Some of Your Blood

by Theodore Sturgeon

  A. (Defensively) Shock?

  The Rorschach is a set of ten standardized “ink blots.” (You would make such a blot by putting a blob of ink on paper, folding it in two through the blot pressing the folded paper flat and then opening it up. The blot would be irregular in shape but identical right and left.) To the ten standard Rorschach cards most people react in certain conventional ways. They see humans or animals or insects or plant life. They see people in traditional poses or action, such as eating, talking, dancing, walking, laughing. These usual reactions are offered spontaneously at sight. There is no “right” or “wrong” way to see Rorschach blots. There is merely approach to or departure from statistical norms.

  Q. (Chuckles.) Not “shock.” Rorschach. Name of the guy invented them. Just look at ’em one by one and tell me what you see, or what they look like or remind you of.

  A. (For the impact second, and for the first time, eyes wide and completely alert. Scansion swift, up, down, across. Then lids lower again to usual hooded attitude; subsequent gaze steady and dull. This particular card usually seen by men his age as two figures dancing around an overgrown tree.) This is like two guys mashing an animal, pulling on it or maybe choking it. It didn’t bleed yet but it will. There’s the animal’s hole. (Pointing to a red spot on the card.)

  Q. (Impulsively using a technique applicable to another test entirely.) Why are they doing that?

  A. (Instantly withdrawing; concealing; secretive.) They just doing it.

  Q. (Another card, oftenest seen as two animals crawling up a hill.) How about this?

  A. (Instant response.) That’s a tit. Two dragons wanted it but they spoiled it, they tore it all up. Now they are mad, they are flying at it.

  Q. Try this. (Usually seen as a large butterfly.)

  A. It’s like animals pulling apart somebody’s body. Vicious animals. There’s the girl’s spine and her hole. She’s cut in half. It’s red inside. (Respiration deeper perhaps but slow; eyes hooded; nostrils repeatedly dilated.)

  Q. This one?

  A. Oh, that’s somebody built a double deadfall, bam, it got two animals, chucks maybe or possum, both at once, mashed.

  Q. And this?

  A. A woman’s belly bust open. It was a baby in it bust it. But the baby bust open too, see it there? (Q. gathers up the cards. A. watches absorbedly.)

  A. (As if he had been thinking about it all this time.) Phil …?

  Q.?

  A. You could call me George if you want.

  Q. Anything you say … we came a long way today. You’re doing real good now. You want to try some more; more kinds, sometime soon? Not now, it’s lunch already.

  A. (Dully.) Okay.

  Q. (Raps for guard.)

  End session.

  Comments: George has a strange quality about him I call inaccurately non-guilt. It is inaccurate because he is completely aware of good and evil as other people judge them, but he seems burdened not at all by that sense of punishment earned which afflicts most people in a Judeo-Christian matrix like ours. An extreme example is the character described from Biblical times right up to the present, who when injured or thrust into misery concludes instantly that this is punishment for a transgression, known or unknown. The cry, “What have I done to deserve this?” seems to mean, “I have done nothing to deserve this!”; actually it means, in many or most cases, “For which of my sins am I being punished?”

  In George’s case I feel—almost intuitively—that there is in him no conviction of quid pro quo, punishment for crime. Punishment he understands, other people’s attitudes toward crime he understands. But he simply seems not to share the attitude. A trivial analogy would be two persons, one dedicated to and transported by music, one completely tone-deaf and arrhythmic. The latter would recognize that the former was experiencing something, but could not know what it was nor how it felt. George seems in that sense to be “tone-deaf” to a whole spectrum of commonly-shared feelings—empathy for a dying animal, squeamishness in regard to pain, blood, injury, or injustice: a protective coating built up over the years and penetrated apparently only when he saw the casualties. Certainly a great deal of this could be explained by his execrable childhood, where punishment descended without rhyme or reason, while childish breaches of conduct like absence at meals or at night, stealing, impertinence, and disobedience were as often as not overlooked. Punishment did not necessarily follow crime in George’s cosmos, yet punishment inevitably came, crime or no.

  I have seen a great many prisoners who, for all their griping about a raw deal, actually felt that they were fairly caught and justly punished. A great many felt, or said they felt, that the punishment was too great; few indeed felt that they should not be punished at all. Even some innocent prisoners—innocent, that is, of the crime for which they are convicted—have a notion that they are paying off for something. But George’s feeling about the long imprisonment which followed his attack on the major was essentially what mine would be if, in crossing a field, my body broke through and fell into an immense labyrinthine cave. I don’t think I would feel I deserved it. I would want to find a way out, and if I could not, but met a man there who convinced me he knew the way, I would follow. And if I discovered, as we went along, that it would be not hours nor days, but weeks and even months before we emerged, I think I would feel about the whole thing as George was feeling now.

  How could such a creature as George exist for any appreciable time in a modern society? How, if he has so little concept of law and of property, of reciprocity and consequence, could he stay out of trouble for even a day?

  It becomes less of a mystery as one thinks it through. George had drifted to either of two environmental poles—the complete license of the outdoors, where laws are impartial and clearly understood, be they laws of gravity or the amount of whip yielded by a birch sapling; or the other pole, the world of the orphanage and the Army, where rigid legalisms guided one’s way to and fro with the fixity of a corral and chutes. A cow may travel parallel with the fence; she may not travel at right angles and into the fence. George had taken to heart the army adage, “Do what you’re told and never volunteer.” And the runways were painless to travel and impalpable to the obedient, who without question or conscious decision slept here, washed there, ate yonder, and waited.

  The area which as yet completely baffles me is the sexual one. Al Williams referred to George’s sexual attitude as “wholesome”; I denied it and still can’t say why. Al said that because, as George so lucidly explains it in his extraordinary manuscript, George is without shame, false modesty, insecurity or hypocrisy. He has plodded along a path of unassailable logic and satisfied himself with certain truths that mankind, categorically, is unable to accept subjectively: that erection, orgasm and ejaculation are as possible to a rabbit as a man and in man, no more noble; that these phenomena need not be nurtured because they are (given a chance) automatic and unstoppable; and if it is senseless to nurture them, it is even more so to suppress them. This Al calls wholesome; well, to use George’s own simile, it is precisely as wholesome as a rabbit’s. The great complications of sex, which run in tides and stain man’s thoughts, speech and works, are incomprehensible to George and, until he turns to look, out of Al’s field of view.

  The conclusion that the extraordinary bestiality of George’s Rorschach reactions is sexual in nature seems at first a foregone conclusion. Extraordinary is hardly the word for it; I have conducted over a thousand Rorschachs and have read everything I could find on the technique and interpretation of the device, and never have I heard of anything like George’s consistent, bloody, murderous pictorializations. Not in Rorschachs—but yes, yes indeed in deep psychoanalysis. But it is invariably found profoundly hidden, and emerges slowly and almost never directly, but symbolically.

  According to George’s biography, Anna is the only woman he ever knew—and I believe it. What little he says about their relationship is unclear. She apparently was the instigator; George says more than once that he did w
hat she wanted. He then makes obscure reference to his doing what he wanted; that she tried to stop him and then permitted it, feeling safe with him.

  Safe with him!

  What is safe with him? Who?

  Me?

  Well … we’ll have to work some more, learn some more. Fantasies of violence sometimes symbolize sex; sexual symbols (and sexual acts) often symbolize and express violence. Somewhere in this area may be theoretical room for the incredibly violent, often genital, yet virtually asexual fantasies of George’s Rorschach.

  Summary: April 3.

  Two more long sessions with George …

  (… it is interesting to inject here the reminder that Sergeant Outerbridge was still on the struggling staff of an overcrowded, underequipped military neuropsychiatric hospital, carrying a tremendous load, working impossible hours. The fact that he had found six of them for George, and the lack of complaint from Col. Williams, attest to his devotion and superhuman energy.)

  … have brought us through motor coordination tests, the house drawing, the human figure drawing, and the Thematic Apperception.

  The motor coordination was the first thing we tackled after the harrowing experience of the Rorschach. It consisted of his copying eight different geometric figures composed of circles, squares, wavy lines and dots. He did them precisely, with care and planning, making corrections to improve them. It appeared that despite a compulsively rigid manner of performing, his motor control was in good order and not overrun easily by his deeper, guarded (frightened?) feelings. Watching him do it, I felt I was watching a pencil-and-paper re-enactment of each new experience he had ever had in controlled circumstances—the orphanage, the Army bases. He sought the channels between fences; he eagerly searched for the areas in which he might, once they were known, run freely without having to think. It was easy to see how he had been able to hold down two years and more of Army motor mechanics, working much of the time alone, and free to use his hands.

  Reassured somewhat, I ventured a little closer to the emotional edge, always uncertain where it might begin to crumble under our feet. I asked him to draw a house.

  He drew a traditional house with a formal, landscaped garden, in the artistic style of an anxious six-year-old. Each window was given twenty or more panes; the flower beds and three trees were formed by forceful, tight, tiny scrawlings in contrast to the tenuous thin lines framing the larger structure of the house. Two things stood out as grotesque: the garden he placed in midair above the first story and sprawling out into the upper wall of the house, and the roof was simply cut out of his drawing by the top of the paper.

  It was hardly a balanced picture. It showed poor perspective and poor planning. It suggested that he could not be counted upon for responsible handling of everyday adult reality. He ignored the fundamentals, preoccupied with his private details. He could manage in compulsive fashion if his life were kept simple, but he might otherwise go to pieces.

  I drew a deep breath (silently) and told him to draw a human figure. I said a human figure, but he proceeded to draw a man and a woman, hurriedly, carelessly, as if, having made the outlines, he could not wait to blacken them in, which he did with a heavy hand: filled-in black legs, arms, torsos right up to the chin, then a round black hat on the woman, a square black hat on the man, close over their eyes. Cover up, cover up … anxiety.

  He stopped and I said, “Is that all?”

  To the best of my ability I said it casually and neutrally, but the heavy eaves of his eyes flicked up and he scanned my face, as avidly, for a second, as he had conned the inkblots. There was a flicker of frown between his brows. “Can I do it over?”

  “Sure.”

  He put his pencil to the paper, held it still, and flashed me that look again. If I believed in telepathy, which emphatically I do not, I would have testified to the receipt of an urgent, “Can I tell?” Then he set to work.

  I thought, as I watched him, how the human psyche, especially the ill one, cries out for contact and communication. George’s partial alexia—the inability to use the spoken word while he could write with such facility—was a phenomenon I had not seen before although I had heard of it. But I was thinking of all the other ways a sick soul reaches out … how the hand of a lonesome person remains outstretched after a handshake, deserted and seeking; how the eyes can express terror alone out of the almost sleeping face of a catatonic; how stern control of impending tears is betrayed by the puckering of the chin. I was convinced by now that George was unaware of anything unwell or odd about himself; yet I was conscious of a thing within him, alive and fully conscious of itself and of his affliction. In that momentary glance, like a separate, sentient being which had borrowed his eyes, it pleaded, “Can I tell? I know. I know. Let me tell.”

  George was drawing a male and a female.

  They were—pears? I would not lean closer, and divert him; I stayed where I was and peered.

  Nude. Head and shoulders together, a single sharp narrow curve. A mere suggestion of arms, perhaps held behind them. Narrow chests, the breasts of the woman indicated with a mere W-shaped zigzag. Huge, pregnant-seeming bellies, and an indeterminate squiggle for legs and feet. Just like two pears with dot-dot faces on their high narrow top-ends, and all else concentrated into that full round bulge.

  Leaning very close, holding his pencil with great care, flaring his strong nostrils again and again, he drew meticulous nipples on the careless W of the breasts, a perfectly round, very black navel, an identical opening down at the bottom. Then he donated another perfect circle to the man for a navel.

  He put down the pencil and shoved the paper across to me. He had forgotten altogether to draw sex organs for the male. I made no comment except to say that was fine, and my usual comment about how well he was doing. That young man was so starved for praise that it disappeared within him on contact, never to be heard from again.

  “You can make all sorts of animals that way,” he said suddenly, one of the few times he ever volunteered anything. He drew a whole row of the pear shapes, then on one he put long ears—rabbit—on another short spike ears and a stringy tail—possum—round ears and a thick ringed tail—racoon—sharp ears, whiskers and a thinner tail-cat—and so on, until he had eight different cartoon animals. “See?” he all but crowed. He even grinned for a second; I wished he would do that more often. A somber lad, altogether.

  I began to rise, and then sat down again to watch him return to the drawing.

  On each and every animal—they were all drawn in the same pose, sitting down, facing forward, with their round fat bellies thrust out—he was carefully drawing his small bold circular navels.

  It was time to go. I collected the papers and hammered on the door for the guard.

  April 9.

  I have just returned from an hour and a half on Thematic Apperception. And if I found it possible to laugh at the ludicrous defenses a psyche can put up, I’d roar.

  George’s alexia, his difficulties with the spoken word, disappeared like magic for the Thematic Apperception, and when I reasoned out why, I marveled.

  The test is simply a series of pictures, the kind of thing one sees in magazine illustrations, but carefully chosen to present a number of pivotal and interpersonal situations. For example, one might be a picture of a girl standing in the open door of a cabin. One patient says she is going out; one that she is going in; another that she has been standing there all day waiting for someone. On occasion a tremendous amount of contributory detail comes tumbling out: the girl’s name, the presence or absence of persons in the cabin behind her, and their impending actions; sometimes the comb in her hair or her “new shoes” will be the central factor. Obviously these spur-of-the-moment stories and anecdotes relate to the patient. Frequently they serve as surrogate solutions to a patient’s own problems, solutions the patient dare not face personally, as for example a girl who is in an agony of indecision about leaving home might react to the picture with a tale of a girl who left and was horribly murdere
d, or a girl who did not leave and got so mad she killed her father.

  It came to me, listening to George incredibly chattering on and on over the pictures, that his verbal censor sat upon the subject of himself. As he remarked in his biography, there is always likely to be someone listening who doesn’t hear right and will get you wrong. It would seem that he was afraid to be heard aright; that is, his mouth might give something away when he wasn’t looking. And give away what? Possibly some anecdotes for which he feared he might get punished (though I am morally certain he feels no guilt) but much more likely he wished to conceal feelings and conclusions and observations which would attract the attention and derision of other people. Incapable of evaluating like other people, he was incapable of knowing before he spoke the effect his words might have.

  But in the face of Thematic Apperception, his censor gave one relieved sigh and went to sleep. For it was—it must have been—convinced that as long as George talked within the four corners of a picture, he could not talk about himself!

  He talked about himself—fluently, boldly, and never knew it. And the peak of the ludicrous (if one could laugh) came when amongst the pictures appeared a white blank card with a border around it—a picture for the patient to make up himself and talk about. And when George came to it his censor awoke and restored to him his soft growling slur: “A blank one? … nothing. It would probably be about myself. No story.”

  But the ones about other people? … these are verbatim.

  A boy and a woman standing in a room: “The kid used to do a lot of stuff, he got sent away. He was away so long him and his mother don’t hardly know what they look like. He just come back. In a minute she is going to put out her arms and he will run to her and she will squeeze him real hard but the front of her dress is not soft. It’s full of rocks. And it isn’t his mother but somebody dressed up in the mother’s clothes is going to steal the money.”

  A boy standing by a window. A shotgun leaning against the wall. “Let’s say a kid is in a shack. A window and shotgun there. He has been reading up on doctor books, operations and all. His father is going to get operated on. He is going to go to the hospital and stand there and tell that doctor if he makes a mistake he will blow his head off. But the gun goes off and kills the father.”