The Power of a Person
Lou Bruno, The Power of a Person, The Inwood Journal, 14 June 1998
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The Power of the Person. If you watch Loveline on MTV, you recognize the fellow in the photo at right. It's "Dr. Drew", Loveline's primary host, who despite his handsome good looks is not an actor but a board certified internist specializing in chemical dependencies. So what is Drew Pinsky, M.D., doing hosting Loveline, a call-in show about sex and relationships aimed at teens, and why are we talking about Drew in the Inwood Journal? The short answer is that we want to salute this happily married father of triplets who in addition to his demanding practice has devoted himself to helping kids grow up -- on the radio (WKROQ in Los Angeles and in syndication) and more recently on TV -- for over fourteen years, the first eight of these without pay. Way to go, Drew!
Drew Pinsky, who TIME magazine (June 15, 1998) describes as "obsessed with changing ... a culture of 'broken-down interpersonal relationships' that lack intimacy", is a person with a mission. Drew knows it is possible for an individual to bring about profound changes in the world by his own efforts, and Drew is out there doing it. Drew does it with his nightly radio and TV shows, with his private practice, with service at Los Encinas Hospital in Pasadena in several capacities, and with service as President of the Pasadena Medical Society, and as Editor of the Los Angeles County Medical Association magazine. Watch Loveline and you'll know that this intelligent, sincere and gentle man cares deeply about the troubled teens he counsels, and he is obviously making a difference. (For more information about Drew, the nicely executed Dr. Drew's Loveline is the only resource you'll need.)
We're glad to celebrate Drew's efforts here, but even more importantly we want to point to Drew as a clear and perhaps unexpected example of what we have dubbed "The Da Vinci Principle" -- the power of one person to profoundly change the world for all of us. Leonardo himself is, of course, the prime example. Da Vinci, gifted as an artist, poet, writer, and scientist took it upon himself not only to amuse and entertain us, but to inform us in things both large -- as in tanks, and guns, and bridges, and flying machines -- and small, such as the bobbin threading machine in the illustration at left. In Da Vinci's time, gifted people thought they had a responsiblity to use their talents in the service of mankind -- and they didn't know they couldn't. Ironically, it wasn't until Freud used his talents to almost single handedly change how we think about human behavior that we got confused about responsibility and ability.
Freud taught us to recognize the roots of our behavior in our early childhood experiences. That's determinism and today few would quarrel with it. But Freud never preached fatalism. He saw adult behavior as having childhood antecedents, but he also saw it as changeable. And his belief system surely never included the "the corollary of inevitable incompetence": We can change our behavior, we are responsible for it, and we can use it to change the behavior of others. That's why there was a Da Vinci, and unfortunately, a Hitler.
In a world made inhospitable and cold by the post-Freudian abrogation of personal responsibility, we applaud Drew Pinsky and the others like him who understand the power of the person and exercise it.
