“Do you know the other two kinds of close encounters?” he said to the bathroom door. The glass or plastic doorknob was faceted, as if it were a cut gem. “The first is when you catch a glimpse. The second kind is crop circles, physical evidence. What are you doing in there?”
“I’m praying on my knees to Jesus,” the bathroom door said. “What we just did was wrong.”
“All right.”
“You can leave me here. My sister will pick me up.”
“Imagine that,” he said. He slept in the van, in the parking lot, and woke with a neck ache. He looked in the rearview mirror. There are visions a man can only tolerate in a mirror. To see them face-to-face turns him to stone.
White lines and yellow lines. Green grass and yellow grass. Far-off hills. Mile markers. Telephone poles standing in line, waiting for what. He was ripping southward on the interstate just as fast as the other cars could get out of his way, in a van he didn’t own. He had driven this stretch of highway all his life. It was haunted. He saw things he knew weren’t there. He wanted to close his eyes.
He was glad he still had his phone. Someone, somewhere, might call him and have something useful to tell him. He considered that unlikely possibility for half an hour. He rolled down the window and threw his phone out of it.
He pulled the van over to the shoulder and sat there, thinking and making decisions, reminding himself that he had for the most part freely chosen what at other times he claimed had been forced on him.
He walked back toward his phone. His knee gave out as he bent to pick it up. On the road the cars roared past him, almost close enough to touch, on their ways to all the places they thought they were going. He waited there, on his knees.
LETTER FROM THE PRIMAL HORDE
I ENTERED PSYCHOANALYSIS because I felt I was becoming intolerable to the people around me. I loved them, and they deserved better.
After five years, my analyst suggested that I attend a residential group-relations conference, thinking the experience might shed some new light on my old problems.
What is group relations? If your job involves attending meetings, then you know most meetings are a waste of time. We sense that what we are talking about cannot be what we are actually talking about, because, if it were, events would occur in a different order, and the tone or feeling would be different, and so on. Something else is happening to us, through us, and among us.
Now imagine a professional meeting with no pseudo-unifying pseudo-topic, where the meeting’s topic is the meeting itself: the New England Motor Press Association, but shorn of New England, motors, and the press. Nothing remains but the association, the something else, the group, the collective, if it does remain: a shrewdness of apes, a gang of turkeys, a nest of vipers.
“The Group Relations Conference,” says the Web site of the A. K. Rice Institute for the Study of Social Systems, “is an intensive participatory process that provides participants the opportunity to study their own behavior as it happens in real time without the distractions of everyday social niceties and workplace pressures and protocols.”
And they have to say something corporate-klutzy-jargony like that, don’t they, because if they were to come right out and say, “You are cordially invited to have your individual ego reduced to molten slag in the hell-furnace of our collective unconscious,” no one would sign up.
What does such a conference reveal, if not the something else that is not the people at the meeting: the something else that is not “me,” but conspires to act through “me,” then disowns me and claims, in a bizarre act of half-justice, that I am to be held responsible for both its actions and my own.
—The good that I would I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do.
—Really? Whose unconscious is it, anyway?
—Maybe the answer to that question is more complex than it appears.
At first I refused to go. A year later, I attempted to enroll, but there were no places open. Another year passed. I packed my suitcase and boarded the commuter rail.
“You did not indicate your career when you registered for the conference,” said the wide-eyed man at the front desk.
“You noticed that?” I said.
Silence.
“There’s a line here”—he waved the paper at me—“for you to say what profession you’re in.”
“I see that.”
Silence.
“But you did not fill it out.”
“That’s correct.”
“We use that information to organize your debriefing groups.”
“Is that right?”
Silence.
“I’m a writer,” I said. It is almost always an error to admit this, and possibly an error ever to say or to write anything at all.
Many attendees were made ill at ease by the discovery of a writer in their midst. Thirty-six psychiatrists, chaplains, social workers, counselors, nurses, and others in the caring professions had been sent by their respective employers to investigate authority and institutional life by improvising an institution and analyzing it, if they could—or, as things turned out, by failing to improvise such an institution, and by failing to analyze that failure.
Thirty-six white-collar professionals and one writer, devoted to following his frequent errors wherever they might lead him.
Many people hate writers. As the judge snarled at Brodsky, “Who has recognized you as a poet? Who has enrolled you in the ranks of poets?” It’s true that something has gone wrong in a family or a group that gives birth to a writer, a person whose role is to escape and tell the tale. But the hatred at the conference had a particular flavor.
What would Freud have amounted to without Sophocles or Shakespeare, without Dostoyevsky or even Jensen? Psychoanalysts and writers might seem to be natural allies, covering the same territory. Now I understand that psychoanalysts and writers are natural enemies precisely because they cover the same territory. Only a child would be surprised.
Don’t worry, I changed your name. I made it all up. There is no such thing as a door or a chair. Psychoanalysis does not exist.
It is not much of an exaggeration to say that the staff locked us in and left us to work it all out for ourselves.
“I welcome you to the conference,” said the director at our first meeting. He sat down among the other consultants. There was a long silence.
“What now?” said Tommy.
“Yes,” said the director. “What now?”
I had read the brochure: “The consultant confronts the group by drawing attention to group behavior. This is done by means of description, process observation, thematic development, and other interventions, some of which are designed to shock the group into awareness of what is happening.” What this meant in practice was that our consultants rarely intervened, and for the most part served as silent projection magnets, embodiments of authority for us to pretend not to resent.
Sometimes thirty-seven of us were seated in a gray room: this was the “large group.” At other times we were taken to separate rooms in groups of ten or so: a “small group.” Ten people in a room, seventy-five minutes. Thirty-seven people in a room, seventy-five minutes. Self-forming groups in rooms of our choosing, seventy-five minutes. Five of these meetings per day. No other rules.
Our regression was swift. It is incorrect to use the word “I” when describing mass-hysterical events. My feelings were not special or unique. They were not even mine.
“I don’t have an image for this conference,” Tommy said.
“What does that mean?” said Vicki.
“I don’t know your names. Tell me your names,” said Tommy.
“I know your name,” said Eric. “I know everyone’s name.”
“We told each other our names yesterday,” Vicki said.
“Maybe the name is not the name,” said our consultant.
We went around the small group and said our names again. Tommy, Samantha, Vicki, Jennifer, Martin, Eric, Renata, Federico, and Tina.
/> “My name is Ronald,” I said.
“Hello, Ronald,” said Tommy. “I am Tommy. Pleased to meet you.”
“His name is not Ronald,” Vicki said.
“That’s enough about the names for now,” I said. “Five minutes before this meeting, I threw up my breakfast into the sink in my room. Isn’t anyone else here as nervous as I am?”
“Why did you choose to throw up alone in your room?” said our consultant. “Don’t you feel you can throw up here in our group?”
“I threw up scrambled eggs and two cups of coffee mixed with the juices of my stomach. Not metaphorical undigested emotions. Yellow-and-brown vomit.”
“Thanks for the image,” said Vicki.
“I know I talk a lot,” said Tommy. “I take up too much space in our small group. I wish someone would tell me to shut up.”
“Okay. Shut up,” said Samantha.
“Shut up,” said Tina.
“Shut up, Tommy,” said Eric.
“Please shut up,” said Vicki.
“How can you speak to me like this?” Tommy said.
Back to the large group.
“Some group members may still not be aware that there is a writer present. When is management going to address my concerns about confidentiality?” said Barry, who would soon write and publish his own report of our conference on his Web site.
“I feel ashamed,” said Rhonda.
“So far, I have learned one thing at this conference,” said Dora, “and it is that Americans say hello by saying Go fuck yourself.”
“I’ve never understood the expression Go fuck yourself,” said Sean.
“I’m cold,” said Karen.
“I have a nodule in my chest,” said Eric. “It’s my companion. I have a companion.”
“I feel fear,” said Anna.
“I am also afraid,” said Jane.
“I feel the men in the group are being submissive,” Brian said.
“I’m taking a bold stand against reductive gender binaries,” said Patricia.
“I have so much to contribute,” said Travis, “but no one will give me a chance.”
“Tell us, Travis. Tell us what you have to say,” said Margaret.
“Uh,” said Travis. “Okay. Uh. Uh.”
“Everything everyone says here sounds like a pickup line,” Malik said.
“Pickup lines work,” said Pilar. “Trust me.”
“I’m bored,” said Tina.
“The group appears to be attempting to ignore and deny its aggression,” said the conference director.
“I am aware of the group’s aggressive feelings,” I said. “For example, I would like to kill you.”
By the thirtieth time Eric explained to the large group that “it’s all about respect,” it had become clear to me that what he meant was, Everyone else must shut up when I am talking, something I have heard many three-year-olds say, or scream.
I shared this interpretation with the group, and Eric promptly had a heart attack. But it was not a real heart attack, not even a little, not at all. Eric was taken by ambulance to a local hospital and was swiftly returned to us, resurrected, in perfect health, if health is the word for a strategy of illness-as-leadership or weakness-as-strength.
A. K. Rice himself pointed out “how the group uses individuals to express its own emotions, how it exploits some members so that others can absolve themselves from the responsibility for such expression.” Several people thanked me for saying what they themselves had not wished to say to or about Eric.
A man told me, “You are our strongest advocate for reality,” and a woman said, “I hope you know how grateful we all are to you for speaking out.”
“It’s like you can read my mind,” another woman said.
It was odd to be told that I was “the real, responsible parent” at the exact moment when I felt as if I were Norman Bates from Psycho—but Norman is his own parent, isn’t he.
This was not my first excursion into the primitive substrata of human consciousness. I was just doing it without hallucinogens for a change.
As night fell on the second day of the conference, I felt I had already acquired an adequate grasp of the basic concepts of Experiences in Groups, W. R. Bion’s brilliant study of “the individual [as] a group animal at war, not simply with the group, but with himself for being a group animal and with those aspects of his personality that constitute his ‘groupishness,’ ” and I was not looking forward to four more days of experiences in groups.
I had understood yet again, and more thoroughly than ever, how and why I have chosen my line of work (we might call it the emotion-recollected-in-tranquillity racket), in which I spend one-third of my time having experiences in groups and the other two-thirds sitting alone in a room, thinking about what went wrong.
“Group mentality,” writes Bion, “is the unanimous expression of the will of the group, contributed to by the individual in ways of which he is unaware, influencing him disagreeably whenever he thinks or behaves in a manner at variance with the basic assumptions.”
Bion’s basic assumptions are dependency, in which a group unites to pretend its impotence in order to rely on an imagined omnipotent leader; fight-flight, in which a group derives unity from either attacking or fleeing from an identified enemy; and pairing, a kind of predependency in which a group demotes itself to helpless expectation by focusing on two members and waiting for the birth of their messiah-child.
We had waited for the conference director to tell us what to do next, as if we weren’t free to do just as we pleased. We had fought Eric—I had, on behalf of the group—and he had obligingly fled to the hospital.
My private apartment on campus contained two tiny quarter-beds that I pushed together to form a single half-bed, and a tiny black chairlike object unsuitable for sitting on, and a tiny sink for me to throw up in. Each night I locked my door and jammed the chairlike object against it and wore noise-canceling headphones and sat on the bedlike objects, thinking about what had gone wrong that day.
Across the hall from me was a distinguished sort of person with plenty of exotic stories to share. We ate lunch together. He had attended twelve of these conferences, he told me.
At three the next morning, this grown man stood undressed in the hallway, hammering on the unlocked door of his apartment. He knocked on my door for a while, too.
“Help me,” he said. “I’m naked. Let me come in your bedroom.”
“Listen to the words you are saying,” I told him through the door. “What words did you just say?”
“Help me. Help me.”
“Yes, those are some of the words you said.”
“Help me.”
In the end, a woman woke up and went out in the hall and showed him how to operate a doorknob. You turn it from side to side.
Freud, in “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming”:
There is one very marked characteristic in the production of these writers which must strike us all: they all have a hero who is the center of interest, for whom the author tries to win our sympathy by every possible means … His Majesty the Ego, the hero of all day-dreams and all novels …
The other people in the story are sharply divided into good and bad, with complete disregard of the manifold variety in the traits of real human beings; the “good” ones are those who help the ego in its character of hero, while the “bad” are his enemies and rivals.
The problem with telling the story of the conference from a single character’s point of view is that this obscures the major insight that group relations has to offer.
Most readers will be familiar with the experience of watching a certain kind of movie and understanding that, just as a dreamer is all of the characters in his dream, so, too, Dutch is the hated Predator, Ripley is the Alien Queen, the good archaeologist Indiana Jones is the bad archaeologist Belloq, the red-blooded Flash Gordon is the anemic Ming the Merciless, and so on.
These are stories of disowning parts of the self, projecting
unwanted traits into an enemy, and contemplating the unwanted traits at a safe distance—typically, in a climactic confrontation, the “hero” denies his essential identity with the “villain” by destroying these traits along with the enemy who contains them.
At a group-relations conference, it is the group that is the “hero”—or the patient. My name was Legion, for we were many; “I” was large, “I” contained multitudes. The most fictional part of this story is the nonplural “I” that narrates it.
Scenes from previous pages ought to be rewritten. But how?
“I feel shame,” said the primal horde.
“I feel fear,” said the primal horde.
“I would like to kill you,” the primal horde said.
“I know your name,” the primal horde said. “I know everyone’s name.”
The group mind presents certain problems. Leave aside that His Majesty the Ego has been demoted from a star to just another flicker of light in a constellation, a mere organ in a larger social organism. There is nothing outside the group. Where can you project all of your disowned traits now?
I wasn’t surrounded by assholes. I was trapped inside of one.
On the third day of the conference, I cut class. What were they going to do—arrest me?
Angry, lonely, tired, and frightened, I spent an afternoon in the woods on campus. I hiked until the trees ended. I had been walking down a two-lane country road for some time when a stranger with a short gray beard pulled his truck over and offered me a lift to the next town.
As strangers sometimes will, we took advantage of the moment to tell each other everything we knew. He told me disturbing secrets about his parents. I told him I was an escapee from a PSYOPS experiment.
“You’re not serious.”
“More or less.” I gave him some examples.
“That is the most amphetaminized shit I have ever heard. You need a drink.”
“I haven’t had a drink in ten years.”
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