Tuned into the shrink’s office

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One therapist’s empathy threatens to consume his life. Another is so narcissistic she holds sessions while being fitted for her wedding dress. A third manages to help her patients but is in such personal disarray she does not know which colleague fathered her child.

As if in answer to the country’s economic woes and general anxiety, there are suddenly an awful lot of shrinks on TV. Ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous, these doctors create a microcosm of television’s, and popular culture’s, evolving relationship with psychoanalysis.

At opposite ends of the spectrum are HBO’s “In Treatment,” in which Dr. Paul Weston (Gabriel Byrne) and his therapist Gina (Dianne Wiest) provide aspirational therapy -- they’re the doctors you wish you had -- and Starz’s “Head Case”, which plays more like “What About Bob?” meets “Entourage.” Matching egos with the likes of Kevin Nealon, Tori Spelling and Jeff oldberg, Alexandra Wentworth’s Dr. Elizabeth Goode practices something closer to psycholo-me. It’s no coincidence that her officemate is a Freudian with more wives than patients.

In between are the Team Players, including Dr. Violet Turner (Amy Brenneman) on “Private Practice” (she of the DNA-test aversion) and Dr. Lance Sweets (John Francis Daley) on “Bones.” Nor should we overlook the Special Guest Star Therapists like one of the originals “M*A*S*H”’s “Dr. Sidney Freedman” and newcomers like Amy Madigan on “Grey’s Anatomy” and Stephen Fry also on “Bones.”

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(Photo of “In Treatment” courtesy HBO)