I’d honestly forgotten about this place until noted expert on psychiatry, Mr. Tom Cruise, sparred with Today Show co-host Matt Lauer.  “You don’t know the history of psychiatry,” Cruise shot back to Lauer, who’d mentioned Cruise’s earlier criticism of Brooke Shields’ use of anti-depressants.  “I do.”

No doubt, Mr. Cruise has been many times to 6616 Sunset Blvd. and soaked up the eye-catching visuals and mind-blowing data from four centuries of nascent science and the ample history of human folly.

The facts are there for all to see, plain as day — a day with a Level-three smog alert. One of the earliest psychiatric innovations was the spinning chair — people were strapped down, and the demons were supposed to spin free of them as they whirled around.  Drawbacks to this therapy were motion sickness and possible death.  And it also made it very hard to conduct a conversation at a dinner party.

Modern psychiatry as we know it was founded in 1879, when German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt established “experimental psychology.”  He declared man to be an animal with no soul, but he didn’t say much about pets or women.

The museum highlights various faux pas in the annals of psychiatry, such as phrenology.  That is, the parceling of certain parts of the brain, corresponding to specific regions of thought or action, such as the one that makes men leave their socks on the floor and the part that makes women shout about it.

From phrenology it was just a short, enticing step to lobotomy, a procedure for surgically removing the “bad” part of the brain—the trouble-maker—and one that gives a whole new meaning to the figure of speech: “I’m gonna give you a piece of my mind.”  These days pretty much everyone agrees lobotomy was a bad way to go, though reality TV has become an effective substitute.

One poignant section is devoted to the ill-fated shock treatment of Ernest Hemingway at the Mayo Clinic.  Blazoned on one wall is Hemingway’s indictment of doctors for “erasing my memory, which is my capital… It was a brilliant cure but we lost the patient.”  (Listen, if I were remotely famous I would hold the Mayo.  Name one famous person who got cured there; the same goes for Cedars Sinai.  Celebrities go there—they drop like flies.  If you get sick, have them send you to County Hospital, at least you’ll have a fighting chance of getting out alive.)

To be sure, the photos of the fathers of American Psychiatry make them look like simian goons, and they wouldn’t look out of place in a pre-Darwin display called “Evolution Rocks.”  There’s a chart that will take your breath away: in 50 years of codification, the number of mental conditions has mushroomed from around 100 to over 350.  Disorder 373 is an obsessive fear of plankton, followed by 374, compulsive buying of hats.

The organizers of the museum would have you believe this is a ploy to get more people diagnosed, but hey, maybe we’re just getting crazier.  The exhibition, sponsored by the Citizens’ Commission on Human Rights, falls just short of suggesting that Freudian analysis was a conspiracy by furniture-makers to sell more couches.

My feet lament one major omission in this otherwise excellent display: that there were no analysts’ couches to sit and cool one's heels.