Imus Schools Dr. Keith Ablow, a Psychiatrist, in Psychiatry

To call what went down in Egypt in just 18 days revolutionary, or game-changing, or any other hyperbolic phrase is just as accurate as calling it downright crazy. So Imus turned to Dr. Keith Ablow, Fox’s resident psychiatrist, to explain what might be behind some of the sea change in the Middle East.
 
“People cannot be deprived of themselves in perpetuity,” Ablow said, appearing by satellite today from Boston, where he lives. “Ultimately, the self declares itself in life. You can’t drug it away, you can’t drink it away, you can’t have a relationship that isn’t really true to you and isn’t true love. It won’t work.”
 
What’s more, he added, “You can’t live in a country subjugated by a ruler who substitutes your own autonomy.” In other words, after 30 years of repressive rule by President Hosni Mubarak, Egyptians finally succumbed to what Ablow called an “inborn human quality.”
 
“It’s a wonderful quality of human beings that you can’t keep them down forever,” he said. “Charles knows this.”
 
But unlike Charles’s relationship with his dictator, marriages founded on people’s weaknesses tend not to last very long, according to Ablow. “You can’t delegate your liberty to somebody else,” he said. “You can’t live at a distance from your truth. Not forever. The truth always wins!”
 
He suggested the people of Egypt do some real soul-searching as to why their national character led them into bondage in the first place. Kind of like Ablow himself did 16 years ago, when, after dating his wife for eight years, he claimed she “fooled” him into getting married.
 
“I’m so suspect of anything you sign on to for a lifetime,” he admitted. Luckily, former drug and alcohol addict Imus was on hand to provide some perspective.
 
“If somebody had said to me, ‘You can’t have a drink for the rest of your life,’ I couldn’t have done it,” he said. “But if they said, ‘You can’t have a drink today,’ which is what I say everyday—same with cocaine—it’s very easy to get through today.”
 
The same, Imus posited, should apply to Ablow’s marriage. “Just get through today with her!” he advised his guest, who acknowledged it was, strangely, great advice.
 
In fact, it’s not all that different from what Ablow sometimes tells patients. “People get lost in joy,” he explained. “So they start thinking, things are fine, and why aren’t they better?” Ablow brings people back down to earth from thoughts of divorce by suggesting they think about a scenario where somebody else takes their spouse—god forbid—for chemotherapy treatments. “That blows people back in their seats.”
 
The bad times, Ablow tells people, are often “just today.” He added, “As my friend Imus says.”
 
Might want to keep that last part out, Doc, lest all credibility fly out the window.
 
-Julie Kanfer