so i found a dr raynor vs dr harrow analysis i wrote a while back just sitting in my drafts so here it is for anyone that cares lol:
so in hindsight, neither of them are necessarily good or bad therapists. i think, like real life, they have varying qualities about them that will either play into their patients strengths, or just totally go against their weaknesses.
i think marvel is a little… unbalanced, shall we say? when it comes to portraying real life therapy. now, i would like to stress that dr harrow isn’t real (in terms of existing in the mcu world) he’s simply a creation from marc’s mind, and so when i discuss his tactics against dr raynor’s consider that im saying all of this with a pinch of salt because some of his behaviour/actions just stems from marc’s own perspective on therapist and therapy.
i’ll talk about dr raynor first however since we saw her actually exist with the mcu and give a real therapy session. now, bucky barnes and marc spector are two completely different characters. they’ve experienced different things, experienced different mental health issues, however it’s evident that both of them are victims of very heavy trauma.
so when we meet dr raynor in episode one, it’s evident that her and bucky do not get along. which, in itself is no crime. im sure a lot of people can relate to having some sort of resilience towards their therapist, especially under bucky’s circumstances where it’s government mandated instead of voluntary (aka, he’s not doing this for his own sake of getting better but rather because it’s required of him to do so). their relationship is strained, he’s very closed off, there’s a lot of very blunt answers and raynor… i feel lets it aggravate her. now, we know as a character bucky is stubborn, he can be blunt and snappy. and im gonna pretend like marvel put any thought behind this at all, but i imagine that when picking an appropriate therapist for bucky, they went with someone that was most like him, in order to make him feel vulnerable enough to open up. bucky certainly doesn’t need to be babied. he doesn’t need a therapist that is gonna coddle him every time he refuses to talk about his ptsd fuelled nightmares, or allow him to simply sit in silence for the entirety of the session just so he can say he went. in that aspect, raynor is a good therapist for bucky. someone who isn’t gonna shy away from him, someone who’s clearly not afraid of him – and that’s key. bucky spends a lot of time worrying about himself and how he is perceived. having raynor be blunt with him isn’t her just being an asshole, but it’s simply showing him “hey, im not gonna treat you any differently because who you are and what you did. this is how it is now suck it up and help yourself get better.”
i believe in that aspect, raynor is a pretty good fit for bucky. my gripe comes with basically how the show wrote her. i think again, it’s not so much her as a character but how marvel projects therapy into their show. raynor did some pretty unprofessional things. she taunted him about his dead family and friends as a means to get him to open up (yeesh) she makes sam sit in on a therapy session with neither of their consent (big no no) and her entire purpose of her being there is to get bucky to make amends to the people the winter soldier has hurt in the past. not once does she make it explicitly clear to him that HE is not responsible for any of that. that bucky is not behind all those deaths, that it was hydra who did that. she sends him on a wild goose chase, basically making him feel worse, and the guilt just piles on. her character is good, her execution of how to help bucky is not.
so overall: raynor gets a 3.5/5 stars from me in terms of, okay i see what you’re doing but holy cow marvel you’re going about it the wrong way entirely.
as for dr harrow, again, like i stated before, it’s a little tricky to compare the two because he’s not an actual therapist. his existence stems from marc’s subconscious whilst they are dead so… again: pinch of salt lol
i think, from my own perspective, his portrayal comes across as very authentic. again, marc (nor steven) need to babied. they don’t need to be treated like children because of their mental illnesses. but in this sense, dr harrow does treat marc (and i’m just gonna reference marc since he has the most screen time with him) with a sense of… fragility.
it’s evident that in those scenes, marc is definitely unwell. he’s going through an episode and he’s clearly not at his peak in regards to his mental state. dr harrow doesn’t belittle him, nor is he cruel. he’s gentle and soft spoken because it’s clear he knows what kind of environment marc needs when he’s in this headspace. i actually really loved ethan hawke’s betrayal of this character, it was really interesting and fun to watch, and i think he just really felt like an actual therapist of a mentally ill man, rather than someone pretending to be one.
he engages in marc’s questions or worries. he’s never dismissive however, he gets to the point in telling marc (or jake in this scene, whatever you want) that the things he’s seeing with the hippopotamus is nonsense, and gets him to say it out loud so that he can understand it better. he reiterated that not everything he is seeing is real, and does so by not necessarily talking down to him but just… telling him. talking to him and then parroting back his own statement so that marc can confirm he understands why that is.
he makes a sharp turn though when it’s steven fronting. and again, dr harrow is very calm with him, he’s patient in allowing him to ask questions and then insult him (lol) but when it comes down to his mother, steven starts to panic and dr harrow’s idea of helping him with that is to pretend to call steven’s mother to which it’s just an empty dial tone, and that is the moment steven is confronted with the information that his mother is in fact dead.
now… idk about you but uhhh that would fuck me up pretty badly lmao. if i was under the belief that my family member was alive and well, and this was because of years and years of childhood trauma had caused me to repress that so much (which dr harrow knows) i don’t think it’d be a safe and sensible thing to do that kind of shock/exposure therapy. he very bluntly (but packages it up to look like he’s being nice) forces steven to face the facts that his mother has already passed away, and he’s been essentially lied to. i personally just don’t think that’s a fair way to do it, but understandably a lot of people differ in how they react to certain forms of therapy, and if it works for you then it works, but again, none of this is real and this is just me rambling lol
so in conclusion i think marvel are still figuring out how to write a good therapist. and don’t get me wrong: i don’t think either of them were meant to be necessary “good” therapists, but marvel sometimes think they’re writing a positive character trait when in actuality they’re not and that can blur the lines sometimes as to what their actual purpose is there and what marvel is essentially saying is a good example of therapy, and what isn’t.
this is all just my own personal opinion. im not a therapist and honestly i just make all of this up as i go along but yeah. that’s my babbling done for now :) if anyone has anything else they’d like to add on to this then feel free !! thanks :)