“I beg your pardon?”
“Why try to write?”
“It is a pleasure I have long enjoyed—”
“Merde.”
He sat up and looked toward the door as if he expected Batman to break in any moment and rescue him.
“I came to you, not because I am neurotic, but in order to cure a very simple writing block. Now—”
“You are a patient who came with a cold and who is dying of cancer.”
“Now that you seem unable to cure the block you try to convince me not to write. I find this—”
“You find this uncomfortable. But just imagine all the fun you could be having if you gave up trying to publish. Have you looked at a tree in the last six years?”
“I’ve seen many trees. I want to publish, and I don’t know what you think you’re doing this morning.”
“I’m letting down the mask, Boggles. I’ve been playing the psychiatrist game with you, pretending we were after big things like anal stage, object cathexis, latent heterosexuality and the like, but I’ve decided that you can only be cured by being initiated into the mysteries behind the facade, into the straight poop, so to speak. The straight poop, that’s symbolism, Boggles, that’s—”
“I have no desire to be initiated—”
“I know you don’t. None of us do. But I’m letting you pay me thirty-five dollars per hour, and I want to give you your money’s worth. First of all, I want you to resign from the university and announce to your department chairman, the board of trustees and to the press that you are going to Africa to reestablish contact with your animal origins.”
“That’s nonsense!”
“Of course it is. That’s the point. Think of the publicity you’ll get: ‘Yale Professor Resigns to Seek Truth.’ It’ll get a lot more play than your last article in the Rhode Island Quarterly on ‘Henry James and the London Bus Service.’ Moreover—”
“But why Africa?”
“Because it has nothing to do with literature, academic advancement and full professorships. You won’t be able to fool yourself that you’re gathering material for an article. Spend a year in the Congo, try to get involved with a revolutionary group or a counterrevolutionary group, shoot a few people, familiarize yourself with the native drugs, let yourself get seduced by whatever comes along, male, female, animal, vegetable, mineral. After that, if you still feel you want to write about Henry James for the quarterlies, I’ll try to help you.”
He was sitting on the edge of the couch looking at me with nervous dignity. He said:
“But why should you want me to stop wanting to write?”
“Because as you are now, Boggles, and have been for forty-three years, you’re a dead loss. Absolutely. I don’t mean to sound critical, but absolutely. Deep down inside you know it, your colleagues know it and at all levels I know it. We’ve got to change you completely to make you worth taking money from. Normally I’d recommend that you have an affair with a student, but with your personality the only students who might open up for you would be worse off than you and no help.”
Boggles had stood up but I went serenely on.
“What you need is a more extensive personal experience with cruelty, with suffering, hunger, fear, sex. Once you’ve experienced more fully these basics there might be some hope of a major breakthrough. Until then none.”
Old Boggles had his overcoat on now and with a toothy grimace was backing toward the door.
“Good day, Dr. Rhinehart, I hope you’re better soon,” he said.
“And a good day to you, Boggles. I wish I could hope the same for you, but unless you get captured by the Congolese rebels, or get sick in the jungle for eight months or become a Kurtzian ivory trader, I’m afraid there’s not much hope.”
I rose from behind my desk to shake hands with him, but he backed out the door. Six days later I got a polite letter from the president of the American Association of Practicing Psychiatrists (AAPP) noting that a patient of mine, a Dr. Orville Boggles of Yale, had paranoiac hallucinations about me and had sent a long, nasty, highly literary complaint to the AAPP about my behavior. I sent a note to President Weinstein thanking him for his understanding and a note to Boggles suggesting that the length of his letter to the AAPP indicated progress vis-a-vis his writing block. I also gave him permission to try to have his letter published in the South Dakota Quarterly Review Journal. I didn’t see him again for six months, when he returned to become one of my first and most successful dicestudents.
12
“Jenkins,” I said one morning to the masochist Milquetoast of Madison Avenue, “have you ever considered rape?”
“I don’t understand,” he said.
“Forced carnal knowledge.”
“I … don’t understand how you mean that I should consider it.”
“Have you ever daydreamed of killing someone or of raping someone?”
“No. No, I never have. I feel almost no aggression toward anyone.” He paused. “Except myself.”
“I was afraid of that, Jenkins, that’s why we’d better give serious consideration to rape, theft or murder.”
Jenkins lay neatly and quietly on the couch through this whole interview, not once raising his voice or stirring a muscle.
“You … you mean daydream about such actions?” he asked.
“I mean commit them.”
“But I want to help people. I feel no aggression. Ever.”
“Look, Jenkins, I’m sated with your passivity, your daydreaming. Haven’t you ever done anything?”
“No opportunity has ever—”
“Have you ever hurt another human?”
“I can’t. I don’t want to. I want to save—”
“First you’ve got to save yourself and that you can only do by breaking your inertia. I’m giving you an assignment for our Friday session. Will you do it for me?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want to hurt people. My whole soul is based on that principle.”
“I know it is. I know it is, and your soul’s sick, remember? That’s why you’re here.”
“Please, I don’t want to rape any—”
“You’ve noticed I have a new receptionist, I mean a second one?” (She was a middle-aged call girl I had hired expressly to date Mr. Jenkins.)
“Er, yes, I have.”
“She’s lovely, isn’t she?”
“Yes, she is.”
“And she’s a nice person, too.”
“Yes,” he said.
“I want you to rape her.”
“Oh no, no, I, no, it would not be a good idea.”
“All right then, would you like to date her?”
“But … is it ethical?”
“What are you planning to do to her?”
“I mean … she’s your receptionist … I thought—”
“Not at all. Her private life is her own business. [It certainly was.] I want you to date her. Tonight. Take her to dinner and invite her back to your apartment and see what happens. If you get the urge to rape her, go ahead. Tell her it’s part of your therapy.”
“Oh, no, no, I’d never want to do anything to hurt her. She seems such a lovely person.”
“She is, which makes her all the more rapable. But have it your own way. Just do your best to feel aggression.”
“Do you really think it might help if I got a little aggressive?”
“Absolutely. Change your whole life. With hard work you might even make it to starting a Vietnam. But don’t brood if at first all you can do is swear under your breath at pedestrians.” I stood up. “Now go. You’ll need a couple of minutes to wheedle Rita into accepting a date.”
It took him twenty, despite Rita’s trying to say “yes” from the moment he told her his name. After three and a half weeks of Jenkins-style courting he finally managed to seduce her in the front seat of his Volkswagen, much to the relief of all concerned. To the further relief of the principals, they shifted to Jenkins’s apartment for further indoor work. The on
ly evidence I was able to garner that Jenkins was trying to express aggression was that once he accidentally bumped her nose with his elbow and didn’t say he was sorry. Rita tried the old game of “Oh you’re so masterful, hit me,” but Jenkins responded by assuring her that no matter how masterful he was he would never hit anyone. She urged him to bite her breasts, but he said something about having weak gums. She tried to irritate him into anger by using her body to arouse him and then deny the desires she had aroused, but Jenkins just sulked until she gave in.
Meanwhile he was trying every trick in the masochist’s trade to try to make Rita break off with him. He stood her up on two occasions (Rita sent a bill for her time), accidentally broke her wristwatch (I got the bill) and as a lover usually had his orgasm when she was least expecting it and in the middle of a yawn. Nevertheless, Rita clung lovingly—three hundred dollars a week—on.
At the end of a month of solid success with her, Jenkins was definitely more comfortable with women; he even flirted for five minutes with Miss Reingold. But he was also perilously close to a total nervous breakdown. Being unable to contract a venereal disease, make Rita pregnant, infuriate her, cause her to leave him or fail in any other obvious way, he was desperate. Of course, he’d compensated by accelerating the rate of failure in all other areas of his life. Twice he lost his wallet. He left the water in the bathtub running when he was out and flooded his apartment. Finally one day he told me he’d lost so much money in the stock market since taking over his own investing that he’d have to drop therapy.
I urged him to continue, but that afternoon he managed to get hit by a bulldozer while watching some construction and was hospitalized for six weeks. A few months later the dice told me to send him a bill for Rita’s services and, I regret to report, he promptly paid it. I’ve tentatively listed his case as a failure.
Without introducing the patients to the use of the dice as in my later dice therapy, the results were generally disastrous. In addition to two lawsuits, one patient committed suicide (thirty-five dollars an hour out the window), one was arrested for leading to the delinquency of a minor, and a last disappeared at sea in a sailing canoe on his way to Tahiti. Still, even my failures may turn out to be successes; one never knows.
There was Linda Reichman, for example. She was a slender, young rich girl who had spent her last four years living in Greenwich Village doing all the things rich, emancipated girls think they’re expected to do in Greenwich Village. In four weeks of treatment prior to my own emancipation, I had learned that this was her third analysis, that she loved to talk about herself, particularly her promiscuity with, indifference to and cruelty toward men, and their stupid, ineffectual efforts to hurt her. Her monologues were occasionally flooded by literary, philosophical and Freudian allusions and as abruptly empty of them. Each session she usually managed to say something intended to shock my bourgeois respectability.
It was only three weeks after letting the dice dictate anarchy that I had a rather remarkable session with her. She’d come in even more keyed up than usual, swivel-hipped her rather swivelable hips across the room and flopped aggressively onto the couch. Much to my surprise she didn’t say a thing for three minutes; for her, an all-time record. Finally, with an edge to her voice, she said:
“I get so sick and tired of this … shit. [Pause] I don’t know why I come here. [Pause] You’re about as much help as a chiropractor. Christ, what I’d give to meet a MAN some day. I meet nothing but … ball-less masturbators. [Pause] What a … stupid world it is. How do people get through their crumby lives? I’ve got money, brains, sex—I’m bored stiff. What keeps all those little clods without anything, what keeps all those little clods going? [Pause] I’d like to blast the whole … fucking city to pieces. [Long pause]
“I spent the weekend with Curt Rollins. For your info, he’s just published a novel that the Partisan Review calls—and I quote—‘as stunningly poetic a piece of fiction as has appeared in years.’ Unquote. [Pause] He’s got talent. His prose is like lightning: cutting, darting, brilliant; he’s a Joyce with the energy of Henry Miller. [Pause] He’s working on a new novel about fifteen minutes in the life of a young boy who’s just lost his father. Fifteen minutes—a whole novel. Curt’s cute, too. Most girls throw themselves at him. [Pause] He needs money. [Pause] It’s funny, he doesn’t seem to like sex much. Wham-bam, back to the old writing board. Wham-bam. [Pause] He liked the way I sucked him off though. But …
“I’d like to chop his hands off. Chop, chop. Then he could dictate his novel to me. [Pause] Chop his hands off: I suppose that means I want to castrate him. Could be. I don’t think it would bother him much. I think he’d consider it gave him more time for his precious writing, his all-important fifteen minutes in the life of a little prick. [Pause] ‘Stunning novel’—Jesus, it had the grace of late Herman Melville and the power of a dying Emily Dickinson. You know what it was about? A sensitive young man who discovers that his mother is having an affair with the man that’s teaching him to love poetry. Sensitive young man despairs. ‘Oh Shelley, why has thou forsaken me?’ [Pause] He’s another ball-less masturbator. [Pause]
“You sure are quiet today. Can’t you even throw in a few uh-huhs or yesses? I’m paying you forty bucks an hour, remember? For that I should get at least two or three yesses a minute.”
“I don’t feel like it today.”
“You don’t feel like it today! Who cares? You think I feel like spilling out my garbage three days a week? Come on Dr. Rhinehart, you’ve gotta feel like it. The world is built on the principle that all humans must eat shit regardless of taste. Come on, speak up. Act like a psychiatrist. Let’s hear that faithful echo.”
“Today I’d like to hear what you’d like to do if you could recreate the world to suit your own … highest dreams.”
“Cut the crap. I’d turn it into a great big testicle, what else?”
[Pause] [Longer pause]
“I’d … I’d eliminate all the human beings first … except … eh … maybe for a few. I’d destroy everything man has ever made, EVERYTHING, and I’d put—all the animals would still be there—No. No, they wouldn’t. I’d eliminate all of them too. There’s be grass though, and flowers. [Pause]
“I can’t picture the humans. [Pause] I can’t even picture me. I must have got wiped out. Ha! Woo. My highest dream is of an empty world. Boy, that’s something. The little lays at Remo’s would love that. But where are they in this world of mine? They’re gone too. An empty, empty, empty world.”
“Can you imagine a human being that you would like?”
“Look, Doctor, I detest humans. I know it. Swift detested them, Mark Twain detested them. I’m in good company. It takes clods to appreciate clods, herd to appreciate herd. Whatever I am, I’ve got enough on the ball to realize that the best of humans is either weak or a phony. You too, obviously. In fact, you psychiatrists are the biggest phonies of all.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Your phony code of ethics. You hide behind it. I’ve sat here for four weeks telling you about my stupid, cruel, promiscuous, senseless behavior and you sit back there nodding away like a puppet and agreeing with everything I say. I’ve twitched my butt at you, flashed a little thigh, and you pretend you don’t know what I’m doing. You acknowledge nothing except what I put into words. All right: I’d like to feel your prick. [Pause] And now the good doctor will say with quiet, asinine voice, ‘You say you’d like to feel my prick,’ and I’ll say ‘Yes, it all goes back to when I was three years old and my father …’ and you’ll say ‘You feel the desire to feel my prick goes back …’ and we’ll both go right on acting as if the words didn’t count.”
Miss Reichman briefly paused and then raised herself on her elbows and, without looking at me, spat, clearly and profusely, in a high arc, onto the rug in front of my desk.
“I don’t blame you. I’ve been acting like an automaton. Or, more concretely, an ass.”
Miss Reichman sat up on the couch and turned fr
om the waist to stare at me.
“What did you say?”
“You feel you don’t know what I said?” But as I said this I put on a mock psychiatrist face and tried to grin intimately.
“Jesus, there’s a human being in there after all. [Pause] Well. Say something else. I’ve never heard you say anything before.”
“Well, Linda, I’d say it was time to end nondirective therapy. Time you heard some of my feelings about you. Right?”
“That’s what I just said.”
“First, I think we’d better acknowledge that you’re outstandingly conceited. Second, that sexually you may offer much less than many women since you are thin, with, to judge by superficial appearances only, a smallish bosom necessitating falsies [she sneered], and you probably bring the male racing to a climax before he’s got his fly totally unzipped. Thirdly, that intellectually you are extremely limited in the depth and breadth of your reading and understanding. In summation, that as human beings go you are mediocre in all respects except in the quantity of your fortune. The number of men you’ve slept with and who’ve proposed as well as propositioned, is a reflection of the openness of your legs and of your wallet, not of your personality.”
Her sneer had expanded until it had nowhere else to go on her face and so spread to her shoulders and back, which writhed theatrically away from me in disdain. By the time I finished her face was flushed and she spoke with an exaggerated slowness and serenity.
“Oh poor poor Linda. Only big Lukie Rhinehart can save cesspool soul from hardening into concete shit. [She abruptly changed pace] You conceited bastard. Who do you think you are, sounding off about me? You don’t know me at all. I haven’t told you anything about myself except a few sensational superficialities. And you judge me by these.”
“Do you want to show me your breasts?”
“Fuck you.”
“Do you have some essays, or stories or poems, or paintings that you can show me?”
“You can’t judge a person by measurements or by essays. When I make love to a man they don’t forget it. They know they’ve had a woman, and not some fluffed-up iceberg. And you’ll hide behind your precious ethics and feel superior because all you see is the surface.”
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