Barry Michels tells his clients that success in the movie industry can entail confronting their darker selves. Illustration by BARRY BLITT

The writer was in despair. For a year and a half, he had been trying to write a script that he owed to a studio, and had been unable to produce anything. Finally, he started seeing a therapist. The therapist, Barry Michels, told him to close his eyes and focus on the things he was grateful for. The first time he did this, in the therapist’s office, there was a long silence. “What about your dog?” Michels asked. “O.K. I’m grateful for my dog,” the writer said after a while. “The sun?” “Fine, the sun,” the writer said. “I’m grateful for sun. Sometimes.”

Michels also told the writer to get an egg timer. Following Michels’s instructions, every day he set it for one minute, knelt in front of his computer in a posture of prayer, and begged the universe to help him write the worst sentence ever written. When the timer dinged, he would start typing. He told Michels that the exercise was stupid, pointless, and embarrassing, and it didn’t work. Michels told him to keep doing it.

A few weeks later, the writer was startled from his sleep by a voice: it sounded like a woman talking at a dinner party. He went to his computer, which was on a folding table in a corner of the room, and began to write a scene. Six weeks later, he had a hundred-and-sixty-five-page script. Six months after that, the script was shot, and when the movie came out the writer won an Academy Award.

Michels, in the words of a former patient, is an “open secret” in Hollywood. Using esoteric precepts adapted from Jungian psychology, he and Phil Stutz, a psychiatrist who is his mentor, have developed a program designed to access the creative power of the unconscious and address complaints common among their clientele: writer’s block, stagefright, insecurity, the vagaries of the entertainment industry. “The Jungians I’ve always been uncomfortable with, because they kind of drift,” Stutz says. “They say that the dreams will tell you what to do, and that’s bullshit.” Instead, he and Michels tell their patients what to do. Their brand of therapy is heavily prescriptive and not always intuitive. “I had one guy who was terrified of public speaking,” Michels says. “He had to learn to make more passionate love to his wife. If he could expose himself to his wife and really let go, I knew he’d be able to speak publicly.” He hands out three-by-five index cards inscribed with Delphic pronouncements like “THE HIERARCHY WILL NEVER BE CLEAR.” His starting rate is three hundred and sixty dollars an hour.

Michels is fifty-seven and trim, with a clipped beard surrounding his mouth and silver hair that ripples back in waves from a high forehead. He looks uncannily like Barry Landes, the psychiatrist on “24,” who was patterned on him by Howard Gordon, an executive producer on the show and a former patient. Michels’s manner is meditative; to illustrate his points, he draws slow circles in the air. He rarely swears except during sessions, when he says “fuck” constantly—as in “Fuck, yeah,” “Fuck, no,” “Stop being such a fucking baby,” and “Shut the fuck up”—a habit that can shock patients used to coddling and, in some instances, is a sympathetic mirroring of their speech patterns. At times, his language is just a matter of expediency. When P. K. Simonds, a self-effacing writer, got his first job as a show runner, a managerial position, on “Party of Five,” Michels said, “P.K., you need to be a much bigger bastard.” Simonds, too, wrote a Michels character in homage.

Michels’s office, in West Los Angeles, is spare, and generically therapeutic in its décor, with a black leather couch and, on the walls, carved wood African masks, along with his diplomas: one from Harvard, which he attended as an undergraduate; one from Berkeley, where he went to law school (he worked at a white-shoe firm for a couple of years before quitting, at the age of twenty-eight, and going to Europe to play guitar on street corners); and one from the University of Southern California, where he earned a master’s in social work, in 1984.

As he finished his training, Michels, already disenchanted with what he felt was the passivity of traditional therapy, met Stutz, who became his supervisor. In the course of their work, Stutz, a transplant from the Upper West Side who had recently arrived in Los Angeles, introduced him to his unconventional approach, a series of tools and principles, often illustrated by stick-figure drawings on index cards, which he calls “the information.” He showed him how to make the drawings and weave connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena (driving buzzed and problems at work; mistreating assistants and marital discord; going to matinées on weekdays and writer’s block). The two share a facial-hair style, and a habit of closing their eyes when explaining something recherché. Overhearing Michels talking to a patient on the phone, his wife, Judith White, a Jungian psychologist, once pointed out that he did therapy with Stutz’s New York accent.

For the past several years, Michels and Stutz have been collaborating on a manuscript tentatively titled “The Tools.” If “The Secret,” a best-selling self-help book, promises riches through manifestation—think about a pile of gold and one will literally appear—“The Tools” represents a prosperity gospel better suited to a patient base that repeatedly encounters humiliation and failure even as it is conditioned to expect life-altering windfalls.

Patients are told to visualize things going horribly wrong, a strategy of “pre-disappointment.” The tool for this, which Michels and Stutz teach to those who are hoping to win an award or who are about to submit a script for approval, involves imagining yourself falling backward into the sun, saying “I am willing to lose everything” as you are consumed in a giant fireball, after which, transformed into a sunbeam, you profess, “I am infinite.” Needless to say, neither therapist relates much to the wider analytic community, and both suspect that the techniques would be met with consternation. “My method and orientation are radically outside the mainstream of my profession,” Michels told me. “I like being a little bit of a maverick.” On a low bookshelf at the far end of his office sits a Carl Jung action doll.

Paging through his calendar on a recent afternoon, Michels enumerated the week’s appointments. “Writer, director, entertainment attorney, actor, investment banker, agent, writer, writer-director-producer, guy who works peripherally in Hollywood—let’s say catering,” he said, for the sake of discretion. According to a former patient, “His waiting room was like the red carpet.” Michels has treated warring agents from the same office and opposing parties in a creative dispute, who may or may not know he’s counselling the other side. Many report feeling a prickle of eagerness and curiosity when a green button on the office wall lights up, indicating the arrival of the next patient.

Once, in a previous office, Michels caught an agent patient wooing an actress who had the next appointment. “I was, like, ‘Get the fuck out of my office!’ ” he said, but he wasn’t really mad. “That’s the agent just being an agent. They’re relentless. There’s something in me, I think it’s my father’s entrepreneurialism, that admires the chutzpah.” Michels’s father manufactured furniture; his mother, late in life, became a therapist. They brought up Barry and his sister in West Los Angeles, and their best friends were Rod Serling, who created “The Twilight Zone,” and his family. Serling gave Michels his first lesson in writerly discipline. When the families took vacations together, Michels noticed that Serling woke up every morning at five or six to work and did not emerge from his room until eleven.