Psychology and Other Stories

by C. P. Boyko

  They chuckled. She sighed and said, “It’s actually quite endearing, though, if you think about it.”

  *

  Strickland was about to ring the doorbell again when at last he heard footsteps coming from inside the house. The chain was eventually unlatched, the locks unlocked, and the door opened.

  “Oh!” said the little old woman. “It’s Danny!”

  “Hello, mother.”

  Strickland said into his tape recorder, “We tell ourselves we’re not going to be like our parents.”

  “I’ll make tea,” she said. “Aren’t you cold in only that? Oh, but you shouldn’t have come all this way, not just for a visit.”

  “I was in the neighborhood. How are you feeling?”

  “Oh, bosh.”

  “But when the time comes, you find your primary concern is not what a robot you’re turning your kid into, but how to keep them alive long enough to someday hate your guts.”

  “Sit down. You always look flushed after that drive. Let me make you something to eat. No, sit down. And turn that nasty thing off. It’s nothing but bad news. Did you hear about this young man who tried to shoot the president? Maybe he did shoot the president, I don’t know, they don’t tell you anything. It’s beyond me why anyone would go and do a thing like that. Why, the man was only inaugurated last month. He hasn’t had a chance to do anything to deserve it yet. Not that I think shooting anyone is the answer to anything, but you would think you could at least wait and see what he actually does. Shooting a man like that a month after his inauguration! It doesn’t make any sense. Why would someone go and do a thing like that?”

  Strickland frowned and shook his head.

  NOTES ON SOURCES

  And we, all of us, are interpreters, ‘hermeneuts’— creatures who pan for sense in the muddy waters of human transaction, and who, if we are interested in people, collect this sense into the bundles of remembered event, belief, and fantasy that constitute the human biography.

  The psychologist’s musings may eventually take on a formal shape—in flow charts and formulae—and may be checked systematically against the evidence; conversely plain men may achieve an intuitive depth of insight that professional psychologists lack. But both are hermeneuts, and their efforts to achieve understanding are essentially of the same sort.

  Liam Hudson

  THERE ARE TWO REASONS to cite one’s sources: to parade one’s erudition, and to escape accusations of plagiarism. Psychologists, no doubt inspired by both motives, usually cite; fiction writers, whose pride and identity are so tied to notions of their creativity and originality, usually don’t.

  I hope to escape accusations of plagiarism.

  In almost every case, I have modified the original author’s original words— sometimes slightly, sometimes radically. Assume that every quotation in this book is inaccurate and wrong. Consult the original before requoting.

  Where a number of editions are in existence, possibly with different paginations, I have included the total page count in parentheses. This should permit you to track down the quotation in any edition without too much trouble. Simply divide the cited page number by the total, and multiply the result (a fraction) by the number of pages in your copy. This will at least give you some idea where to look.

  Frontispiece: Freud, “Schematic diagram of sexuality,” in The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess. (Translated and edited by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson. Belknap, 1985.) p. 100.

  5 Epigraph: William James, “The Consciousness of Lost Limbs,” in Essays in Psychology. (Harvard University Press, 1983.) p. 214.

  Reaction-Formation

  11 Epigraph: Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. (Translated and edited by James Strachey. Hogarth, 1953.) vol. 4, p. 113.

  25 ‘The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag. ’Walt Whitman, “A Song of Myself,” §2.

  30 ‘what is unclean and disturbing and should not be part of the body’: Freud, “Character and Anal Erotism,” in Standard Edition, vol. 9, p. 172.

  34 “Respiration becomes shallow and rapid … involuntary rhythmic contractions …” This jumble is actually taken from Havelock Ellis, Psychology of Sex: A Manual for Students. (Emerson Books, 1936.) pp. 19-28 (of 377).

  48 Alfred Adler. The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology. (Translated by P. Radin. Harcourt, Brace, 1929.) pp. 187-190 (of 352).

  57 Perhaps if I could have lain with Bunny … I wanted to lie with him now! Lytton Strachey, “Monday June 26th, 1916,” in Lytton Strachey by Himself. (Edited by Michael Holroyd. Heinemann, 1971.) p. 140.

  57-58 “I imagined myself reading … what would happen in the end.” Ibid., p. 150.

  58 And then the vision of that young postman … really might, if I had the nerve, come off. Ibid., pp. 140-141.

  Eat the Rich and Shit the Poor

  59 Epigraph: H. K. Nixon, Psychology For the Writer. (Harper & Brothers, 1928.) p. 1.

  80 “And bring us some bread,” said Mr. Custard. In Hervey Cleckley’s excellent The Mask of Sanity (C. V. Mosby, 1950), there appears on page 61-62 the following scene:

  “Boastfully he told me that he was, in addition to all his other parts, an artist of remarkable ability. He asked to be given a loaf of bread, stating that he would mold from it creations of great beauty and worth. On getting the bread he broke off a large chunk, placed it in his mouth, and began to chew it assiduously, apparently relishing the confusion of his observers. After proceeding for a length of time and with thoroughness that once would have met with favor from advocates of Fletcherism, he at last disgorged the mess from his mouth and with considerable dexterity set about modeling it into the figure of a cross. Soon a human form was added in the customary representation. Rosettes, intertwining leaves, garlands, and an elaborate pedestal followed. The mixture of saliva and chewed bread rapidly hardened. By the next day, it had become as hard as baked clay. It was indeed an uncommon production. The whole piece was very skillfully and ingeniously shaped, dry, firm, and as neatly finished as if done by a machine. It was, furthermore, one of the most extravagant, florid, and unprepossessing articles that has ever met my glance. Max presented it with an air of triumph and expectancy that seemed to demand expressions of wonder and gratitude beyond reach of the ordinary man.”

  I wanted very much to use this scene, but found that I could not get Custard to sit still long enough.

  Paddling an Iceberg

  99 Epigraph: Jim Bird, Self-Help? Self-Harm! The Seven Myths of Self-Help. (Chapman Loebb, 1999.) p. 50.

  102 ”You will become what you are.” Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom, §270.

  103 The individual is … adding to the first act of stupidity a second. This is a jumble of four separate quotations from Nietzsche: (1) Twilight of the Idols, “Morality as Anti-Nature,” §6; (2) Human, All Too Human, §39; (3) and (4) The Wanderer and His Shadow, §38 and §323.

  103-104 “Whoever despises himself still respects himself as one who despises.” Beyond Good and Evil, §78.

  104 … gloriously, angelically wronged. Cf. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, §62: “Coarse people who feel themselves offended tend to take as great a degree of offense as possible and to relate the cause in greatly exaggerated terms, simply in order to be able to revel thoroughly in the feeling of hate and vengeance that has been aroused.”

  104 Whoever respects himself must still despise himself as one who respects. Perhaps this is the meaning behind another of Nietzsche’s beautiful little parables: A sage asked a fool the way to happiness. The fool answered without delay, like one who’d been asked the way to the next town: “Admire yourself, and live on the street!” “Hold on,” cried the sage, “you require too much; surely it suffices to admire oneself?” The fool replied: “But how can one constantly admire without constantly despising?” Joyful Wisdom, §213.

  105 … he enjoys himself in Paris. Schopenhauer, The Wisdom of Life. (Tra
nslated by T. Bailey Saunders. Willey Books, no date.) Chapter II, p. 14 (of 124). This observation also finds an echo in Nietzsche: “‘Taking joy in a thing’ is what we say, but in truth we are taking joy in ourselves by means of the thing.’” (Human, All Too Human, §501.)

  107 … a philosophy fit only for slaves, for it taught men to embrace the status quo. Henry James, cited in Robert D. Richardson, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism. (Houghton Mifflin, 2006.) p. 53.

  107-108 “It is important … affects digestion adversely. Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking. (Prentice-Hall, 1952.) pp. 27-28 (of 276).

  108 “Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.” John Stuart Mill, The Autobiography of John Stuart Mill, p. 78 (of 170). Here is the quotation in context:

  “I never wavered in the conviction that happiness is the test of all rules of conduct, and the goal of life. But I now thought that this goal was only to be attained by not making it the direct goal. Those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness. Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. The only chance is to treat not happiness, but some goal external to it, as the purpose of life. Let your self-consciousness, your scrutiny, your self-interrogation exhaust themselves on that; and if otherwise fortunately circumstanced you will inhale happiness with the air you breathe, without dwelling on it or thinking about it, without either forestalling it in imagination or putting it to flight by fatal questioning.”

  This is the best piece of advice I have ever read.

  109 “The will, as Nietzsche would be the first to admit … ‘self-referential subroutines’ …” Barton Q. Barnard, from the introduction to The Will and The Won’t: Nietzsche and the Myth of Decision, by James R. Bird. (Clapham University Press, 1993.) p. xxi.

  110 “The sum of the inner movements … one calls his soul.” Daybreak, §311.

  110 … the great writer could be recognized: The Wanderer and His Shadow, §97.

  Nietzsche also said that to improve one’s style is to improve one’s thoughts, and nothing else. In other words, you cannot say exactly what you mean until you figure out exactly what you think, and most of our thoughts cannot even be thought clearly unless they are clutched with words: “I caught a notion on the way, and hastily took the readiest, poor words to hold it fast, so that it might not again fly away. But it has died in these dry words, and hangs and flaps about in them—and now I hardly know how I could have had such happiness when I caught this bird.”

  As someone who put a high value on saying exactly what you mean, Nietzsche deplored verbosity and pleonasm: “The half-blind are the mortal foes of authors who let themselves go. They would like to vent on them the wrath they feel when they slam shut a book whose author has taken fifty pages to communicate five ideas—their wrath, that is, at having endangered what is left of their eyesight for so little recompense.” He even formulated a “draconian law” against such authors, which stated that a writer should be treated as a criminal “who deserves acquittal or pardon only in the rarest of cases: that would be one remedy against the increase of books.” This may not be practical, but one must admire the sentiment.

  “In the mountains,” he wrote, “the shortest route is from peak to peak, but for that you must have long legs. Aphorisms should be peaks, and those to whom they are spoken should be big and tall of stature.”

  See The Wanderer and His Shadow, §131; Joyful Wisdom, §298; The Wanderer and His Shadow, §143; Human, All Too Human, §193; and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 67 (of 343).

  111 “If you don’t give in to your true self, your true self will give in to you.” Jim Bird, Letting Go: How To Stop Striving and Start Living! (Chapman Loebb, 1998.) p. 215 (of 325).

  111 “Smiling is not a panacea—but it is a good cure for a frown.” Ibid., p. 20 (of 325).

  111 “I know, I know, you’re thinking … It applies to everyone.” This sample of Bird’s catechistic style is actually taken from his third book, The Power of Powerlessness: Letting It Happen To Make It Happen. (Chapman Loebb, 2000.) p. 48 (of 309).

  111-112 The two “striving index” self-quiz questions are from Letting Go, pp. 191 and 194 (of 325).

  112 The beautifully absurd diagram is from p. 117 (of 325) of Letting Go. Adapted slightly.

  114 You are a piece of fate … Why would you want to be? Ibid., pp. 174, 15, 205, and 302 (of 325).

  118 “101 ways to score points with a woman.” John Gray, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. (HarperCollins, 1992.) pp. 180-185 (of 286).

  118-119 Gaddis, The Recognitions. (Harcourt Brace, 1955.) p. 505 (of 956).

  123 “The drive towards self-improvement … divided we fall. Bird, Self-Help? Self-Harm! p. 105.

  127-129 This long quotation is from The Power of Powerlessness, pp. 176-179 (of 341).

  The reference to “Your golf game” here is peculiarly reminiscent of a passage from W. Timothy Gallwey, The Inner Game of Tennis (Bantam, 1974): “A ‘hot streak’ usually continues until the player starts thinking about it and tries to maintain it; as soon as he attempts to exercise control, he loses it. To test this theory is a simple matter, if you don’t mind a little underhanded gamesmanship. The next time your opponent is having a hot streak, simply ask him as you switch courts, ‘Say, George, what are you doing so differently that’s making your forehand so good today?’ If he takes the bait and begins to think about how he’s swinging, telling you how he’s really meeting the ball out in front, keeping his wrist firm, and following through better, his streak invariably will end. He will lose his timing and fluidity as he tries to repeat what he has just told you he was doing so well.” p. 8 (of 178).

  129 “Using the power… in an instant!” Anthony Robbins, Awaken the Giant Within. (Simon & Schuster, 1992.) p. 35 (of 538). (Italics and exclamation mark mine.)

  129 … even bad music and bad reasons sound fine when one marches off to fight an enemy: Daybreak, §557.

  137 … knack of being themselves. Cf. Nietzsche, Assorted Opinions and Maxims, §387: “We always stand a few paces too close to ourselves, and always a few paces too distant from our neighbor. So it happens that we judge him too much wholesale and ourselves too much by individual, occasional, insignificant traits and occurrences.”

  140 I would only believe in a God who knew how to dance. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 68 (of 343).

  140 She liked herself, and wanted to change. Cf. Nietzsche, Assorted Opinions and Maxims, §339: “As soon as it reposes in the sunlight of joy, our soul involuntarily promises itself to be good, to become perfect, and is seized as though by a blissful shudder with a presentiment of perfection …”

  140-141 The great physicist Schrödinger … a true continued self-conquering. Many of the words in this section are Schrödinger’s. But here, as elsewhere, I have not hesitated to condense, expand, change words, reorder sentences, and otherwise distort the original text. To have been rigorous about enclosing in quotation marks all those words and only those words that Schrödinger actually wrote would have left the passage looking like a bristling hedgehog. The other option, to completely paraphrase his ideas, was even less appealing, for Schrödinger’s prose is often unsurpassable. See Mind and Matter, in What is Life? With Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches. (Cambridge University Press, 1992.) pp. 99-101.

  141 Deciding what to be, becoming what we are, is a true continued self-conquering. Or, as Bergson put it: “To be conscious is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly. We are the sculptors of the moments of our life; each of them is a kind of creation. And just as the talent of the sculptor is formed under the very influence of the works he produces, so each of our moments modifies our personality. It is therefore correct to say that what we do depends on what we are; but it is necessary to add also that we are, to a certain extent, what we do, and that we are creating ourselves continually.” Creative Evolution. (Translated by Arthur Mitchell. Macmilla
n, 1919.) pp. 7-8 (of 425).

  A third reason to cite one’s sources just occurred to me: the joy of sharing good writing. After all, it’s so much easier to quote well than to write well.

  142 The living being is only a species of dead being. Joyful Wisdom, §109.

  143 The patience of the bricklayer is assumed in the dream of the architect. Gael Turnbull, “An Irish Monk.”

  143 “doomed by determinacy”: A catchphrase of Barton Q. Barnard’s that crops up in several of his works; but see, for example, his overweeningly titled The Brain Code Broken: What Science Reveals About Dreams, Personality, Sex, and Free Will. (Chestermeare University Press, 1991.) passim.

  145-146 Deceived by the apparent smallness … from our proper course. Jim Bird, Self-Improv-ment: The Art of Getting Everything You Really Want By Giving Up Wanting Everything. (Chapman Loebb, 2002.) p. 258 (of 399).

  147 “Everything good is on the highway.” Emerson, “Experience.”

  Signal to Noise

  149 Epigraph: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night. p. 126 (of 274)

  171 … she manufactures her own unhappiness.” This witticism is found in Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking, p. 73 (of 276).

  180 “There’s only one God in heaven.” Carlton Brown, Brainstorm. (Farrar and Rinehart, 1944.) p. 233. Though this line is not quite plagiarizable, I mention the book here, not so much because it inspired certain minor details of my story, but because it is the best memoir about mental illness I ever expect to read. Highly recommended.