Sigmund Freud has his promoters; but the best-known psychiatrist of the 20th century was probably Lucy van Pelt. From her first clinical session in 1959 (Charlie Brown: “I have deep feelings of depression…What can I do about this?” Lucy: “Snap out of it! Five cents, please.”), this little girl ministered to the children of her neighbourhood from a lemonade stand emblazoned with “PSYCHIATRIC HELP 5¢. THE DOCTOR IS IN.” (Asked by a bewildered visitor, “Are you a real doctor?” Lucy replied, “Was the lemonade ever any good?”) Her adventures were documented by the artist Charles Schulz in Peanuts, a comic strip that was syndicated in more than 2600 newspapers, in 75 countries, and is still reprinted today. The first Peanuts cartoon was published on Oct 2, 1950, and the last on Feb 13, 2000—the morning after Schulz died.

Lucy is very much the modern doctor. Early on, she worked in general medicine, persuading the neighbourhood children to lie down on the sidewalk and cough, in an attempt to literally “stamp out” the common cold: “No germ has ever been able to build up a defence against being stepped on!” She will “treat any patient who has a problem and a nickel”, and once charged Charlie Brown US$143 for an unsolicited slide-show of his faults. She did research on her own younger brother, Linus, by withdrawing his security blanket from him and documenting the consequences: she won first prize in a science fair, leaving Linus, as the exhibit, on the laboratory bench overnight; asked by Charlie Brown about her medical ethics, she replied, “I won, didn't I?”

Like most psychiatrists—indeed, most people—Lucy is a broken person. Early childhood promise as an athlete disintegrates, as she becomes possibly the worst baseball player ever. She pines for Schroeder, a musician who would not marry her “for all the beagles in Beagleland”, and will kiss her only if “the kiss will be supplied by my representative”. She is ferociously aggressive to Linus, and to anyone who stands in her way; every year, trusted by Charlie Brown to hold a football for him to kick, she pulls it away at the last moment. But she lacks self-doubt: Lucy, in her blinkered determination, is (almost) always right.

In her years of practice, Lucy treats several neighbourhood children, a dog, and the occasional bird, but her most frequent patient is Charlie Brown. Charlie comes from a loving home, and is decent, considerate, and reflective: but his life is a mess. Despite obvious intelligence, he is a mediocre student. He invests much emotional energy in managing and playing for his baseball team, which habitually loses by ridiculous scores. He yearns for the Little Red-Haired Girl, but never has the courage to approach her; when her family moves away, he stands in the street, paralysed and silent, as his life collapses around him; days later, woken by a scream, his sister Sally muses, “Before she moved away, he never cried out during the night.” The neighbourhood girls casually despise him.

Asked, at around 7 years of age, how long “this period of depression has lasted”, Charlie Brown replies, “Six years!” One summer, he develops a psychosomatic rash and has to spend weeks with his head in a sack. Another time, haunted by the meaninglessness of his losses, he decides to spend the rest of his life lying in a dark room, only to emerge, stooped and shattered, when he realises he has to feed the dog.

Charlie Brown's dog, Snoopy, is ostensibly a success. He is appointed Head Beagle; excels at baseball and figure skating; and is often so happy he can't help but dance. He is an art lover who, on losing his van Gogh in a house fire, replaces it with an Andrew Wyeth; despite being unable to talk, he studies a college course in anthropology, and reads widely, favouring Leo Tolstoy, Hermann Hesse, and Miss Helen Sweetstory, author of the Bunny-Wunny books. Yet his life also features tragedy. He is removed from his post as Head Beagle after taking a stress-related break; cannot skate in competition because of stage fright; and, through nerves and Charlie Brown's ineptitude, misses his opportunity to break Babe Ruth's all-time record for home runs before Hank Aaron gets there. He spends some nights paralysed with fear at his own vulnerability. He retreats into fantasy, pretending to be, for instance, a World War 1 flying ace, or Joe Cool, a student who rarely attends classes because they “can ruin your grade average”. His personal life is a disaster: his first girlfriend is forbidden to marry him because he is an obedience school dropout, prompting him to try to forget her by eating: “You try for a little happiness, and what do you get? A few memories and a fat stomach.” A subsequent girlfriend elopes on the morning of their wedding with his brother, before running off with a coyote.

The sources of Snoopy's pain are not hard to find. He was taken from his family as a puppy, without his consent or choice: adopted into the family of a little girl called Lila, whom he loved very much, he was returned to the puppy farm because the family could not keep him. Charlie Brown is his second owner: in his resentment, he cannot even remember his owner's name (“It's kind of a complicated name…I have trouble with complicated names”).

Snoopy has been known to act as Lucy's mute, bespectacled locum. But he rarely consults her. His inability to talk hinders psychotherapy: “I feel like I'm interviewing a teddy bear.” He cannot easily pay medical bills: once, his failure to raise 20¢ (“I refuse to sell my Andrew Wyeth!”) caused Lucy, acting as her own bailiff, to seize his supper dish. But most important is his scepticism about the psychiatric process:

Lucy sometimes shows insight Copyright © 2015 PEANUTS © 1971 Peanuts Worldwide LLC. Dist. By UNIVERSAL UCLICK. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

[Lucy:] It used to be that a person could live isolated from the world's problems. Then it got to be that we all knew everything that was going on. The problem now is that we know everything about everything except what's going on. That's why you feel nervous… Five cents, please! [Snoopy thinks:] I'm short a nickel, I'm still nervous, and I still don't know what's going on!

He sometimes undercuts Lucy by offering other therapies, such as FRIENDLY ADVICE 2¢, or HUG A WARM PUPPY 1¢.

Charlie Brown often seeks Lucy's help, but does not seem to get very far. She wants him to feel that he can fit in:

Have you ever seen any other worlds? No. As far as you know this is the only world there is…right? Right. There are no other worlds for you to live in…right? Right. You were born to live in this world…right? Right. Well, LIVE IN IT, THEN!…Five cents, please.

But Charlie Brown is not going to get there. He feels pain and doubt too quickly—through self-pity and vanity, but also through sympathy and a sense of justice. Perhaps, Schulz seems to suggest, it is not Charlie Brown who is mad, but the world.

With the exception of George Herriman's Krazy Kat, comic strips have rarely been regarded as high art; but I confess that Schulz moves me more, and reveals more, than any other visual artist. Like some other geniuses—the snooker player Alex Higgins springs to mind—what Schulz does seems not only accomplished but impossible. It is incredible that, using a spare few lines and much white space, he should convey so much emotion and deep understanding; beyond imagination that his pacing of space and prose poetry should be so musical. And, like the best of artists, his work was demotic.

For a while, in the late 1960s, Schulz was probably as fashionable, at least in the USA, as he deserved to be. You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown ran on Broadway; the Apollo 10 command and lunar modules were called Charlie Brown and Snoopy. At other times, Schulz was, like world snooker and the Byzantine Empire, never as good as he used to be—even when he was better. Editors cut his space, making it difficult for him to convey so much rich subtlety, and requiring him to refine his style (some posthumous editors have cropped his panels and ruined his composition). But his work remained popular, and arguably matured with age.

As did Charlie Brown. By the last years of the strip, he is a less anguished little fellow. His dysfunctional relationships with neighbourhood girls have been replaced by affectionate if awkward friendships with Peppermint Patty and Marcie. He shows considerable emotional strength by learning to love again—even if the beautiful Peggy Jean eventually gets a boyfriend, and he cannot dance with the almost equally lovely Emily because Snoopy has come with him, and “dogs aren't allowed in the dance studio”. He hears voices at night, but uses them to work through his spiritual crises; and finds great satisfaction in caring for his dog, at one stage deciding to devote the rest of his life to it.

Snoopy, for his part, reconciles himself to Charlie Brown's ownership, and finds affection in it. Crucially, he regains contact with his family, and finds friends with whom he can converse, principally the little bird Woodstock.

And Lucy? After one apocalyptic crisis (“YOU CAN't EAT! YOU CAN't SLEEP!! YOU'll WANT TO SMASH THINGS!”) she largely reconciles herself to Schroeder's (partly feigned) indifference; the birth of a second brother, Rerun, inspires her to express love and consideration within her family. She still cannot resist pulling the ball away from Charlie Brown, but becomes much more thoughtful and humanising. By the last days of her practice, she starts to look distinctly old-fashioned: keeping her prices low; rarely prescribing drugs; trusting in her patients to think and feel their way through their problems; and providing admirable continuity of care, available in her lemonade stand in all seasons. She will probably be remembered when most or all of us are forgotten.

Fantagraphics (Seattle, WA) is issuing The Complete Peanuts in over 20 volumes, and has got as far as 1994. Good single-volume collections include Celebrating Peanuts: 60 years (Kansas City, MO: Andrews McMeel, 2009) and The Snoopy Festival (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974)

Uncited Reference Briggs, 1998. Briggs R Ethel and Ernest. Jonathan Cape , London Google Scholar Hedges and Sacco, 2012. Hedges C

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