An intellectual is a person whose mind watches itself. So said the French existentialist, Albert Camus. In today’s jumble of life, how many of us can stand up and be counted in Camus’ camp of mind watchers? Citizens of the 21st century really don’t have the luxury to ‘watch’ their minds while negotiating life in the fast lane, just so they can exhale.

“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life,” said Camus, dead at age 47, right at the pinnacle of his brilliance. He believed that to know yourself, you must assert yourself. Psychology, to him, was action, not thinking about oneself: “If we knew ourselves perfectly, we should die.”

And die he did when he knew himself ‘perfectly’.

But the intellectual weightlessness of millions of Americans today needs an assist. Not an intellectual like Camus, but someone who’ll hold their hand and show them the way, someone who’ll chart out the mind’s highways and byways in their journey through life.

The shining star today is Dr Phil McGraw. So popular has he become, so sought-after is his life strategies, that he launched his own national TV show last week. He’s on air every afternoon to give therapy to thousands who desperately need it.

Dr Phil is a big, bald, basic man. He’s middle-aged, married and father of two teenage boys. He’s very rich and lives in a mansion in Los Angeles. But before he became rich, he agonized ten years for ‘the fix’, for that authentic self: “I’m talking about the passion and excitement of knowing you are fulfilling your purpose and are doing it well. I’m talking about the feeling of confidence that comes from self-trust; the calm assurance that you experience when you know you have the courage to be who you really are, and to be there for yourself when it really counts.”

He has arrived and with him he has brought the key word ‘courage’.

Ordinary people with every-day problems: marriage, work, family, life; those sort of things light up a bulb in the shrink’s head, they make his eyes pop out and add urgency to his mid-western drawl. He reaches out and touches anyone who has the courage to pour out his heart.

Here’s the thing. According to him, every one of us has some extra baggage that we bandy about in the presence of people. When nobody else is looking, nobody else is listening, nobody else is monitoring what we’re doing, we are our true selves. But the minute we’re not alone “we believe things about ourselves...we put on a social mask, and we put our best foot forward. We go out there and what everybody does is, they compare their reality with everybody else’s social mask. And that doesn’t work at all.”

Everybody tries to make a statement, “I’m not saying that’s bad. Frankly, I go to the mall. I don’t want to know everybody’s damn problems. Just let me go get my ice-cream cone and go home.”

So sometimes that’s convenient for us. But the truth is, says the doc, we all have those things that we know about ourselves and those things determine the outcomes in our life. “You are going for that job interview and if your personal truth is: I’m not as smart as these people, I’m not as good as these other applicants, this isn’t me, that’s going to come out because 93 per cent of your communications are nonverbal.”

So your personal truth is going to scream out who you really believe you are.

Perception is reality?

“Well, there is no reality, only perception. But you can’t change what you don’t acknowledge. So you got to say, what is it I believe about myself? Instead of denying it, instead of pretending, instead of putting that social mask on, I’m going to acknowledge it and deal with it. And sometimes that’s hard, but you got to be willing to ask yourself the hard questions and say: Look, if I really don’t have confidence, if I really don’t like myself, if I really think I’m sitting here at 58 years old and feel like my life is over, I had my shot and I blew it. Then you got to acknowledge that. Write it down and say, this is something I got to deal with and change.”

Here’s how Dr Phil gets down to ferreting out the truth: Heather is a 38-year-old single mom caring for Suzy, 16, and Vincent, 11, and going bananas cursing both the kids all the time. When she’s driving, her road rage takes hold of her. It’s so bad that she must yell, make obscene gestures and abuse fellow drivers on the road. Dr Phil plants a camera in her car and home (with her permission) to record the woman’s foul temper and tongue and then re-plays it before his audience.

“This is truth TV, and not any voyeuristic viewing; this is down-to-earth stuff that makes common sense of what is happening,” says the Doc who also plays an interview with Vincent recorded separately where the boy says: “I hate it when my mom yells and curses at us. I just go into my room, curl under a blanket and cry. I am tired of crying. I want her to get help.”

The whole episode turns into a tear-jerker: Heather and Vincent (seated on the stage with Dr Phil) are crying; the crowd is crying, but Dr Phil is shouting at Stephanie: “What do you want from me today? To tell you it’s not okay to behave like this or to pat on your hands and say ‘don’t worry’.”

Dr Phil’s word power is a showstopper!

Then there’s the story of Ron and Jane who have a little boy, but their home is a war zone. “He’s so lazy and irresponsible and ever so relaxed. It’s me who does all the work around the house, pay the bills, mow the lawn... our marriage is a mess,” says Jane, with her nerves all strummed up. “She’s a perfectionist who cares about every little detail and makes it into a huge problem,” complains Ron, who says it was a mistake to have married her.

“I met you two minutes ago and I can’t stand either of you!” says Dr Phil.

His first wake-up call is to Jane: “In the quest for perfection, you’re destroying reality.” To Ron, he says to grow up, become mature, have an accepting spirit and think about his son because “the most powerful role model in a kid is the same-sex parent.”

Dr Phil sums up today’s status-conscious and consumer-crazed society in one sentence: “The truth is we are a self-less society, not a selfish or self-oriented society. Look at the kids today. I got a 15-year-old that’s got a cell phone, a pager. I mean, I talked to a woman the other day and I asked her where she lived and she said in a white suburban!”

In such a shallow and superficial existence, life becomes mindless, leaving you tired, depressed, worried, stressed and emotionally flat. “It is because you have abandoned yourself and what matters to you.” Your authentic self has been taken over by the ‘fictional infection’.

The good news, according to America’s # 1 shrink, is that the only person who needs fixing is you! “You don’t need your parents, your spouse, your boss or anyone else, just you.” He’s a fixer, for sure!