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.”

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

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.

Paparazzi have sometimes staked out Michels’s building; some years ago, he got nervous about the amount of attention a celebrity patient was attracting, and transferred the patient’s file to a bank safe-deposit box. A few days later, he arrived at work and found the place trashed: someone had thrown a brick through the window, torn apart his file cabinet, and left without stealing anything. Now, for extra security, he assigns high-profile patients aliases like P. G. Wodehouse, John Milton, and John Keats.

The writer-director-producer Adam McKay started seeing Michels about four years ago, around the time he opened a production company with the comedian Will Ferrell. (They make movies and run the Web site Funny or Die.) He soon discovered that he knew a number of other patients. “Many’s the time I’ve gone to see him and seen someone I know in the hallway,” McKay said. “It’s, like, ‘Wait a minute, you go to Barry?’ I’ve seen one of my colleagues here, one of my agents. It’s like a brotherhood.”

McKay’s presenting problem was a fear of the red carpet and talk shows, which aggravated a neurological condition he has called “essential tremor.” “My existential nightmare is ‘Charlie Rose,’ ” he told me. The first time he went on the show, promoting “Step Brothers,” he had a panic attack and started to shake visibly. “People are, like, ‘Oh, my God, are you all right? Do you have Parkinson’s?’ You think no one will notice and then you read the comments online, and people are genuinely worried, or, worse, they’re making fun of you.”

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Michels gave him an index card bearing the mantra “YOU ARE MARKED TO BATTLE THE FORCES OF JUDGMENT” and one with a drawing of a stick figure radiating arrows to symbolize the internal seat of authority, which McKay keeps in the visor of his car. Michels taught him a tool called Cosmic Rage, which entailed his shouting “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!” in his head to a roomful of faceless critics. (Kelli Williams, a patient of Michels’s who plays a psychiatrist on the television show “Lie to Me,” told me that when she does her version of Cosmic Rage she just pretends she’s running lines.) After McKay finished his next movie, “The Other Guys,” he said, “I decided, I’m going to do every bit of press on this. Fuck it.” He visualized the worst-case scenario and told himself, If I get shaky, I get shaky, who the fuck cares. “I did Jimmy Fallon, the red carpet, all the press junkets where you’re filmed a hundred times, and I did great with it,” he said. “But for some fuckin’ reason ‘Charlie Rose’ got me again.” During the show, which also featured Ferrell, he forced himself to engage in the conversation, even as he started to tremble. He said, “I talked to Judd Apatow about it and he said, ‘That’s because you know President Clinton is watching.’ ” McKay still sees Michels once a week.

“My buzzer looks like I’m a hooker or something, ’cause the button is completely worn out,” Stutz told me, when giving directions to his apartment, which is also where he sees patients. The apartment, in a run-down brown stucco building on a residential street not far from Michels’s office, is a two-bedroom, with a tiny, mustard-yellow kitchen, a small living room that doubles as a waiting area, and a balcony where shyer patients have been known to hide until it’s their turn. Stutz’s patients—C.E.O.s of companies, high-level producers—hate the place, and complain constantly. “One guy said he was going to buy the building and evict me,” he said. “There’s a rumor I have this huge estate in Bel Air or something.” Stutz, who is sixty-four, lives alone, and believes that his monastic example can be therapeutic. “Part of what we’re doing is to get this result-free attitude,” he said.

But simply being a Stutz patient confers status. He charges up to four hundred dollars an hour and hasn’t taken a new patient in years. Mark Levin, a writer-director who has been working in the business for twenty years and seeing Michels on and off for fourteen, understands it this way: “Oh—you got to Hollywood before me, because you see Phil.” (For a number of years, between other projects, Levin and his wife, Jennifer Flackett, have been working on a movie in which six filmmaker patients each make a segment about a character based on Michels.) Stutz’s patients have won so many Oscars—twelve or thirteen, he told me, reluctantly—that he has developed a coping strategy he calls the Stutz 96-Hour Academy Awards Principle, which postulates that by Day Four life sucks again and no one knows who you are, so you might as well get over it now. His credo for writers is “KEEP WRITING SHIT, STUPID.”

Stutz is thin, with a haunted look; he wears his pants tightly belted above his hips. When he came to Los Angeles, seeking a milder climate for the chronic-fatigue syndrome that then afflicted him, he hated it. “I was pissed off when I saw that smog,” he says. “I saw everybody in the morning driving to work through the smog and I thought, These fucking people are crazy. Six months later, I never noticed the smog again.” This gave rise to a principle that Stutz calls Ceaseless Immersion—the idea that it’s easier to live with painful conditions if you accept them.

Stutz had no patients, and so he cold-called established therapists to ask for referrals. Every day, he’d force himself to approach the scariest person on his list, an undertaking that he described as eating “a death cookie.” Most rejected him, but he found the process generative. “The risk you take has a feedback effect on the unconscious,” he says. “The unconscious will give you ideas and it wants you to act on them. The more courage you have when you act, the more ideas it will give you.” Over time, Stutz began to build a practice among entertainment-industry people; for a number of years, he held workshops in his apartment that were attended by actors like John Cusack and Hank Azaria.

Hollywood psychotherapy, when Stutz arrived, was divided between the classical Freudians, who had started coming West in the twenties to treat nervous stars and studio heads, and the followers of Jung, whose arcane symbology appealed to the arty spiritualist impulses of the locals. Jung’s school of thought, particularly his belief that universal archetypes—the Mother, the Father, the Hero, the Maiden—play a role in humanity’s collective imagination, found purchase with the industry’s storytelling class. The assumption that a universal archetype will hold universal appeal has been proved at the box office: George Lucas famously credited “The Hero with a Thousand Faces,” by Joseph Campbell, a follower of Jung, as an inspiration for the “Star Wars” franchise. The allure of Jung’s ideas persists. To celebrate the recent publication of Jung’s “Red Book,” an illuminated manuscript full of paintings of mandalas and snakes in which Jung recorded his investigation of the archetypes inherent in his own psyche—a document so bizarre that his heirs kept it in a bank vault for twenty-three years, perhaps for fear it would damage his reputation—the Hammer Museum held a series of talks. Helen Hunt and Miranda July were among the featured speakers.

At the center of Michels’s practice is the Jungian figure of the Shadow, the occult aspect of the personality that Jung defined as “the sum of all those unpleasant qualities we like to hide, together with the insufficiently developed functions and the contents of the personal unconscious.” In “Memories, Dreams, Reflections,” Jung describes a dream in which he was out on a windy night, cupping a tiny candle in his hand. “I looked back, and saw a gigantic black figure following me,” he writes. “When I awoke I realized at once that the figure was a ‘specter of the Brocken,’ my own shadow on the swirling mists, brought into being by the little light I was carrying.”

As the liaison to the unconscious, Michels says, the Shadow is the source of all creativity and agility in life, business, and art, which he calls “flow.” “If you can really know your own Shadow, you start to know the Shadows of everyone,” he says. “People who can write that way start to articulate universal themes, which not only makes them more successful on that level”—in other words, commercially—“but it’s a more gratifying endeavor.” In Hollywood, mentioning the Shadow can draw a look of recognition, followed by instant camaraderie. “It’s like we all went to the same school,” one of Michels’s patients—seven of whose good friends also see Michels—told me. “As in, ‘Oh, you went to Princeton? What year?’ ” Talk of Michels’s services spreads through productions, casts, and groups of friends. Howard Gordon says, “Outside the military, I can’t imagine too many collective communities sharing that kind of professional help.”

Michels asks his patients to relate to the Shadow as something real, which can be coaxed from the cobwebbed lair of the unconscious into the physical world. The process, as he describes it, is spooky, a kind of daylight séance in which he plays the role of guide. In “The Tools,” Michels tells the story of “Jennifer,” a model who lobbies to get her child into a fifteen-thousand-dollar-a-year kindergarten but is too ashamed of her self-described “trailer trash” origins to talk to the other mothers, whom she views as “a superior race of Range-Rover-driving goddesses.” The secret to her crippling sense of inferiority lies with her Shadow, which she must accept and integrate into her public self. “I asked her to close her eyes,” Michels writes. He goes on: