by Will Self
‘Well, yes. I suppose I am.’
‘After all, we were never exactly sympatico, were we?’
‘Yes, yes. I think I’d agree with you there.’
‘Well, here it is. The fact is that I’m attracting a good deal of publicity with what I’m trying to do here. Some of it is distinctly favourable, but that fact only seems to persuade those who are seeking to discredit me to redouble their efforts. I know that you have never programmatically defined yourself as belonging to any avant-garde movement. But on the other hand I know that you have allied yourself with some pretty weird courses of study during your career, isn’t that so?
‘What I want you to do here is what you do best: research. There is one way that I can really kick over the hornet’s nest of the psychiatric and psychotherapeutic establishment and get them all buzzing furiously. And that is to prove not that my methods of helping people who suffer from so-called “mental illnesses” are more effective than conventional ones, but that they are more cost effective; that would really upset people. If I could prove that Concept Houses the length and breadth of the country would reduce public expenditure, I might well become unstoppable.’
‘And me?’
‘I want you to construct and manage the trials and to collate the results, to be published in the form of an article co-authored by the two of us in the BJE1.’
And so it was. I became a member of the Concept House team and abandoned my suits and shiny shoes in favour of uncomfortable overalls which rode up my cleft and shoes that appeared half-baked. Why? Well, because whatever the extent of Busner’s rampant egoism, whatever the dubious nature of his ideas, there was a sense of human warmth at the Concept House that I found lacking, either at Aston or at the Institute of Job Reductivism. I craved some of that warmth. You have to remember that since the age of seventeen, I had lived an almost exclusively institutionalised life. Nonetheless, ever prudent, I didn’t give up my academic positions, I merely secured a leave of absence to work on Busner’s study. Of course there were mutterings about what I was getting involved with, but I paid them no mind.
The trial I evolved for Busner was complex in the extreme. There were two aspects to the problem: how much diagnosed mental patients spent themselves and what was spent on them. It was to be a double-blind trial, which operated itself in the context of a double-blind. There were to be three trial groups: the inmates of the Concept House, a group of patients diagnosed as afflicted with major psychoses at Friern Barnet, and fourteen Beth Din approved butchers living in the Temple Fortune area. That the latter group was chosen was to bedevil the validity of our results for years to come. I would like to state here, once and for all, that the fact was that the people who applied for the trial, and who fulfilled the necessary criteria, all happened to be kosher butchers domiciled in that area.
Of course in retrospect this fact was undoubtedly one of the secret springs, the ‘subtle connections’ which I had begun to make unconsciously, and which led eventually to the full-blown Quantity Theory.
The trial was conducted over a period of six months in four distinct ‘trial periods’. The results were monitored by me purely in the form of computer data. I never had any direct access to either the mechanics of the trial itself, or even to the intermediate collection of data. Naturally a double-double-blind trial involves not only the technician who is directly monitoring the trial to be unaware of whether he is administering a placebo or not, but also the overall administrator of the trial – be he psychologist or statistician – to be unaware of whether he really is administering a trial, or just carefully collating and analysing figures, totals and percentages, completely at random. Thus, two of the groups of data that Zack Busner fed through to me comprised respectively: the number of snail trails he had counted, smearing across the fissured concrete apron, wreathed in bindweed, that lay in the dead centre of the waste ground behind the Concept House; and, a random selection of handicapping weights from the pages of a back number of the Sporting Life.
On the other two occasions the data was, of course, ‘real’ – although in a very restricted sense. The two real trials contained an obvious reversal. In one, the mental patients were given an economic placebo and the Concept House inhabitants, money. In the other this was reversed. The butchers were given, arbitrarily, either money or virtually useless discount vouchers for household cleaning products. Thus, the overall form of the trial could be depicted by a schematic diagram:
To my mind this expressed with absolute clarity the limiting conditions necessary for a cost-benefit analysis of sanity variables. Of course the informed reader will have already detected the lineaments of Quantity Theory in the structure of the trial diagram. My purpose here is expressly to avoid the crude attempts that are made to retrospectively manufacture the genesis of an idea. The problems I have been most interested in that arose from the Concept House trial were purely methodological. For instance, Olsen’s 1978 paper in the BJE in which he presented the results of his own trials. Olsen took three groups of recently diagnosed and sectioned mental patients. One group was given in equal thirds, lithium, chlorapromasine and a tricyclic anti-depressant. The second group was given a placebo and the third group was given nothing; instead Olsen had the patients in this group mercilessly beaten to a bloody pulp.
If any of the patients in the three groups manifested any signs of severe deterioration in their overall condition they were administered ECT. However, the substance of Olsen’s trial and indeed the validity or otherwise of his results are of little interest to me. Rather it was Olsen’s argument that it was my error in the double negative implied by the double-double-blind trial that exercised me greatly. Fortunately I was saved from having to answer the accusation by the revelation that Olsen had himself participated in administering beatings to the control group in his experiment. Such a violation of the blind status of the trial naturally discredited him entirely.
The trials took six months to complete and during that time I was accepted into the Concept House community. This, as you will hear in due course, was altogether a mixed blessing. Busner and his therapists had long since ceased to make any practical distinction between themselves and their patients. So another involution of the trial sequence was that at the end of it no one could be really sure who had been giving what to whom. The trial money and placebo money were given out at random times when I was sure not to be in the vicinity. Occasionally I would catch a glimpse of a man, skull-capped and be-locked, his apron suspiciously stained and clutching a handful of glossy paper slips. But I discounted these peripheral visions, putting them down to the generally heightened psychic atmosphere of the Concept House.
There were in theory six therapists, six patients, Busner’s parents and myself in residence. The patients were a random selection from the chronic wards that Busner had been attached to over the years. Basically he recruited for the Concept House through a mixture of fraudulence and guile. Busner was typical of experimentalists in the psychiatric and educational fields in that he blamed the failure of his methods not on their theoretical basis, but on the fact that he could only persuade wealthy parents to send their chronically disturbed children to his institution.
I participated in the exhaustive group therapy sessions, which more often than not were long periods of either silence or disjointed monamaniac ranting – usually by Busner himself. The truth was that although I felt accepted within the Concept House, it wasn’t really a congenial environment. People who are severely mentally ill when they are left unconstrained tend to behave fairly badly. On reflection I suppose that is why they are diagnosed as being mentally ill in the first place. And as for the ‘therapists’ that Busner had recruited, they were, on the whole, fairly unstable people themselves, coming as they did from the wilder fringes of the therapeutic world. Among them were a failed holistic osteopath to naturopaths and a woman who described herself as ‘seismically sentient’. Pretty stupid really. The main reason I remained was to complete the trial, adde
d to that it was a fairly stimulating environment for debate. Busner’s old cronies from Chelmsford – Harley, Sikorski and the others – dropped round at fairly regular intervals. They were all beginning to make names for themselves and they were always keen for a wide-ranging debate on all the latest developments in our various fields.
These were of course the men who were to form the nucleus of my Quantity Theory research group. Now I see what they have become I rather wish I had left them all alone, but at the time I was so pleased to be accepted by them that I suppose the dawning awareness that I might in fact be their intellectual superior was enough to make me want to stick close.
Eventually, however, I left the Concept House. It was becoming intolerable. You couldn’t even eat breakfast without someone either slavering down the neck of your pullover or trying to sell you time shares in a pyramid building project. Busner himself was beginning to be taken up by the media as the prophet of some new movement and his vanity was insupportable, as was his pretension. He would sit for hours in a darkened room, thrumming mindlessly on an electric bass guitar and composing what he called ‘verbal tone poems’. Let me tell you, what I could see at the time prefigured his eventual fall from grace. I knew he would end up on television game shows.
As for the trial and its findings, they received short shrift from the psychological establishment, which found both our methods and our aims quite incomprehensible. That was their problem; and although I hadn’t managed to come up with the results that Busner would have liked, I had proved, to my own satisfaction at least, that £7.00 will make someone who is significantly mentally ill feel at least marginally better.
The only person I was sorry to leave behind at the Concept House was Professor Lurie. This poor old buffer had made it to a considerable age as a happy eccentric before fatefully teetering over the brink into genuine delusional mania. Nonetheless I had spent some happy hours sitting listening to his clever, inventive fantasies of life marooned in the Amazon with a tribe of unspeakable banality.
Back to Birmingham then and the institute. My teaching, my books, my essentially lonely, but contented scholarly life. But something had changed. There was a new restlessness in the way I attacked ideas and worried at them like a terrier, a new edge to my thinking. All this came to a head as I laboured over completing the index to the revised edition of my doctoral thesis. An American college press of some obscurity had agreed to publish and I knew that the work needed attention. Yet it was no longer a task that quickened my blood. Quite frankly I had long since ceased to care about the nature of academic grant application. The whole study appeared useless and fruitless to me, perhaps only interesting as the purest possible expression of the digging-out and then filling-in mentality of so much academic endeavour – especially in the social sciences. What I wanted to do was to hit upon a general explanatory theory of the relation between normal and abnormal psychopathology. A theory of the order of Freud’s entire corpus of work, but, unlike Freudianism, intimately bound up with and connected to a theory of social form and change.
As I laboured on the tedious index I felt something gestate inside of me. It was like a great, warm, rounded bolus of thought. Stuck to its sides were all the insights and experiences I had had in the preceding ten years: my undergraduate days with Müller at Oxford; my postgraduate thesis at Chelmsford; my time researching for MacLintock; my doctorate at Birmingham; my trials with Busner. All of these were now to find their rightful place, unified in the Quantity Theory of Insanity.
Drizzle over Bromsgrove. The sodden postman flobs along the pavement, pauses as if to enter by the green garden gate, and then flobs on. The damp clinging of cloth to flesh is felt across a sodden twenty-foot tangle of bindweed as he moves on past the mullions. My desk – normally a sanctuary of rigid order, a baffle against the worst of entropy – has started to decay. Curled and stained pages of typescript hold funnelled within themselves soggy drifts of biscuit crumbs. Biros, cemented to one another and to balls of fluff and lint with hardened saliva, are thrown into the path of the paper avalanche like so many spillikins. Hither and thither across the melamine stand ramparts of bound volumes from the institute library, Dewey decimal tags detaching from their spines and curling into Sellotape snails. I no longer have the impetus, the application, to work on the index, instead I doodle on a sheet of scrap paper, my pen describing senseless diagrams which express with a conjunction of lines and dashes the relations that obtain between a series of dots …
… And yet this particular diagram has such an appealing, cogent form. It looks as if it ought to express a genuine relationship of some kind. It is too four-square, too obviously functional, to be a mere doodle. I see in it the shape of the schematic diagram I drew to express the double-double-blind status of the Concept House trial … And then I see it, altogether, in one pure thought-bite; the Quantity Theory of Insanity shows its face to me.
I suppose all people who look for the first time upon some new, large-scale, explanatory theory must feel as I did at that moment. With one surge of tremendous arrogance, of aching hubris, I felt as if I were looking at the very form of whatever purpose, whatever explanation, there really is inherent in the very stuff of this earth, this life.
‘What if…’ I thought to myself, ‘What if there is only a fixed proportion of sanity available in any given society at any given time?’ No previous theory of abnormal psychology had ever assumed such a societal dimension. For years I had sought some hypothesis to cement the individual psyche to the group; it was right in front of me all the time. But I went on, I elaborated, I filled out the theory, or rather, it filled out itself. It fizzed and took on form the way a paper flower expands in water. ‘What if,’ I further thought, ‘any attempts to palliate manifestations of insanity in one sector of society can only result in their upsurge in some other area of society?’
So that was it! The surface of the collective psyche was like the worn, stripy ticking of an old mattress. If you punched into its coiled hide at any point, another part would spring up – there was no action without reaction, no laughter without tears, no normality without its pissing accompanist.
The sodden crescent at the edge of my long-since-dunked digestive biscuit flotched to the desk top like excrement. I paid it no mind. In that instant I saw whole series of overlapping models of given sanity quantities – for if each societal grouping had a given sanity quotient, then why not each sub-societal grouping? From the Bangladeshis to the bowling club, from the Jews to the Jewellers’ Association. It must be so. In each model the amount of sanity available would be different and each societal model would have a bearing on the next. I saw it in my mind’s eye as an endless plain of overlapping mattresses, each of a different size. Tread on one and the effect would ripple away through all the others.
That was it stated in its barest outline, but what was especially remarkable about the Quantity Theory was that it came into my mind complete with a myriad of hypotheses. Such as:
i) If you decrease the number of social class 2 anorexics you necessarily increase the numbers of valium abusers in social class 4.
ii) If you provide efficient medication for manic depressives in the Fens, there are perceptible variations in the numbers of agoraphobics on the South Coast.
iii) If you use behavioural conditioning to stop six pupils at St Botolph’s primary school on Anglesey from bed wetting, the result will be increased outbursts of sociopathic rage among the ten borderline psychotics that attend the school.
And so on.
In one fell swoop I also found myself abandoning all the models of sanity and insanity I had absorbed during my years of study. The key to the abnormal psyche lay not in a juxtaposition between the acquired and the instinctual, nor in a comprehensive model of the workings of the mind, but in an altogether purer, more mathematical direction. Traditional psychology retained the status of being a pseudo-science, its findings unable to bridge the vast gulf between the empirically testable hypotheses of neurophysio
logy and the incommunicable truths of inner mental states. Just as philosophy, try as it might, cannot bind itself to formal logic. All this would end with Quantity Theory. The individual psyche would be left to discover its own destiny; psychology would be confined to the elaboration of statistical truths.
I make no bones about it, the Quantity Theory was my salvation. No one ever complains if a great artist says that he was driven to create a masterpiece by a hunger for recognition and money. But a scientist? Well, he is meant to be disinterested, pure; his ambition merely to descry the cement of the universe. He isn’t meant to use it to start laying his own patio. I was saved from Bromsgrove, from Aston, from Chelmsford, from the Majestic Hotel, by the Quantity Theory. From its inception I knew that it fulfilled the criteria required by all great scientific theories: 1. It made large-scale predictions. 2. These were testable empirically. 3. The testings would really eat up cash.
That night I paced the Wilton until it smelt of singed nylon. I could not sleep, I was tormented, gripped by the fear that should I make the wrong move, should I fail to do the Quantity Theory justice, then I would be unable to claim all the credit. I knew that as a responsible scholar I should search around for some funding, do some fieldwork and then write up the results for publication in the relevant journal. But a wayward, craven part of me feared instantly that some other, some interloper was perhaps at that very moment stumbling on the same truth and about to make it known to the world – pulverising the credit due to me and me alone. I was tempted to call the national press, arrange a conference of some sort, upstage the academic community and tell the world.
Prudence got the better of me. I knew that I had to effectively gain control of the Quantity Theory. To unleash it on the world half-cocked was to ensure only that the massive industry of thought, research and practice which I could foresee would be within the domain of others. If I wanted to control I would have to plot, scheme, machinate, and above all lay my plans carefully.