's tremendous conversation. It's people really opening up. But to maintain a level of excitement, she has to get into some pretty bizarre stuff, I guess.
PT: Do you think she's in the same business as you?
AL: No.
PT: How would you distinguish the two?
AL: We are not doing the same thing. I am a listener, a helper. She doesn't give advice. People don't go to her for advice. They go to her because they want to be on television.
PT: So you're saying people go to Oprah to be on television. The people who write you are anonymous. How does that change the nature of your relationship with people?
AL: I don't think about why they are here or what they want. What I do is I try to fill a need. Oprah is not there to fill a need. Oprah is there to be the host of a television show. We do totally, totally different things.
PT: Are you saying it's entertainment with compassion? Certainly people go because they have a narcissistic desire to be on TV But they go there because they have problems and they want to discuss their problems. They want somebody to tell them what the answer is. What's interesting is this willingness to say things that you would normally not tell anybody, let alone the whole world. It's now acceptable in America to say, "I have this terrible problem. My father used to beat my mother and now I try to do the same thing at my home." There's permission nationally to voice these very private concerns publicly. In that sense you and Oprah are part of the same thing.
Do you think that people tend to use traditional mental health services less because of your column?
AL: No. Maybe more, because I very often recommend counseling. I do not recommend psychiatrists. There are some very good psychiatrists who do a lot of good in the world. But I think there are some who are not compassionate, not helpful, much too commercial, and don't do that much good. There is no measure that tells you when you're healed, when you're ready to end therapy. A good doctor, a good psychiatrist will release you when he feels he has done as much as he can and that you ought to get out in the world. Too many of them don't do that.
PT: Do you include psychologists and social workers in that appraisal?
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