East
The Diary of the Rose
30 AUGUST
Dr. Nades recommends that I keep a diary of my work. She says that if you keep it carefully, when you reread it you can remind yourself of observations you made, notice errors and learn from them, and observe progress in or deviations from positive thinking, and so keep correcting the course of your work by a feedback process.
I promise to write in this notebook every night, and reread it at the end of each week.
I wish I had done it while I was an assistant, but it is even more important now that I have patients of my own.
As of yesterday I have six patients, a full load for a scopist, but four of them are the autistic children I have been working with all year for Dr. Nades’s study for the Nat’l Psych. Bureau (my notes on them are in the cli psy files). The other two are new admissions:
Ana Jest, 46, bakery packager, md., no children, diag. depression, referral from city police (suicide attempt).
Flores Sorde, 36, engineer, unmd., no diag., referral from TRTU (Psychopathic behavior—Violent).
Dr. Nades says it is important that I write things down each night just as they occurred to me at work: it is the spontaneity that is most informative in self-examination (just as in autopsychoscopy). She says it is better to write it, not dictate onto tape, and keep it quite private, so that I won’t be self-conscious. It is hard. I never wrote anything that was private before. I keep feeling as if I was really writing it for Dr. Nades! Perhaps if the diary is useful I can show her some of it, later, and get her advice.
My guess is that Ana Jest is in menopausal depression and hormone therapy will be sufficient There! Now let’s see how bad a prognostician I am.
Will work with both patients under scope tomorrow. It is exciting to have my own patients, I am impatient to begin. Though of course teamwork was very educational.
31 AUGUST
Half-hour scope session with Ana J. at 8:00. Analyzed scope material, 11:00-17:00. N.B.: Adjust right-brain pickup next session! Weak visual Concrete. Very little aural, weak sensory, erratic body image. Will get lab analyses tomorrow of hormone balance.
It is amazing how banal most people’s minds are. Of course the poor woman is in severe depression. Input in the Con dimension was foggy and incoherent, and the Uncon dimension was deeply open, but obscure. But the things that came out of the obscurity were so trivial! A pair of old shoes, and the word “geography”! And the shoes were dim, a mere schema of a pair-of-shoes, maybe a man’s maybe a woman’s, maybe dark blue maybe brown. Although definitely a visual type, she does not see anything clearly. Not many people do. It is depressing. When I was a student in first year I used to think how wonderful other people’s minds would be, how wonderful it was going to be to share in all the different worlds, the different colors of their passions and ideas. How naive I was!
I realised this first in Dr. Ramia’s class when we studied a tape from a very famous successful person, and I noticed that the subject had never looked at a tree, never touched one, did not know any difference between an oak and a poplar, or even between a daisy and a rose. They were all just “trees” or “flowers” to him, apprehended schematically. It was the same with people’s faces, though he had tricks for telling them apart: mostly he saw the name, like a label, not the face. That was an Abstract mind, of course, but it can be even worse with the Concretes, whose perceptions come in a kind of undifferentiated sludge—bean soup with a pair of shoes in it.
But aren’t I “going native”? I’ve been studying a depressive’s thoughts all day and have got depressed. Look, I wrote up there, “It is depressing.” I see the value of this diary already. I know I am over-impressionable.
Of course, that is why I am a good psychoscopist But it is dangerous.
No session with F. Sorde today, since sedation had not worn off. TRTU referrals are often so drugged that they cannot be scoped for days.
REM scoping session with Ana J. at 4:00 tomorrow. Better go to bed!
1 SEPTEMBER
Dr. Nades says the kind of thing I wrote yesterday is pretty much what she had in mind, and invited me to show her this diary again whenever I am in doubt. Spontaneous thoughts—not the technical data, which are recorded in the files anyhow. Cross nothing out. Candor all-important.
Ana’s dream was interesting but pathetic. The wolf who turned into a pancake! Such a disgusting, dim, hairy pancake, too. Her visuality is clearer in dream, but the feeling tone remains low (but remember: you contribute the affect—don’t read it in). Started her on hormone therapy today.
F. Sorde awake, but too confused to take to scope room for session. Frightened. Refused to eat. Complained of pain in side. I thought he was unclear what kind of hospital this is, and told him there was nothing wrong with him physically. He said, “How the hell do you know?” which was fair enough, since he was in a straitjacket, due to the V notation on his chart. I examined and found bruising and contusion, and ordered X-ray, which showed two ribs cracked. Explained to patient that he had been in a condition where forcible restraint had been necessary to prevent self-injury. He said, “Every time one of them asked a question the other one kicked me.” He repeated this several times, with anger and confusion. Paranoid delusional system? If it does not weaken as the drugs wear off, I will proceed on that assumption. He responds fairly well to me, asked my name when I went to see him with the X-ray plate, and agreed to eat. I was forced to apologise to him, not a good beginning with a paranoid. The rib damage should have been marked on his chart by the referring agency or by the medic who admitted him. This kind of carelessness is distressing.
But there’s good news too. Rina (Autism Study subject 4) saw a first-person sentence today. Saw it: in heavy, black, primer print, all at once in the high Con foreground: I want to sleep in. the big room. (She sleeps alone because of the feces problem.) The sentence stayed clear for over 5 seconds. She was reading it in her mind just as I was reading it on the holoscreen. There was weak subverbalisation, but not subvocalisation, nothing on the audio. She has not yet spoken, even to herself, in the first person. I told Tio about it at once and he asked her after the session, “Rina, where do you want to sleep?”—“Rina sleep in the big room.” No pronoun, no conative. But one of these days she will say I want—aloud. And on that build a personality, maybe, at last: on that foundation. I want, therefore I am.
There is so much fear. Why is there so much fear?
4 SEPTEMBER
Went to town for my two-day holiday. Stayed with B. in her new flat on the north bank. Three rooms to herself!!! But I don’t really like those old buildings, there are rats and roaches, and it feels so old and strange, as if somehow the famine years were still there, waiting. Was glad to get back to my little room here, all to myself but with others close by on the same floor, friends and colleagues. Anyway I missed writing in this book. I form habits very fast. Compulsive tendency.
Ana much improved: dressed, hair combed, was knitting. But session was dull. Asked her to think about pancakes, and there it came filling up the whole Uncon dimension, the hairy, dreary, flat wolf-pancake, while in the Con she was obediently trying to visualise a nice cheese blintz. Not too badly: colors and outlines already stronger. I am still willing to count on simple hormone treatment. Of course they will suggest ECT, and a coanalysis of the scope material would be perfectly possible, we’d start with the wolf-pancake, etc. But is there any real point to it? She has been a bakery packager for 24 years and her physical health is poor. She cannot change her life situation. At least with good hormone balance she may be able to endure it.
F. Sorde: rested but still suspicious. Extreme fear reaction when I said it was time for his first session. To allay this I sat down and talked about the nature and operation of the psychoscope. He listened intently and finally said, “Are you going to use only the psychoscope?”
I said Yes.
He said, “Not electroshock?”
I said No.
He said, “Will you promise me that?”
I explained that I am a psychoscopist and never operate the electroconvulsive therapy equipment, that is an entirely different department. I said my work with him at present would be diagnostic, not therapeutic. He listened carefully. He is an educated person and understands distinctions such as “diagnostic” and “therapeutic.” It is interesting that he asked me to promise. That does not fit a paranoid pattern, you don’t ask for promises from those you can’t trust He came with me docilely, but when we entered the scope room he stopped and turned white at sight of the apparatus. I made Dr. Aven’s little joke about the dentist’s chair, which she always used with nervous patients. F.S. said, “So long as it’s not an electric chair!”
I believe that with intelligent subjects it is much better not to make mysteries and so impose a false authority and a feeling of helplessness on the subject (see T. R. Olma, Psychoscopy Technique). So I showed him the chair and electrode crown and explained its operation. He has a layman’s hearsay knowledge of the psychoscope, and his questions also reflected his engineering education. He sat down in the chair when I asked him. While I fitted the crown and clasps he was sweating profusely from fear, and this evidently embarrassed him, the smell. If he knew how Rina smells after she’s been doing shit paintings. He shut his eyes and gripped the chair arms so that his hands went white to the wrist. The screens were almost white too. After a while I said in a joking tone, “It doesn’t really hurt, does it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, does it?”
“You mean it’s on?”
“It’s been on for ninety seconds.”
He opened his eyes then and looked around, as well as he could for the head clamps. He asked, “Where’s the screen?”
I explained that a subject never watches the screen live, because the objectification can be severely disturbing, and he said, “Like feedback from a microphone?” That is exactly the simile Dr. Aven used to use. F.S. is certainly an intelligent person. N.B.: Intelligent paranoids are dangerous!
He asked, “What do you see?” and I said, “Do be quiet, I don’t want to see what you’re saying, I want to see what you’re thinking,” and he said, “But that’s none of your business, you know,” quite gently, like a joke. Meanwhile the fear-white had gone into dark, intense, volitional convolutions, and then, a few seconds after he stopped speaking, a rose appeared on the whole Con dimension: a full-blown pink rose, beautifully sensed and visualised, clear and steady, whole.
He said presently, “What am I thinking about, Dr. Sobel?” and I said, “Bears in the Zoo.” I wonder now why I said that. Self-defense? Against what? He gave a laugh and the Uncon went crystal-dark, relief, and the rose darkened and wavered. I said, “I was joking. Can you bring the rose back?” That brought back the fear-white. I said, “Listen, it’s really very bad for us to talk like this during a first session, you have to learn a great deal before you can co-analyse, and I have a great deal to learn about you, so no more jokes, please? Just relax physically, and think about anything you please.”
There was flurry and subverbalisation on the Con dimension, and the Uncon faded into grey, suppression. The rose came back weakly a few times. He was trying to concentrate on it, but couldn’t. I saw several quick visuals: myself, my uniform, TRTU uniforms, a grey car, a kitchen, the violent ward (strong aural images—screaming), a desk, the papers on the desk. He stuck to those. They were the plans for a machine. He began going through them. It was a deliberate effort at suppression, and quite effective. Finally I said, “What kind of machine is that?” and he began to answer aloud but stopped and let me get the answer subvocally in the earphone: “Plans for a rotary engine assembly for traction,” or something like that, of course the exact words are on the tape. I repeated it aloud and said, “They aren’t classified plans, are they?” He said, “No,” aloud, and added, “I don’t know any secrets.” His reaction to a question is intense and complex, each sentence is like a shower of pebbles thrown into a pool, the interlocking rings spread out quick and wide over the Con and into the Uncon, responses rising on all levels. Within a few seconds all that was hidden by a big signboard that appeared in the high Con foreground, deliberately visualised like the rose and the plans, with auditory reinforcement as he read it over and over: keep out! keep out! keep out!
It began to blur and flicker, and somatic signals took over, and soon he said aloud, “I’m tired,” and I closed the session (12.5 min.).
After I took off the crown and clamps I brought him a cup of tea from the staff stand in the hall. When I offered it to him he looked startled and then tears came into his eyes. His hands were so cramped from gripping the armrests that he had trouble taking hold of the cup. I told him he must not be so tense and afraid, we were trying to help him not to hurt him.
He looked up at me. Eyes are like the scope screen and yet you can’t read them. I wished the crown was still on him, but it seems you never catch the moments you most want on the scope. He said, “Doctor, why am I in this hospital?”
I said, “For diagnosis and therapy.”
He said, “Diagnosis and therapy of what?”
I said he perhaps could not now recall the episode, but he had behaved strangely. He asked how and when, and I said that it would all come clear to him as therapy took effect. Even if I had known what his psychotic episode was, I would have said the same. It was correct procedure. But I felt in a false position. If the TRTU report was not classified, I would be speaking from knowledge and the facts. Then I could make a better response to what he said next:
“I was waked up at two in the morning, jailed, interrogated, beaten up,, and drugged. I suppose I did behave a little oddly during that. Wouldn’t you?”
“Sometimes a person under stress misinterprets other people’s actions,” I said. “Drink up your tea and I’ll take you back to the ward. You’re running a temperature.”
“The ward,” he said, with a kind of shrinking movement, and then he said almost desperately, “Can you really not know why I’m here?”
That was strange, as if he has included me in his delusional system, on “his side.” Check this possibility in Rheingeld. I should think it would involve some transference and there has not been time for that.
Spent pm analysing Jest and Sorde holos. I have never seen any psychoscopic realisation, not even a drug-induced hallucination, so fine and vivid as that rose. The shadows of one petal on another, the velvety damp texture of the petals, the pink color full of sunlight, the yellow central crown—I am sure the scent was there if the apparatus had olfactory pickup—it wasn’t like a mentifact but a real thing rooted in the earth, alive and growing, the strong thorny stem beneath it.
Very tired, must go to bed.
Just reread this entry. Am I keeping this diary right? All I have written is what happened and what was said. Is that spontaneous? But it was important to me.
5 SEPTEMBER
Discussed the problem of conscious resistance with Dr. Nades at lunch today. Explained that I have worked with unconscious blocks (the children, and depressives such as Ana J.) and have some skill at reading through, but have not before met a conscious block such as F.S.’s keep out sign, or the device he used today, which was effective for a full 20-minute session: a concentration on his breathing, bodily rhythms, pain in ribs, and visual input from the scope room. She suggested that I use a blindfold for the latter trick, and keep my attention on the Uncon dimension, as he cannot prevent material from appearing there. It is surprising, though, how large the interplay area of his Con and Uncon fields is, and how much one resonates into the other. I believe his concentration on his breathing rhythm allowed him to achieve something like “trance” condition. Though of course most so-called “trance” is mere occultist fakirism, a primitive trait without interest for behavioral science.
Ana thought through “a day in my life” for me today. All so grey and dull, poor soul! She never thought even of food with pleasure, though she lives on minimum ration. The single thing that came bright for a moment was a child’s face, clear dark eyes, a pink knitted cap, round cheeks. She told me in post-session discussion that she always walks by a school playground on the way to work because “she likes to see the little ones running and yelling.” Her husband appears on the screen as a big bulky suit of work clothes and a peevish, threatening mumble. I wonder if she knows that she hasn’t seen his face or heard a word he says for years? But no use telling her that. It may be just as well she doesn’t. The knitting she is doing, I noticed today, is a pink cap.
Reading De Cam’s Disaffection: A Study, on Dr. Nades’s recommendation.
6 SEPTEMBER
In the middle of session (breathing again) I said loudly: “Flores!”
Both psy dimensions whited out but the soma realisation hardly changed. After 4 seconds he responded aloud, drowsily. It is not “trance,” but autohypnosis.
I said, “Your breathing’s monitored by the apparatus. I don’t need to know that you’re still breathing. It’s boring.”
He said, “I like to do my own monitoring, Doctor.”
I came around and took the blindfold off him and looked at him. He has a pleasant face, the kind of man you often see running machinery, sensitive but patient, like a donkey. That is stupid. I will not cross it out. I am supposed to be spontaneous in this diary. Donkeys do have beautiful faces. They are supposed to be stupid and balky but they look wise and calm, as if they had endured a lot but held no grudges, as if they knew some reason why one should not hold grudges. And the white ring around their eyes makes them look defenseless.
“But the more you breathe,” I said, “the less you think. I need your cooperation. I’m trying to find out what it is you’re afraid of.”
“But I know what I’m afraid of,” he said.
“Why won’t you tell me?”
“You never asked me.”
“That’s most unreasonable,” I said, which is funny, now I think about it, being indignant with a mental patient because he’s unreasonable. “Well, then, now I’m asking you.”
He said, “I’m afraid of electroshock. Of having my mind destroyed. Being kept here. Or only being let out when I can’t remember anything.” He gasped while he was speaking. I said, “All right, why won’t you think about that while I’m watching the screens?”
“Why should I?”
“Why not? You’ve said it to me, why can’t you think about it? I want to see the color of your thoughts!”
“It’s none of your business, the color of my thoughts,” he said angrily, but I was around to the screen while he spoke, and saw the unguarded activity. Of course it was being taped while we spoke, too, and I have studied it all afternoon. It is fascinating. There are two subverbal levels running aside from the spoken words. All sensory-emotive reactions and distortions are vigorous and complex. He “sees” me, for instance, m at least three different ways, probably more, analysis is impossibly difficult! And the Con-Uncon correspondences are so complicated, and the memory traces and current impressions interweave so rapidly, and yet the whole is unified in its complexity. It is like that machine he was studying, very intricate but all one thing in a mathematical harmony. Like the petals of the rose.
When he realised I was observing he shouted out, “Voyeur! Damned voyeur! Let me alone! Get out!” and he broke down and cried. There was a clear fantasy on the screen for several seconds of himself breaking the arm and head clamps and kicking the apparatus to pieces and rushing out of the building, and there, outside, there was a wide hilltop, covered with short dry grass, under the evening sky, and he stood there all alone. While he sat clamped in the chair sobbing.
I broke session and took off the crown, and asked him if he wanted some tea, and he refused to answer. So I freed his arms, and brought him a cup. There was sugar today, a whole box full. I told him that and told him I’d put in two lumps.
After he had drunk some tea he said, with an elaborate ironical tone, because he was ashamed of crying, “You know I like sugar? I suppose your psychoscope told you I liked sugar?”
“Don’t be silly,” I said, “everybody likes sugar if they can get it.”He said, “No, little doctor, they don’t.” He asked in the same tone how old I was and if I was married. He was spiteful. He said, “Don’t want to marry? Wedded to your work? Helping the mentally unsound back to a constructive life of service to the Nation?”
“I like my work,” I said, “because it’s difficult, and interesting. Like yours. You like your work, don’t you?”
“I did,” he said. “Goodbye to all that”
“Why?”
He tapped his head and said, “Zzzzzzt!—All gone. Right?”
“Why are you so convinced you’re going to be prescribed electroshock? I haven’t even diagnosed you yet.”
“Diagnosed me?” he said. “Look, stop the playacting, please. My diagnosis was made. By the learned doctors of the TRTU. Severe case of disaffection. Prognosis: Evil! Therapy: Lock him up with a roomful of screaming thrashing wrecks, and then go through his mind the same way you went through his papers, and then burn it… burn it out. Right, Doctor? Why do you have to go through all this posing, diagnosis, cups of tea? Can’t you just get on with it? Do you have to paw through everything I am before you burn it?”
“Flores,” I said very patiently, “you’re saying ‘Destroy me’—don’t you hear yourself? The psychoscope destroys nothing. And I’m not using it to get evidence, either. This isn’t a court, you’re not on trial. And I’m not a judge. I’m a doctor.”
He interrupted—“If you’re a doctor, can’t you see that I’m not sick?”
“How can I see anything so long as you block me out with your stupid keep out signs?” I shouted. I did shout. My patience was a pose and it just fell to pieces. But I saw that I had reached him, so I went right on. “You look sick, you act sick—two cracked ribs, a temperature, no appetite, crying fits—is that good health? If you’re not sick, then prove it to me! Let me see how you are inside, inside all that!”
He looked down into his cup and gave a kind of laugh and shrugged. “I can’t win,” he said. “Why do I talk to you? You look so honest, damn you!”
I walked away. It is shocking how a patient can hurt one. The trouble is, I am used to the children, whose rejection is absolute, like animals that freeze, or cower, or bite, in their terror. But with this man, intelligent and older than I am, first there is communication and trust and then the blow. It hurts more.
It is painful writing all this down. It hurts again. But it is useful. I do understand some things he said much better now. I think I will not show it to Dr. Nades until I have completed diagnosis. If there is any truth to what he said about being arrested on suspicion of disaffection (and he is certainly careless in the way he talks) Dr. Nades might feel that she should take over the case, due to my inexperience. I should regret that. I need the experience.
7 SEPTEMBER
Stupid! That’s why she gave you De Cam’s book. Of course she knows. As Head of the Section she has access to the TRTU dossier on F.S. She gave me this case deliberately.
It is certainly educational.
Today’s session: F.S. still angry and sulky. Intentionally fantasized a sex scene. It was memory, but when she was heaving around underneath him he suddenly stuck a caricature of my face on her. It was effective. I doubt a woman could have done it, women’s recall of having sex is usually darker and grander and they and the other do not become meat-puppets like that, with switchable heads. After a while he got bored with the performance (for all its vividness there was little somatic participation, not even an erection) and his mind began to wander. For the first time. One of the drawings on the desk came back. He must be a designer, because he changed it, with a pencil. At the same time there was a tune going on the audio, in mental puretone; and in the Uncon lapping over into the interplay area, a large, dark room seen from a child’s height, the windowsills very high, evening outside the windows, tree branches darkening, and inside the room a woman’s voice, soft, maybe reading aloud, sometimes joining with the tune. Meanwhile the whore on the bed kept coming and going in volitional bursts, falling apart a little more each time, till there was nothing left but one nipple. This much I analysed out this afternoon, the first sequence of over 10 sec. that I have analysed clear and entire.
When I broke session he said, “What did you learn?” in the satirical voice.
I whistled a bit of the tune.
He looked scared.
“It’s a lovely tune,” I said, “I never heard it before. If it’s yours, I won’t whistle it anywhere else.”
“It’s from some quartet,” he said, with his “donkey” face back, defenseless and patient. “I like classical music. Didn’t you—”
“I saw the girl,” I said. “And my face on her. Do you know what I’d like to see?”
He shook his head. Sulky, hangdog.
“Your childhood.”
That surprised him. After a while he said, “All right. You can have my childhood. Why not? You’re going to get all the rest anyhow. Listen. You tape it all, don’t you? Could I see a playback? I want to see what you see.”
“Sure,” I said. “But it won’t mean as much to you as you think it will. It took me eight years to learn to observe. You start with your own tapes. I watched mine for months before I recognised anything much.”
I took him to my seat, put on the earphone, and ran him 30 sec. of the last sequence.
He was quite thoughtful and respectful after it. He asked, “What was all that running-up-and-down-scales motion in the, the background I guess you’d call it?”
“Visual scan—your eyes were closed—and subliminal proprioceptive input. The Unconscious dimension and the Body dimension overlap to a great extent all the time. We bring the three dimensions in separately, because they seldom coincide entirely anyway, except in babies. The bright triangular motion at the left of the holo was probably the pain in your ribs.”
“I don’t see it that way!”
“You don’t see it; you weren’t consciously feeling it, even, then. But we can’t translate a pain in the rib onto a holoscreen, so we give it a visual symbol. The same with all sensations, affects, emotions.”
“You watch all that at once?”
“I told you it took eight years. And you do realise that that’s only a fragment? Nobody could put a whole psyche onto a four-foot screen. Nobody knows if there are any limits to the psyche. Except the limits of the universe.”
He said after a while, “Maybe you aren’t a fool, doctor. Maybe you’re just very absorbed in your work. That can be dangerous, you know, to be so absorbed in your work.”
“I love my work, and I hope that it is of positive service,” I said. I was alert for symptoms of disaffection.
He smiled a little and said, “Prig,” in a sad voice.
Ana is coming along. Still some trouble eating. Entered her in George’s mutual-therapy group. What she needs, at least one thing she needs, is companionship. After all why should she eat? Who needs her to be alive? What we call psychosis is sometimes simply realism. But human beings can’t live on realism alone.
F.S.’s patterns do not fit any of the classical paranoid psychoscopic patterns in Rheingeld.
The De Cams book is hard for me to understand. The terminology of politics is so different from that of psychology. Everything seems backwards. I must be genuinely attentive at P.T. sessions Sunday nights from now on. I have been lazy-minded. Or, no, but as F.S. said, too absorbed in my work—and so inattentive to its context, he meant. Not thinking about what one is working for.
10 SEPTEMBER
Have been so tired the last two nights I skipped writing this journal. All the data are on tape and in my analysis notes, of course. Have been working really hard on the F.S. analysis. It is very exciting. It is a truly unusual mind. Not brilliant, his intelligence tests are good average, he is not original or an artist, there are no schizophrenic insights, I can’t say what it is, I feel honored to have shared in the childhood he remembered for me. I can’t say what it is. There was pain and fear of course, his. father’s death from cancer, months and months of misery while F.S. was twelve, that was terrible, but it does not come out pain in the end, he has not forgotten or repressed it but it is all changed, by his love for his parents and his sister and for music and for the shape and weight and fit of things and his memory of the lights and weathers of days long past and his mind always working quietly, reaching out, reaching out to be whole.
There is no question yet of formal co-analysis, it is far too early, but he cooperates so intelligently that today I asked him if he was aware consciously of the Dark Brother figure that accompanied several Con memories in the Uncon dimension. When I described it as having a matted shock of hair he looked startled and said, “Dokkay, you mean?”
That word had been on the subverbal audio, though I hadn’t connected it with the figure.
He explained that when he was five or six Dokkay had been his name for a “bear” he often dreamed or daydreamed about. He said, “I rode him. He was big, I was small. He smashed down walls, and destroyed things, bad things, you know, bullies, spies, people who scared my mother, prisons, dark alleys I was afraid to cross, policemen with guns, the pawnbroker. Just knocked them over. And then he walked over all the rubble on up to the hilltop. With me riding on his back. It was quiet up there. It was always evening, just before the stars come out. It’s strange to remember it. Thirty years ago! Later on he turned into a kind of friend, a boy or man, with hair like a bear. He still smashed things, and I went with him. It was good fun.”
I write this down from memory as it was not taped; session was interrupted by power outage. It is exasperating that the hospital comes so low on the list of Government priorities.
Attended the Pos. Thinking session tonight and took notes. Dr. K. spoke on the dangers and falsehoods of liberalism.
11 SEPTEMBER
F.S. tried to show me Dokkay this morning but failed. He laughed and said aloud, “I can’t see him any more. I think at some point I turned into him.”
“Show me when that happened,” I said, and he said, “All right,” and began at once to recall an episode from his early adolescence. It had nothing to do with Dokkay. He saw an arrest. He was told that the man had been passing out illegal printed matter. Later on he saw one of these pamphlets, the title was in his visual bank, “Is There Equal Justice?” He read it, but did not recall the text or managed to censor it from me. The arrest was terribly vivid. Details like the young man’s blue shirt and the coughing noise he made and the sound of the hitting, the TRTU agents’ uniforms, and the car driving away, a big grey car with blood on the door. It came back over and over, the car driving away down the street, driving away down the street. It was a traumatic incident for F.S. and may explain the exaggerated fear of the violence of national justice justified by national security which may have led him to behave irrationally when investigated and so appeared as a tendency to disaffection, falsely I believe.
I will show why i believe this. When the episode was done I said, “Flores, think about democracy for me, will you?”
He said, “Little doctor, you don’t catch old dogs quite that easily.”
“I am not catching you. Can you think about democracy or can’t you?”
“I think about it a good deal,” he said. And he shifted to right-brain activity, music. It was a chorus of the last part of the Ninth Symphony by Beethoven, I recognised it from the Arts term in high school. We sang it to some patriotic words. I yelled, “Don’t censor!” and he said, “Don’t shout, I can hear you.” Of course the room was perfectly silent, but the pickup on the audio was tremendous, like thousands of people singing together. He went on aloud, “I’m not censoring. I’m thinking about democracy. That is democracy. Hope, brotherhood, no walls. All the walls unbuilt. You, we, I make the universe! Can’t you hear it?” And it was the hilltop again, the short grass and the sense of being up high, and the wind, and the whole sky. The music was the sky.
When it was done and I released him from the crown I said, “Thank you.”
I do not see why the doctor cannot thank the patient for a revelation of beauty and meaning. Of course the doctor’s authority is important but it need not be domineering. I realise that in politics the authorities must lead and be followed but in psychological medicine it is a little different, a doctor cannot “cure” the patient, the patient “cures” himself with our help, this is not contradictory to Positive Thinking.
14 SEPTEMBER
I am upset after the long conversation with F.S. today and will try to clarify my thinking.
Because the rib injury prevents him from attending work therapy, he is restless. The Violent ward disturbed him deeply so I used my authority to have the V removed from his chart and have him moved into Men’s Ward B, three days ago. His bed is next to old Area’s, and when I came to get him for session they were talking, sitting on Area’s bed. F.S. said, “Dr. Sobel, do you know my neighbor, Professor Area of the Faculty of Arts and Letters of the University?” Of course I know the old man, he has been here for years, far longer than I, but F.S. spoke so courteously and gravely that I said, “Yes, how do you do, Professor Area?” and shook the old man’s hand. He greeted me politely as a stranger—he often does not know people from one day to the next. As we went to the scope room F.S. said, “Do you know how many electroshock treatments he had?” and when I said no he said, “Sixty. He tells me that every day. With pride.” Then he said, “Did you know that he was an internationally famous scholar? He wrote a book, The Idea of Liberty, about twentieth-century ideas of freedom in politics and the arts and sciences. I read it when I was in engineering school. It existed then. On bookshelves. It doesn’t exist any more. Anywhere. Ask Dr. Area. He never heard of it.”
“There is almost always some memory loss after electroconvulsive therapy,” I said, “but the material lost can be relearned, and is often spontaneously regained.”
“After sixty sessions?” he said.
F.S. is a tall man, rather stooped, even in the hospital pajamas he is an impressive figure. But I am also tall, and it is not because I am shorter than he that he calls me “little doctor.” He did it first when he was angry at me and so now he says it when he is bitter but does not want what he says to hurt me, the me he knows. He said, “Little doctor, quit faking. You know the man’s mind was deliberately destroyed.”
Now I will try to write down exactly what I said, because it is important.
“I do not approve of the use of electroconvulsive therapy as a general instrument. I would not recommend its use on my patients except perhaps in certain specific cases of senile melancholia. I went into psychoscopy because it is an integrative rather than a destructive instrument.”
That is all true, and yet I never said or consciously thought it before.
“What will you recommend for me?” he said.
I explained that once my diagnosis is complete my recommendation will be subject to the approval of the Head and Assistant Head of the Section. I said that so far nothing in his history or personality structure warranted the use of ECT but that after all we had not got very far yet.
"Let’s take a long time about it,” he said, shuffling along beside me with his shoulders hunched.
“Why? Do you like it?”
“No. Though I like you. But I’d like to delay the inevitable end.”
“Why do you insist that it’s inevitable, Flores? Can’t you see that your thinking on that one point is quite irrational?”
“Rosa,” he said, he has never used my first name before, “Rosa, you can’t be reasonable about pure evil. There are faces reason cannot see. Of course I’m irrational, faced with the imminent destruction of my memory—my self. But I’m not inaccurate. You know they’re not going to let me out of here un…” He hesitated a long time and finally said, “unchanged.”
“One psychotic episode—”
“I had no psychotic episode. You must know that by now.”
“Then why were you sent here?”
“I have some colleagues who prefer to consider themselves rivals, competitors. I gather they informed the TRTU that I was a subversive liberal.”
“What was their evidence?”
“Evidence?” We were in the scope room by now. He put his hands over his face for a moment and laughed in a bewildered way. “Evidence? Well, once at a meeting of my section I talked a long time with a visiting foreigner, a fellow in my field, a designer. And I have friends, you know, unproductive people, bohemians. And this summer I showed our section head why a design he’d got approved by the Government wouldn’t work. That was stupid. Maybe I’m here for, for imbecility. And I read. I’ve read Professor Area’s book.”
“But none of that matters, you think positively, you love your country, you’re not disaffected!”
He said, “I don’t know. I love the idea of democracy, the hope, yes, I love that. I couldn’t live without that. But the country? You mean the thing on the map, lines, everything inside the lines is good and nothing out-> side them matters? How can an adult love such a childish idea?”
“But you wouldn’t betray the nation to an outside enemy.”
He said, “Well, if it was a choice between the nation and humanity, or the nation and a friend, I might. If you call that betrayal. I call it morality.”
He is a liberal. It is exactly what Dr. Katin was talking about on Sunday.
It is classic psychopathy: the absence of normal affect. He said that quite unemotionally—“I might.”
No. That is not true. He said it with difficulty, with pain. It was I who was so shocked that I felt nothing—blank, cold.
How am I to treat this kind of psychosis, a political psychosis? I have read over De Cams’s book twice and I believe I do understand it now, but still there is this gap between the political and the psychological, so that the book shows me how to think but does not show me how to act positively. I see how F.S. should think and feel, and the difference between that and his present state of mind, but I do not know how to educate him so that he can think positively. De Cams says that disaffection is a negative condition which must be filled with positive ideas and emotions, but this does not fit F.S. The gap is not in him. In fact that gap in De Cams between the political and the psychological is exactly where his ideas apply. But if they are wrong ideas how can this be?
I want advice badly, but I cannot get it from Dr. Nades. When she gave me the De Cams she said, “You’ll find what you need in this.” If I tell her that I haven’t, it is like a confession of helplessness and she will take the case away from me. Indeed I think it is a kind of test case, testing me. But I need this experience, I am learning, and besides, the patient trusts me and talks freely to me. He does so because he knows that I keep what he tells me in perfect confidence. Therefore I cannot show this journal or discuss these problems with anyone until the cine is under way and confidence is no longer essential. But I cannot see when that could happen. It seems as if confidence will always be essential between us.
I have got to teach him to adjust his behavior to reality, or he will be sent for ECT when the Section reviews cases in November. He has been right about that all along.
9 OCTOBER
I stopped writing in this notebook when the material from F.S. began to seem “dangerous” to him (or to myself). I just reread it all over tonight. I see now that I can never show it to Dr. N. So I am going to go ahead and write what I please in it. Which is what she said to do, but I think she always expected me to show it to her, she thought I would want to, which I did, at first, or that if she asked to see it I’d give it to her. She asked about it yesterday. I said that I had abandoned it, because it just repeated things I had already put into the analysis files. She was plainly disapproving but said nothing. Our dominance-submission relationship has changed these past few weeks. I do not feel so much in need of guidance, and after the Ana Jest discharge, the autism paper, and my successful analysis of the T. R. Vinha tapes she cannot insist upon my dependence. But she may resent my independence. I took the covers off the notebook and am keeping the loose pages in the split in the back cover of my copy of Rheingeld, it would take a very close search to find them there. While I was doing that I felt rather sick at the stomach and got a headache.
Allergy: A person can be exposed to pollen or bitten by fleas a thousand times without reaction. Then he gets a viral infection or a psychic trauma or a bee sting, and next time he meets up with ragweed or a flea he begins to sneeze, cough, itch, weep, etc. It is the same with certain other irritants. One has to be sensitized.
“Why is there so much fear?” I wrote. Well now I know. Why is there no privacy? It is unfair and sordid. I cannot read the “classified” files kept in her office, though I work with the patients and she does not. But I am not to have any “classified” material of my own. Only persons in authority can have secrets. Their secrets are all good, even when they are lies.
Listen. Listen Rosa Sobel. Doctor of Medicine, Deg. Psychotherapy, Deg. Psychoscopy. Have you gone native?
Whose thoughts are you thinking?
You have been working 2 to 5 hours a day for 6 weeks inside one person’s mind. A generous, integrated, sane mind. You never worked with anything like that before. You have only worked with the crippled and the terrified. You never met an equal before.
Who is the therapist, you or he?
But if there is nothing wrong with him what am I supposed to cure? How can I help him? How can I save him?
By teaching him to lie?
(UNDATED)
I spent the last two nights till midnight reviewing the diagnostic scopes of Professor Area, recorded when he was admitted, eleven years ago, before electroconvulsive treatment.
This morning Dr. N inquired why I had been “so far back in the files.” (That means that Selena reports to her on what files are used. I know every square centimeter of the scope room but all the same I check it over daily now.) I replied that I was interested in studying the development of ideological disaffection in intellectuals. We agreed that intellectualism tends to foster negative thinking and may lead to psychosis, and those suffering from it should ideally be treated, as Prof. Area was treated, and released if still competent. It was a very interesting and harmonious discussion.
I lied. I lied. I lied. I lied deliberately, knowingly, well. She lied. She is a liar. She is an intellectual too! She is a lie. And a coward, afraid.
I wanted to watch the Area tapes to get perspective. To prove to myself that Flores is by no means unique or original. This is true. The differences are fascinating. Dr. Area’s Con dimension was splendid, architectural, but the Uncon material was less well integrated and less interesting. Dr. Area knew very much more, and the power and beauty of the motions of his thought was far superior to Flores’s! Flores is often extremely muddled. That is an element of his vitality. Dr. Area is an, was an Abstract thinker, as I am, and so I enjoyed his tapes less. I missed the solidity, spatiotemporal realism, and intense sensory clarity of Flores’s mind.
In the scope room this morning I told him what I had been doing. His reaction was (as usual) not what I expected. He is fond of the old man and I thought he would be pleased. He said, “You mean they saved the tapes, and destroyed the mind?” I told him that all tapes are kept for use in teaching, and asked him if that didn’t cheer him, to know that a record of Area’s thoughts in his prime existed: wasn’t it like his book, after all, the lasting part of a mind which sooner or later would have to grow senile and die anyhow? He said, “No! Not so long as the book is banned and the tape is classified! Neither freedom nor privacy even in death? That is the worst of all!”
After session he asked if I would be able or willing to destroy his diagnostic tapes, if he is sent to ECT. I said such things could get misfiled and lost easily enough, but that it seemed a cruel waste. I had learned from him and others might, later, too. He said, “Don’t you see that I will not serve the people with security passes? I will not be used, that’s the whole point. You have never used me. We have worked together. Served our term together.”
Prison has been much in his mind lately. Fantasies, daydreams of jails, labor camps. He dreams of prison as a man in prison dreams of freedom.
Indeed as I see the way narrowing in I would get him sent to prison if I could, but since he is here there is no chance. If I reported that he is in fact politically dangerous, they will simply put him back in the Violent ward and give him ECT. There is no judge here to give him a life sentence. Only doctors to give death sentences.
What I can do is stretch out the diagnosis as long as possible, and put in a request for full co-analysis, with a strong prognosis of complete cure. But I have drafted the report three times already and it is very hard to phrase it so that it’s clear that I know the disease is ideological (so that they don’t just override my diagnosis at once) but still making it sound mild and curable enough that they’d let me handle it with the psychoscope. And then, why spend up to a year, using expensive equipment, when a cheap and simple instant cure is at hand? No matter what I say, they have that argument. There are two weeks left until Sectional Review. I have got to write the report so that it will be really impossible for them to override it. But what if Flores is right, all this is just playacting, lying about lying, and they have had orders right from the start from TRTU, “wipe this one out”—
(UNDATED)
Sectional Review today.
If I stay on here I have some power, I can do some good No no no but I don’t I don’t even in this one thing even in this what can I do now how can I stop
(UNDATED
Last night I dreamed I rode on a bear’s back up a deep gorge between steep mountainsides, slopes going steep up into a dark sky, it was winter, there was ice on the rocks
(UNDATED)
Tomorrow morning will tell Nades I am resigning and requesting transfer to Children’s Hospital. But she must approve the transfer. If not I am out in the cold. I am in the cold already. Door locked to write this. As soon as it is written will go down to furnace room and burn it all. There is no place any more.
We met in the hall. He was with an orderly.
I took his hand. It was big and bony and very cold. He said, “Is this it, now, Rosa—the electroshock?” in a low voice. I did not want him to lose hope before he walked up the stairs and down the corridor. It is a long way down the corridor. I said, “No. Just some more tests—EEG probably.”
“Then I’ll see you tomorrow?” he asked, and I said yes.
And he did. I went in this evening. He was awake. I said, “I am Dr. Sobel, Flores. I am Rosa.”
He said, “I’m pleased to meet you,” mumbling. There is a slight facial paralysis on the left. That will wear off.
I am Rosa. I am the rose. The rose, I am the rose. The rose with no flower, the rose all thorns, the mind he made, the hand he touched, the winter rose.
30 AUGUST
Dr. Nades recommends that I keep a diary of my work. She says that if you keep it carefully, when you reread it you can remind yourself of observations you made, notice errors and learn from them, and observe progress in or deviations from positive thinking, and so keep correcting the course of your work by a feedback process.
I promise to write in this notebook every night, and reread it at the end of each week.
I wish I had done it while I was an assistant, but it is even more important now that I have patients of my own.
As of yesterday I have six patients, a full load for a scopist, but four of them are the autistic children I have been working with all year for Dr. Nades’s study for the Nat’l Psych. Bureau (my notes on them are in the cli psy files). The other two are new admissions:
Ana Jest, 46, bakery packager, md., no children, diag. depression, referral from city police (suicide attempt).
Flores Sorde, 36, engineer, unmd., no diag., referral from TRTU (Psychopathic behavior—Violent).
Dr. Nades says it is important that I write things down each night just as they occurred to me at work: it is the spontaneity that is most informative in self-examination (just as in autopsychoscopy). She says it is better to write it, not dictate onto tape, and keep it quite private, so that I won’t be self-conscious. It is hard. I never wrote anything that was private before. I keep feeling as if I was really writing it for Dr. Nades! Perhaps if the diary is useful I can show her some of it, later, and get her advice.
My guess is that Ana Jest is in menopausal depression and hormone therapy will be sufficient There! Now let’s see how bad a prognostician I am.
Will work with both patients under scope tomorrow. It is exciting to have my own patients, I am impatient to begin. Though of course teamwork was very educational.
31 AUGUST
Half-hour scope session with Ana J. at 8:00. Analyzed scope material, 11:00-17:00. N.B.: Adjust right-brain pickup next session! Weak visual Concrete. Very little aural, weak sensory, erratic body image. Will get lab analyses tomorrow of hormone balance.
It is amazing how banal most people’s minds are. Of course the poor woman is in severe depression. Input in the Con dimension was foggy and incoherent, and the Uncon dimension was deeply open, but obscure. But the things that came out of the obscurity were so trivial! A pair of old shoes, and the word “geography”! And the shoes were dim, a mere schema of a pair-of-shoes, maybe a man’s maybe a woman’s, maybe dark blue maybe brown. Although definitely a visual type, she does not see anything clearly. Not many people do. It is depressing. When I was a student in first year I used to think how wonderful other people’s minds would be, how wonderful it was going to be to share in all the different worlds, the different colors of their passions and ideas. How naive I was!
I realised this first in Dr. Ramia’s class when we studied a tape from a very famous successful person, and I noticed that the subject had never looked at a tree, never touched one, did not know any difference between an oak and a poplar, or even between a daisy and a rose. They were all just “trees” or “flowers” to him, apprehended schematically. It was the same with people’s faces, though he had tricks for telling them apart: mostly he saw the name, like a label, not the face. That was an Abstract mind, of course, but it can be even worse with the Concretes, whose perceptions come in a kind of undifferentiated sludge—bean soup with a pair of shoes in it.
But aren’t I “going native”? I’ve been studying a depressive’s thoughts all day and have got depressed. Look, I wrote up there, “It is depressing.” I see the value of this diary already. I know I am over-impressionable.
Of course, that is why I am a good psychoscopist But it is dangerous.
No session with F. Sorde today, since sedation had not worn off. TRTU referrals are often so drugged that they cannot be scoped for days.
REM scoping session with Ana J. at 4:00 tomorrow. Better go to bed!
1 SEPTEMBER
Dr. Nades says the kind of thing I wrote yesterday is pretty much what she had in mind, and invited me to show her this diary again whenever I am in doubt. Spontaneous thoughts—not the technical data, which are recorded in the files anyhow. Cross nothing out. Candor all-important.
Ana’s dream was interesting but pathetic. The wolf who turned into a pancake! Such a disgusting, dim, hairy pancake, too. Her visuality is clearer in dream, but the feeling tone remains low (but remember: you contribute the affect—don’t read it in). Started her on hormone therapy today.
F. Sorde awake, but too confused to take to scope room for session. Frightened. Refused to eat. Complained of pain in side. I thought he was unclear what kind of hospital this is, and told him there was nothing wrong with him physically. He said, “How the hell do you know?” which was fair enough, since he was in a straitjacket, due to the V notation on his chart. I examined and found bruising and contusion, and ordered X-ray, which showed two ribs cracked. Explained to patient that he had been in a condition where forcible restraint had been necessary to prevent self-injury. He said, “Every time one of them asked a question the other one kicked me.” He repeated this several times, with anger and confusion. Paranoid delusional system? If it does not weaken as the drugs wear off, I will proceed on that assumption. He responds fairly well to me, asked my name when I went to see him with the X-ray plate, and agreed to eat. I was forced to apologise to him, not a good beginning with a paranoid. The rib damage should have been marked on his chart by the referring agency or by the medic who admitted him. This kind of carelessness is distressing.
But there’s good news too. Rina (Autism Study subject 4) saw a first-person sentence today. Saw it: in heavy, black, primer print, all at once in the high Con foreground: I want to sleep in. the big room. (She sleeps alone because of the feces problem.) The sentence stayed clear for over 5 seconds. She was reading it in her mind just as I was reading it on the holoscreen. There was weak subverbalisation, but not subvocalisation, nothing on the audio. She has not yet spoken, even to herself, in the first person. I told Tio about it at once and he asked her after the session, “Rina, where do you want to sleep?”—“Rina sleep in the big room.” No pronoun, no conative. But one of these days she will say I want—aloud. And on that build a personality, maybe, at last: on that foundation. I want, therefore I am.
There is so much fear. Why is there so much fear?
4 SEPTEMBER
Went to town for my two-day holiday. Stayed with B. in her new flat on the north bank. Three rooms to herself!!! But I don’t really like those old buildings, there are rats and roaches, and it feels so old and strange, as if somehow the famine years were still there, waiting. Was glad to get back to my little room here, all to myself but with others close by on the same floor, friends and colleagues. Anyway I missed writing in this book. I form habits very fast. Compulsive tendency.
Ana much improved: dressed, hair combed, was knitting. But session was dull. Asked her to think about pancakes, and there it came filling up the whole Uncon dimension, the hairy, dreary, flat wolf-pancake, while in the Con she was obediently trying to visualise a nice cheese blintz. Not too badly: colors and outlines already stronger. I am still willing to count on simple hormone treatment. Of course they will suggest ECT, and a coanalysis of the scope material would be perfectly possible, we’d start with the wolf-pancake, etc. But is there any real point to it? She has been a bakery packager for 24 years and her physical health is poor. She cannot change her life situation. At least with good hormone balance she may be able to endure it.
F. Sorde: rested but still suspicious. Extreme fear reaction when I said it was time for his first session. To allay this I sat down and talked about the nature and operation of the psychoscope. He listened intently and finally said, “Are you going to use only the psychoscope?”
I said Yes.
He said, “Not electroshock?”
I said No.
He said, “Will you promise me that?”
I explained that I am a psychoscopist and never operate the electroconvulsive therapy equipment, that is an entirely different department. I said my work with him at present would be diagnostic, not therapeutic. He listened carefully. He is an educated person and understands distinctions such as “diagnostic” and “therapeutic.” It is interesting that he asked me to promise. That does not fit a paranoid pattern, you don’t ask for promises from those you can’t trust He came with me docilely, but when we entered the scope room he stopped and turned white at sight of the apparatus. I made Dr. Aven’s little joke about the dentist’s chair, which she always used with nervous patients. F.S. said, “So long as it’s not an electric chair!”
I believe that with intelligent subjects it is much better not to make mysteries and so impose a false authority and a feeling of helplessness on the subject (see T. R. Olma, Psychoscopy Technique). So I showed him the chair and electrode crown and explained its operation. He has a layman’s hearsay knowledge of the psychoscope, and his questions also reflected his engineering education. He sat down in the chair when I asked him. While I fitted the crown and clasps he was sweating profusely from fear, and this evidently embarrassed him, the smell. If he knew how Rina smells after she’s been doing shit paintings. He shut his eyes and gripped the chair arms so that his hands went white to the wrist. The screens were almost white too. After a while I said in a joking tone, “It doesn’t really hurt, does it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, does it?”
“You mean it’s on?”
“It’s been on for ninety seconds.”
He opened his eyes then and looked around, as well as he could for the head clamps. He asked, “Where’s the screen?”
I explained that a subject never watches the screen live, because the objectification can be severely disturbing, and he said, “Like feedback from a microphone?” That is exactly the simile Dr. Aven used to use. F.S. is certainly an intelligent person. N.B.: Intelligent paranoids are dangerous!
He asked, “What do you see?” and I said, “Do be quiet, I don’t want to see what you’re saying, I want to see what you’re thinking,” and he said, “But that’s none of your business, you know,” quite gently, like a joke. Meanwhile the fear-white had gone into dark, intense, volitional convolutions, and then, a few seconds after he stopped speaking, a rose appeared on the whole Con dimension: a full-blown pink rose, beautifully sensed and visualised, clear and steady, whole.
He said presently, “What am I thinking about, Dr. Sobel?” and I said, “Bears in the Zoo.” I wonder now why I said that. Self-defense? Against what? He gave a laugh and the Uncon went crystal-dark, relief, and the rose darkened and wavered. I said, “I was joking. Can you bring the rose back?” That brought back the fear-white. I said, “Listen, it’s really very bad for us to talk like this during a first session, you have to learn a great deal before you can co-analyse, and I have a great deal to learn about you, so no more jokes, please? Just relax physically, and think about anything you please.”
There was flurry and subverbalisation on the Con dimension, and the Uncon faded into grey, suppression. The rose came back weakly a few times. He was trying to concentrate on it, but couldn’t. I saw several quick visuals: myself, my uniform, TRTU uniforms, a grey car, a kitchen, the violent ward (strong aural images—screaming), a desk, the papers on the desk. He stuck to those. They were the plans for a machine. He began going through them. It was a deliberate effort at suppression, and quite effective. Finally I said, “What kind of machine is that?” and he began to answer aloud but stopped and let me get the answer subvocally in the earphone: “Plans for a rotary engine assembly for traction,” or something like that, of course the exact words are on the tape. I repeated it aloud and said, “They aren’t classified plans, are they?” He said, “No,” aloud, and added, “I don’t know any secrets.” His reaction to a question is intense and complex, each sentence is like a shower of pebbles thrown into a pool, the interlocking rings spread out quick and wide over the Con and into the Uncon, responses rising on all levels. Within a few seconds all that was hidden by a big signboard that appeared in the high Con foreground, deliberately visualised like the rose and the plans, with auditory reinforcement as he read it over and over: keep out! keep out! keep out!
It began to blur and flicker, and somatic signals took over, and soon he said aloud, “I’m tired,” and I closed the session (12.5 min.).
After I took off the crown and clamps I brought him a cup of tea from the staff stand in the hall. When I offered it to him he looked startled and then tears came into his eyes. His hands were so cramped from gripping the armrests that he had trouble taking hold of the cup. I told him he must not be so tense and afraid, we were trying to help him not to hurt him.
He looked up at me. Eyes are like the scope screen and yet you can’t read them. I wished the crown was still on him, but it seems you never catch the moments you most want on the scope. He said, “Doctor, why am I in this hospital?”
I said, “For diagnosis and therapy.”
He said, “Diagnosis and therapy of what?”
I said he perhaps could not now recall the episode, but he had behaved strangely. He asked how and when, and I said that it would all come clear to him as therapy took effect. Even if I had known what his psychotic episode was, I would have said the same. It was correct procedure. But I felt in a false position. If the TRTU report was not classified, I would be speaking from knowledge and the facts. Then I could make a better response to what he said next:
“I was waked up at two in the morning, jailed, interrogated, beaten up,, and drugged. I suppose I did behave a little oddly during that. Wouldn’t you?”
“Sometimes a person under stress misinterprets other people’s actions,” I said. “Drink up your tea and I’ll take you back to the ward. You’re running a temperature.”
“The ward,” he said, with a kind of shrinking movement, and then he said almost desperately, “Can you really not know why I’m here?”
That was strange, as if he has included me in his delusional system, on “his side.” Check this possibility in Rheingeld. I should think it would involve some transference and there has not been time for that.
Spent pm analysing Jest and Sorde holos. I have never seen any psychoscopic realisation, not even a drug-induced hallucination, so fine and vivid as that rose. The shadows of one petal on another, the velvety damp texture of the petals, the pink color full of sunlight, the yellow central crown—I am sure the scent was there if the apparatus had olfactory pickup—it wasn’t like a mentifact but a real thing rooted in the earth, alive and growing, the strong thorny stem beneath it.
Very tired, must go to bed.
Just reread this entry. Am I keeping this diary right? All I have written is what happened and what was said. Is that spontaneous? But it was important to me.
5 SEPTEMBER
Discussed the problem of conscious resistance with Dr. Nades at lunch today. Explained that I have worked with unconscious blocks (the children, and depressives such as Ana J.) and have some skill at reading through, but have not before met a conscious block such as F.S.’s keep out sign, or the device he used today, which was effective for a full 20-minute session: a concentration on his breathing, bodily rhythms, pain in ribs, and visual input from the scope room. She suggested that I use a blindfold for the latter trick, and keep my attention on the Uncon dimension, as he cannot prevent material from appearing there. It is surprising, though, how large the interplay area of his Con and Uncon fields is, and how much one resonates into the other. I believe his concentration on his breathing rhythm allowed him to achieve something like “trance” condition. Though of course most so-called “trance” is mere occultist fakirism, a primitive trait without interest for behavioral science.
Ana thought through “a day in my life” for me today. All so grey and dull, poor soul! She never thought even of food with pleasure, though she lives on minimum ration. The single thing that came bright for a moment was a child’s face, clear dark eyes, a pink knitted cap, round cheeks. She told me in post-session discussion that she always walks by a school playground on the way to work because “she likes to see the little ones running and yelling.” Her husband appears on the screen as a big bulky suit of work clothes and a peevish, threatening mumble. I wonder if she knows that she hasn’t seen his face or heard a word he says for years? But no use telling her that. It may be just as well she doesn’t. The knitting she is doing, I noticed today, is a pink cap.
Reading De Cam’s Disaffection: A Study, on Dr. Nades’s recommendation.
6 SEPTEMBER
In the middle of session (breathing again) I said loudly: “Flores!”
Both psy dimensions whited out but the soma realisation hardly changed. After 4 seconds he responded aloud, drowsily. It is not “trance,” but autohypnosis.
I said, “Your breathing’s monitored by the apparatus. I don’t need to know that you’re still breathing. It’s boring.”
He said, “I like to do my own monitoring, Doctor.”
I came around and took the blindfold off him and looked at him. He has a pleasant face, the kind of man you often see running machinery, sensitive but patient, like a donkey. That is stupid. I will not cross it out. I am supposed to be spontaneous in this diary. Donkeys do have beautiful faces. They are supposed to be stupid and balky but they look wise and calm, as if they had endured a lot but held no grudges, as if they knew some reason why one should not hold grudges. And the white ring around their eyes makes them look defenseless.
“But the more you breathe,” I said, “the less you think. I need your cooperation. I’m trying to find out what it is you’re afraid of.”
“But I know what I’m afraid of,” he said.
“Why won’t you tell me?”
“You never asked me.”
“That’s most unreasonable,” I said, which is funny, now I think about it, being indignant with a mental patient because he’s unreasonable. “Well, then, now I’m asking you.”
He said, “I’m afraid of electroshock. Of having my mind destroyed. Being kept here. Or only being let out when I can’t remember anything.” He gasped while he was speaking. I said, “All right, why won’t you think about that while I’m watching the screens?”
“Why should I?”
“Why not? You’ve said it to me, why can’t you think about it? I want to see the color of your thoughts!”
“It’s none of your business, the color of my thoughts,” he said angrily, but I was around to the screen while he spoke, and saw the unguarded activity. Of course it was being taped while we spoke, too, and I have studied it all afternoon. It is fascinating. There are two subverbal levels running aside from the spoken words. All sensory-emotive reactions and distortions are vigorous and complex. He “sees” me, for instance, m at least three different ways, probably more, analysis is impossibly difficult! And the Con-Uncon correspondences are so complicated, and the memory traces and current impressions interweave so rapidly, and yet the whole is unified in its complexity. It is like that machine he was studying, very intricate but all one thing in a mathematical harmony. Like the petals of the rose.
When he realised I was observing he shouted out, “Voyeur! Damned voyeur! Let me alone! Get out!” and he broke down and cried. There was a clear fantasy on the screen for several seconds of himself breaking the arm and head clamps and kicking the apparatus to pieces and rushing out of the building, and there, outside, there was a wide hilltop, covered with short dry grass, under the evening sky, and he stood there all alone. While he sat clamped in the chair sobbing.
I broke session and took off the crown, and asked him if he wanted some tea, and he refused to answer. So I freed his arms, and brought him a cup. There was sugar today, a whole box full. I told him that and told him I’d put in two lumps.
After he had drunk some tea he said, with an elaborate ironical tone, because he was ashamed of crying, “You know I like sugar? I suppose your psychoscope told you I liked sugar?”
“Don’t be silly,” I said, “everybody likes sugar if they can get it.”He said, “No, little doctor, they don’t.” He asked in the same tone how old I was and if I was married. He was spiteful. He said, “Don’t want to marry? Wedded to your work? Helping the mentally unsound back to a constructive life of service to the Nation?”
“I like my work,” I said, “because it’s difficult, and interesting. Like yours. You like your work, don’t you?”
“I did,” he said. “Goodbye to all that”
“Why?”
He tapped his head and said, “Zzzzzzt!—All gone. Right?”
“Why are you so convinced you’re going to be prescribed electroshock? I haven’t even diagnosed you yet.”
“Diagnosed me?” he said. “Look, stop the playacting, please. My diagnosis was made. By the learned doctors of the TRTU. Severe case of disaffection. Prognosis: Evil! Therapy: Lock him up with a roomful of screaming thrashing wrecks, and then go through his mind the same way you went through his papers, and then burn it… burn it out. Right, Doctor? Why do you have to go through all this posing, diagnosis, cups of tea? Can’t you just get on with it? Do you have to paw through everything I am before you burn it?”
“Flores,” I said very patiently, “you’re saying ‘Destroy me’—don’t you hear yourself? The psychoscope destroys nothing. And I’m not using it to get evidence, either. This isn’t a court, you’re not on trial. And I’m not a judge. I’m a doctor.”
He interrupted—“If you’re a doctor, can’t you see that I’m not sick?”
“How can I see anything so long as you block me out with your stupid keep out signs?” I shouted. I did shout. My patience was a pose and it just fell to pieces. But I saw that I had reached him, so I went right on. “You look sick, you act sick—two cracked ribs, a temperature, no appetite, crying fits—is that good health? If you’re not sick, then prove it to me! Let me see how you are inside, inside all that!”
He looked down into his cup and gave a kind of laugh and shrugged. “I can’t win,” he said. “Why do I talk to you? You look so honest, damn you!”
I walked away. It is shocking how a patient can hurt one. The trouble is, I am used to the children, whose rejection is absolute, like animals that freeze, or cower, or bite, in their terror. But with this man, intelligent and older than I am, first there is communication and trust and then the blow. It hurts more.
It is painful writing all this down. It hurts again. But it is useful. I do understand some things he said much better now. I think I will not show it to Dr. Nades until I have completed diagnosis. If there is any truth to what he said about being arrested on suspicion of disaffection (and he is certainly careless in the way he talks) Dr. Nades might feel that she should take over the case, due to my inexperience. I should regret that. I need the experience.
7 SEPTEMBER
Stupid! That’s why she gave you De Cam’s book. Of course she knows. As Head of the Section she has access to the TRTU dossier on F.S. She gave me this case deliberately.
It is certainly educational.
Today’s session: F.S. still angry and sulky. Intentionally fantasized a sex scene. It was memory, but when she was heaving around underneath him he suddenly stuck a caricature of my face on her. It was effective. I doubt a woman could have done it, women’s recall of having sex is usually darker and grander and they and the other do not become meat-puppets like that, with switchable heads. After a while he got bored with the performance (for all its vividness there was little somatic participation, not even an erection) and his mind began to wander. For the first time. One of the drawings on the desk came back. He must be a designer, because he changed it, with a pencil. At the same time there was a tune going on the audio, in mental puretone; and in the Uncon lapping over into the interplay area, a large, dark room seen from a child’s height, the windowsills very high, evening outside the windows, tree branches darkening, and inside the room a woman’s voice, soft, maybe reading aloud, sometimes joining with the tune. Meanwhile the whore on the bed kept coming and going in volitional bursts, falling apart a little more each time, till there was nothing left but one nipple. This much I analysed out this afternoon, the first sequence of over 10 sec. that I have analysed clear and entire.
When I broke session he said, “What did you learn?” in the satirical voice.
I whistled a bit of the tune.
He looked scared.
“It’s a lovely tune,” I said, “I never heard it before. If it’s yours, I won’t whistle it anywhere else.”
“It’s from some quartet,” he said, with his “donkey” face back, defenseless and patient. “I like classical music. Didn’t you—”
“I saw the girl,” I said. “And my face on her. Do you know what I’d like to see?”
He shook his head. Sulky, hangdog.
“Your childhood.”
That surprised him. After a while he said, “All right. You can have my childhood. Why not? You’re going to get all the rest anyhow. Listen. You tape it all, don’t you? Could I see a playback? I want to see what you see.”
“Sure,” I said. “But it won’t mean as much to you as you think it will. It took me eight years to learn to observe. You start with your own tapes. I watched mine for months before I recognised anything much.”
I took him to my seat, put on the earphone, and ran him 30 sec. of the last sequence.
He was quite thoughtful and respectful after it. He asked, “What was all that running-up-and-down-scales motion in the, the background I guess you’d call it?”
“Visual scan—your eyes were closed—and subliminal proprioceptive input. The Unconscious dimension and the Body dimension overlap to a great extent all the time. We bring the three dimensions in separately, because they seldom coincide entirely anyway, except in babies. The bright triangular motion at the left of the holo was probably the pain in your ribs.”
“I don’t see it that way!”
“You don’t see it; you weren’t consciously feeling it, even, then. But we can’t translate a pain in the rib onto a holoscreen, so we give it a visual symbol. The same with all sensations, affects, emotions.”
“You watch all that at once?”
“I told you it took eight years. And you do realise that that’s only a fragment? Nobody could put a whole psyche onto a four-foot screen. Nobody knows if there are any limits to the psyche. Except the limits of the universe.”
He said after a while, “Maybe you aren’t a fool, doctor. Maybe you’re just very absorbed in your work. That can be dangerous, you know, to be so absorbed in your work.”
“I love my work, and I hope that it is of positive service,” I said. I was alert for symptoms of disaffection.
He smiled a little and said, “Prig,” in a sad voice.
Ana is coming along. Still some trouble eating. Entered her in George’s mutual-therapy group. What she needs, at least one thing she needs, is companionship. After all why should she eat? Who needs her to be alive? What we call psychosis is sometimes simply realism. But human beings can’t live on realism alone.
F.S.’s patterns do not fit any of the classical paranoid psychoscopic patterns in Rheingeld.
The De Cams book is hard for me to understand. The terminology of politics is so different from that of psychology. Everything seems backwards. I must be genuinely attentive at P.T. sessions Sunday nights from now on. I have been lazy-minded. Or, no, but as F.S. said, too absorbed in my work—and so inattentive to its context, he meant. Not thinking about what one is working for.
10 SEPTEMBER
Have been so tired the last two nights I skipped writing this journal. All the data are on tape and in my analysis notes, of course. Have been working really hard on the F.S. analysis. It is very exciting. It is a truly unusual mind. Not brilliant, his intelligence tests are good average, he is not original or an artist, there are no schizophrenic insights, I can’t say what it is, I feel honored to have shared in the childhood he remembered for me. I can’t say what it is. There was pain and fear of course, his. father’s death from cancer, months and months of misery while F.S. was twelve, that was terrible, but it does not come out pain in the end, he has not forgotten or repressed it but it is all changed, by his love for his parents and his sister and for music and for the shape and weight and fit of things and his memory of the lights and weathers of days long past and his mind always working quietly, reaching out, reaching out to be whole.
There is no question yet of formal co-analysis, it is far too early, but he cooperates so intelligently that today I asked him if he was aware consciously of the Dark Brother figure that accompanied several Con memories in the Uncon dimension. When I described it as having a matted shock of hair he looked startled and said, “Dokkay, you mean?”
That word had been on the subverbal audio, though I hadn’t connected it with the figure.
He explained that when he was five or six Dokkay had been his name for a “bear” he often dreamed or daydreamed about. He said, “I rode him. He was big, I was small. He smashed down walls, and destroyed things, bad things, you know, bullies, spies, people who scared my mother, prisons, dark alleys I was afraid to cross, policemen with guns, the pawnbroker. Just knocked them over. And then he walked over all the rubble on up to the hilltop. With me riding on his back. It was quiet up there. It was always evening, just before the stars come out. It’s strange to remember it. Thirty years ago! Later on he turned into a kind of friend, a boy or man, with hair like a bear. He still smashed things, and I went with him. It was good fun.”
I write this down from memory as it was not taped; session was interrupted by power outage. It is exasperating that the hospital comes so low on the list of Government priorities.
Attended the Pos. Thinking session tonight and took notes. Dr. K. spoke on the dangers and falsehoods of liberalism.
11 SEPTEMBER
F.S. tried to show me Dokkay this morning but failed. He laughed and said aloud, “I can’t see him any more. I think at some point I turned into him.”
“Show me when that happened,” I said, and he said, “All right,” and began at once to recall an episode from his early adolescence. It had nothing to do with Dokkay. He saw an arrest. He was told that the man had been passing out illegal printed matter. Later on he saw one of these pamphlets, the title was in his visual bank, “Is There Equal Justice?” He read it, but did not recall the text or managed to censor it from me. The arrest was terribly vivid. Details like the young man’s blue shirt and the coughing noise he made and the sound of the hitting, the TRTU agents’ uniforms, and the car driving away, a big grey car with blood on the door. It came back over and over, the car driving away down the street, driving away down the street. It was a traumatic incident for F.S. and may explain the exaggerated fear of the violence of national justice justified by national security which may have led him to behave irrationally when investigated and so appeared as a tendency to disaffection, falsely I believe.
I will show why i believe this. When the episode was done I said, “Flores, think about democracy for me, will you?”
He said, “Little doctor, you don’t catch old dogs quite that easily.”
“I am not catching you. Can you think about democracy or can’t you?”
“I think about it a good deal,” he said. And he shifted to right-brain activity, music. It was a chorus of the last part of the Ninth Symphony by Beethoven, I recognised it from the Arts term in high school. We sang it to some patriotic words. I yelled, “Don’t censor!” and he said, “Don’t shout, I can hear you.” Of course the room was perfectly silent, but the pickup on the audio was tremendous, like thousands of people singing together. He went on aloud, “I’m not censoring. I’m thinking about democracy. That is democracy. Hope, brotherhood, no walls. All the walls unbuilt. You, we, I make the universe! Can’t you hear it?” And it was the hilltop again, the short grass and the sense of being up high, and the wind, and the whole sky. The music was the sky.
When it was done and I released him from the crown I said, “Thank you.”
I do not see why the doctor cannot thank the patient for a revelation of beauty and meaning. Of course the doctor’s authority is important but it need not be domineering. I realise that in politics the authorities must lead and be followed but in psychological medicine it is a little different, a doctor cannot “cure” the patient, the patient “cures” himself with our help, this is not contradictory to Positive Thinking.
14 SEPTEMBER
I am upset after the long conversation with F.S. today and will try to clarify my thinking.
Because the rib injury prevents him from attending work therapy, he is restless. The Violent ward disturbed him deeply so I used my authority to have the V removed from his chart and have him moved into Men’s Ward B, three days ago. His bed is next to old Area’s, and when I came to get him for session they were talking, sitting on Area’s bed. F.S. said, “Dr. Sobel, do you know my neighbor, Professor Area of the Faculty of Arts and Letters of the University?” Of course I know the old man, he has been here for years, far longer than I, but F.S. spoke so courteously and gravely that I said, “Yes, how do you do, Professor Area?” and shook the old man’s hand. He greeted me politely as a stranger—he often does not know people from one day to the next. As we went to the scope room F.S. said, “Do you know how many electroshock treatments he had?” and when I said no he said, “Sixty. He tells me that every day. With pride.” Then he said, “Did you know that he was an internationally famous scholar? He wrote a book, The Idea of Liberty, about twentieth-century ideas of freedom in politics and the arts and sciences. I read it when I was in engineering school. It existed then. On bookshelves. It doesn’t exist any more. Anywhere. Ask Dr. Area. He never heard of it.”
“There is almost always some memory loss after electroconvulsive therapy,” I said, “but the material lost can be relearned, and is often spontaneously regained.”
“After sixty sessions?” he said.
F.S. is a tall man, rather stooped, even in the hospital pajamas he is an impressive figure. But I am also tall, and it is not because I am shorter than he that he calls me “little doctor.” He did it first when he was angry at me and so now he says it when he is bitter but does not want what he says to hurt me, the me he knows. He said, “Little doctor, quit faking. You know the man’s mind was deliberately destroyed.”
Now I will try to write down exactly what I said, because it is important.
“I do not approve of the use of electroconvulsive therapy as a general instrument. I would not recommend its use on my patients except perhaps in certain specific cases of senile melancholia. I went into psychoscopy because it is an integrative rather than a destructive instrument.”
That is all true, and yet I never said or consciously thought it before.
“What will you recommend for me?” he said.
I explained that once my diagnosis is complete my recommendation will be subject to the approval of the Head and Assistant Head of the Section. I said that so far nothing in his history or personality structure warranted the use of ECT but that after all we had not got very far yet.
"Let’s take a long time about it,” he said, shuffling along beside me with his shoulders hunched.
“Why? Do you like it?”
“No. Though I like you. But I’d like to delay the inevitable end.”
“Why do you insist that it’s inevitable, Flores? Can’t you see that your thinking on that one point is quite irrational?”
“Rosa,” he said, he has never used my first name before, “Rosa, you can’t be reasonable about pure evil. There are faces reason cannot see. Of course I’m irrational, faced with the imminent destruction of my memory—my self. But I’m not inaccurate. You know they’re not going to let me out of here un…” He hesitated a long time and finally said, “unchanged.”
“One psychotic episode—”
“I had no psychotic episode. You must know that by now.”
“Then why were you sent here?”
“I have some colleagues who prefer to consider themselves rivals, competitors. I gather they informed the TRTU that I was a subversive liberal.”
“What was their evidence?”
“Evidence?” We were in the scope room by now. He put his hands over his face for a moment and laughed in a bewildered way. “Evidence? Well, once at a meeting of my section I talked a long time with a visiting foreigner, a fellow in my field, a designer. And I have friends, you know, unproductive people, bohemians. And this summer I showed our section head why a design he’d got approved by the Government wouldn’t work. That was stupid. Maybe I’m here for, for imbecility. And I read. I’ve read Professor Area’s book.”
“But none of that matters, you think positively, you love your country, you’re not disaffected!”
He said, “I don’t know. I love the idea of democracy, the hope, yes, I love that. I couldn’t live without that. But the country? You mean the thing on the map, lines, everything inside the lines is good and nothing out-> side them matters? How can an adult love such a childish idea?”
“But you wouldn’t betray the nation to an outside enemy.”
He said, “Well, if it was a choice between the nation and humanity, or the nation and a friend, I might. If you call that betrayal. I call it morality.”
He is a liberal. It is exactly what Dr. Katin was talking about on Sunday.
It is classic psychopathy: the absence of normal affect. He said that quite unemotionally—“I might.”
No. That is not true. He said it with difficulty, with pain. It was I who was so shocked that I felt nothing—blank, cold.
How am I to treat this kind of psychosis, a political psychosis? I have read over De Cams’s book twice and I believe I do understand it now, but still there is this gap between the political and the psychological, so that the book shows me how to think but does not show me how to act positively. I see how F.S. should think and feel, and the difference between that and his present state of mind, but I do not know how to educate him so that he can think positively. De Cams says that disaffection is a negative condition which must be filled with positive ideas and emotions, but this does not fit F.S. The gap is not in him. In fact that gap in De Cams between the political and the psychological is exactly where his ideas apply. But if they are wrong ideas how can this be?
I want advice badly, but I cannot get it from Dr. Nades. When she gave me the De Cams she said, “You’ll find what you need in this.” If I tell her that I haven’t, it is like a confession of helplessness and she will take the case away from me. Indeed I think it is a kind of test case, testing me. But I need this experience, I am learning, and besides, the patient trusts me and talks freely to me. He does so because he knows that I keep what he tells me in perfect confidence. Therefore I cannot show this journal or discuss these problems with anyone until the cine is under way and confidence is no longer essential. But I cannot see when that could happen. It seems as if confidence will always be essential between us.
I have got to teach him to adjust his behavior to reality, or he will be sent for ECT when the Section reviews cases in November. He has been right about that all along.
9 OCTOBER
I stopped writing in this notebook when the material from F.S. began to seem “dangerous” to him (or to myself). I just reread it all over tonight. I see now that I can never show it to Dr. N. So I am going to go ahead and write what I please in it. Which is what she said to do, but I think she always expected me to show it to her, she thought I would want to, which I did, at first, or that if she asked to see it I’d give it to her. She asked about it yesterday. I said that I had abandoned it, because it just repeated things I had already put into the analysis files. She was plainly disapproving but said nothing. Our dominance-submission relationship has changed these past few weeks. I do not feel so much in need of guidance, and after the Ana Jest discharge, the autism paper, and my successful analysis of the T. R. Vinha tapes she cannot insist upon my dependence. But she may resent my independence. I took the covers off the notebook and am keeping the loose pages in the split in the back cover of my copy of Rheingeld, it would take a very close search to find them there. While I was doing that I felt rather sick at the stomach and got a headache.
Allergy: A person can be exposed to pollen or bitten by fleas a thousand times without reaction. Then he gets a viral infection or a psychic trauma or a bee sting, and next time he meets up with ragweed or a flea he begins to sneeze, cough, itch, weep, etc. It is the same with certain other irritants. One has to be sensitized.
“Why is there so much fear?” I wrote. Well now I know. Why is there no privacy? It is unfair and sordid. I cannot read the “classified” files kept in her office, though I work with the patients and she does not. But I am not to have any “classified” material of my own. Only persons in authority can have secrets. Their secrets are all good, even when they are lies.
Listen. Listen Rosa Sobel. Doctor of Medicine, Deg. Psychotherapy, Deg. Psychoscopy. Have you gone native?
Whose thoughts are you thinking?
You have been working 2 to 5 hours a day for 6 weeks inside one person’s mind. A generous, integrated, sane mind. You never worked with anything like that before. You have only worked with the crippled and the terrified. You never met an equal before.
Who is the therapist, you or he?
But if there is nothing wrong with him what am I supposed to cure? How can I help him? How can I save him?
By teaching him to lie?
(UNDATED)
I spent the last two nights till midnight reviewing the diagnostic scopes of Professor Area, recorded when he was admitted, eleven years ago, before electroconvulsive treatment.
This morning Dr. N inquired why I had been “so far back in the files.” (That means that Selena reports to her on what files are used. I know every square centimeter of the scope room but all the same I check it over daily now.) I replied that I was interested in studying the development of ideological disaffection in intellectuals. We agreed that intellectualism tends to foster negative thinking and may lead to psychosis, and those suffering from it should ideally be treated, as Prof. Area was treated, and released if still competent. It was a very interesting and harmonious discussion.
I lied. I lied. I lied. I lied deliberately, knowingly, well. She lied. She is a liar. She is an intellectual too! She is a lie. And a coward, afraid.
I wanted to watch the Area tapes to get perspective. To prove to myself that Flores is by no means unique or original. This is true. The differences are fascinating. Dr. Area’s Con dimension was splendid, architectural, but the Uncon material was less well integrated and less interesting. Dr. Area knew very much more, and the power and beauty of the motions of his thought was far superior to Flores’s! Flores is often extremely muddled. That is an element of his vitality. Dr. Area is an, was an Abstract thinker, as I am, and so I enjoyed his tapes less. I missed the solidity, spatiotemporal realism, and intense sensory clarity of Flores’s mind.
In the scope room this morning I told him what I had been doing. His reaction was (as usual) not what I expected. He is fond of the old man and I thought he would be pleased. He said, “You mean they saved the tapes, and destroyed the mind?” I told him that all tapes are kept for use in teaching, and asked him if that didn’t cheer him, to know that a record of Area’s thoughts in his prime existed: wasn’t it like his book, after all, the lasting part of a mind which sooner or later would have to grow senile and die anyhow? He said, “No! Not so long as the book is banned and the tape is classified! Neither freedom nor privacy even in death? That is the worst of all!”
After session he asked if I would be able or willing to destroy his diagnostic tapes, if he is sent to ECT. I said such things could get misfiled and lost easily enough, but that it seemed a cruel waste. I had learned from him and others might, later, too. He said, “Don’t you see that I will not serve the people with security passes? I will not be used, that’s the whole point. You have never used me. We have worked together. Served our term together.”
Prison has been much in his mind lately. Fantasies, daydreams of jails, labor camps. He dreams of prison as a man in prison dreams of freedom.
Indeed as I see the way narrowing in I would get him sent to prison if I could, but since he is here there is no chance. If I reported that he is in fact politically dangerous, they will simply put him back in the Violent ward and give him ECT. There is no judge here to give him a life sentence. Only doctors to give death sentences.
What I can do is stretch out the diagnosis as long as possible, and put in a request for full co-analysis, with a strong prognosis of complete cure. But I have drafted the report three times already and it is very hard to phrase it so that it’s clear that I know the disease is ideological (so that they don’t just override my diagnosis at once) but still making it sound mild and curable enough that they’d let me handle it with the psychoscope. And then, why spend up to a year, using expensive equipment, when a cheap and simple instant cure is at hand? No matter what I say, they have that argument. There are two weeks left until Sectional Review. I have got to write the report so that it will be really impossible for them to override it. But what if Flores is right, all this is just playacting, lying about lying, and they have had orders right from the start from TRTU, “wipe this one out”—
(UNDATED)
Sectional Review today.
If I stay on here I have some power, I can do some good No no no but I don’t I don’t even in this one thing even in this what can I do now how can I stop
(UNDATED
Last night I dreamed I rode on a bear’s back up a deep gorge between steep mountainsides, slopes going steep up into a dark sky, it was winter, there was ice on the rocks
(UNDATED)
Tomorrow morning will tell Nades I am resigning and requesting transfer to Children’s Hospital. But she must approve the transfer. If not I am out in the cold. I am in the cold already. Door locked to write this. As soon as it is written will go down to furnace room and burn it all. There is no place any more.
We met in the hall. He was with an orderly.
I took his hand. It was big and bony and very cold. He said, “Is this it, now, Rosa—the electroshock?” in a low voice. I did not want him to lose hope before he walked up the stairs and down the corridor. It is a long way down the corridor. I said, “No. Just some more tests—EEG probably.”
“Then I’ll see you tomorrow?” he asked, and I said yes.
And he did. I went in this evening. He was awake. I said, “I am Dr. Sobel, Flores. I am Rosa.”
He said, “I’m pleased to meet you,” mumbling. There is a slight facial paralysis on the left. That will wear off.
I am Rosa. I am the rose. The rose, I am the rose. The rose with no flower, the rose all thorns, the mind he made, the hand he touched, the winter rose.
The White Donkey
There were snakes in the old stone place, but the grass grew so green and rank there that she brought the goats back every day. “The goats are looking fat,” Nana said. “Where are you grazing them, Sita?” And when Sita said, “At the old stone place, in the forest,” Nana said, “It’s a long way to take them,” and Uncle Hira said, “Look out for snakes in that place,” but they were thinking of the goats, not of her; so she did not ask them, after all, about the white donkey.
She had seen the donkey first when she was putting flowers on the red stone under the pipal tree at the edge of the forest. She liked that stone. It was the Goddess, very old, round, sitting comfortably among the roots of the tree. Everybody who passed by there left the Goddess some flowers or poured a bit of water on her, and every spring her red paint was renewed. Si{a was giving the Goddess a rhododendron flower when she looked round, thinking one of the goats was straying off into the forest; but it wasn’t a goat. It was a white animal that had caught her eye, whiter than a Brahminee bull. Sita followed it to see what it was. When she saw the neat round rump and the tail like a rope with a tassel, she knew it was a donkey; but such a beautiful donkey! And whose? There were three donkeys in the village, and Chandra Bose owned two, both of them grey, bony, mournful, laborious beasts. This was a tall, sleek, delicate donkey, a wonderful donkey. It could not belong to Chandra Bose, or to anybody in the village, or to anybody in the other village. It wore no halter or harness. It must be wild; it must live in the forest alone.
Sure enough, when she brought the goats along by whistling to clever Kala, and followed where the white donkey had gone into the forest, first there was a path, and then they came to the place where the old stones were, blocks of stone as big as houses all half buried and overgrown with grass and kerala vines; and there the white donkey was standing looking back at her from the darkness under the trees.
She thought then that the donkey was a god, because it had a third eye in the middle of its forehead like Shiva. But when it turned she saw that that was not an eye, but a horn—not curved like a cow’s or a goat’s horns, a straight spike like a deer’s—just the one horn, between the eyes, like Shiva’s eye. So it might be a kind of god donkey; and in case it was, she picked a yellow flower off the kerala vine and offered it, stretching out her open palm.
The white donkey stood a while considering her and the goats and the flower; then it came slowly back among the big stones towards her. It had split hooves like the goats, and walked even more neatly than they did. It accepted the flower. Its nose was pinkish-white, and very soft where it snuffled on Sita’s palm. She quickly picked another flower, and the donkey accepted it too. But when she wanted to stroke its face around the short, white, twisted horn and the white, nervous ears, it moved away, looking sidelong at her from its long dark eyes.
Sita was a little afraid of it, and thought it might be a little afraid of her; so she sat down on one of the half-buried rocks and pretended to be watching the goats, who were all busy grazing on the best grass they had had for months. Presently the donkey came close again, and standing beside Sita, rested its curly-bearded chin on her lap. The breath from its nostrils moved the thin glass bangles on her wrist. Slowly and very gently she stroked the base of the white, nervous ears, the fine, harsh hair at the base of the horn, the silken muzzle; and the white donkey stood beside her, breathing long, warm breaths.
Every day since then she brought the goats there, walking carefully because of snakes; and the goats were getting fat; and her friend the donkey came out of the forest every day, and accepted her offering, and kept her company.
“One bullock and one hundred rupees cash,” said Uncle Hira, “you’re crazy if you think we can marry her for less!”
“Moti Lai is a lazy man,” Nana said. “Dirty and lazy.”
“So he wants a wife to work and clean for him! And he’ll take her for only one bullock and one hundred rupees cash!”
“Maybe he’ll settle down when he’s married,” Nana said.
So Sita was betrothed to Moti Lai from the other village, who had watched her driving the goats home at evening. She had seen him watching her across the road, but had never looked at him. She did not want to look at him.
“This is the last day,” she said to the white donkey, while the goats cropped the grass among the big, carved, fallen stones, and the forest stood all about them in the singing stillness. “Tomorrow I’ll come with Uma’s little brother to show him the way here. He’ll be the village goatherd now. The day after tomorrow is my wedding day.”
The white donkey stood still, its curly, silky beard resting against her hand.
“Nana is giving me her gold bangle,” Sita said to the donkey. “I get to wear a red sari, and have henna on my feet and hands.”
The donkey stood still, listening.
“There’ll be sweet rice to eat at the wedding,” Sita said; then she began to cry.
“Goodbye, white donkey,” she said. The white donkey looked at her sidelong, and slowly, not looking back, moved away from her and walked into the darkness under the trees.
The Phoenix
The radio on the chest of drawers hissed and crackled like burning acid. Through the crackle a voice boasted of victories. “Butchers!” she snarled at the voice. “Butchers, liars, fools!” But there was an expression in the librarian’s eyes which brought her rage up short like a dog on a chain, clawing at the air, choked off.
“You can’t be a Partisan!”
The librarian said nothing. He might well have said nothing even if he had been able to say anything.
She turned the radio down—you could never turn it off, lest you should miss the last act, the denouement—and came up close to the librarian on the bed. Familiar to her now were the round, sallow face, the dark eyes with bloodshot whites, the dark, wiry hair on his head, and the hair on his forearms and the backs of his hands and fingers, and the hair under his arms and on his chest and groin and legs, and the whole of his stocky, sweaty, suffering body, which she had been trying to look after for thirty hours while the city blew itself apart street by street and nerve by nerve and the radio twitched from lies to static to lies.
“Come on, don’t tell me that!” she said to his silence. “You weren’t with them. You were against them.”
Without a word, with the utmost economy, he evinced a denial.“But I saw you! I saw exactly what you did. You locked the library. Why do you think I came there looking for you? You don’t think I’d have crossed the street to help one of them!” A one-note laugh of scorn, and she awarded the well-delivered line the moment of silence that was its due. The radio hissed thinly, drifting back to static. She sat down on the foot of the bed, directly in the librarian’s line of sight, front and center.
“I’ve known you by sight for I don’t know how long—a couple of years, it must be. My other room, there, looks out on the square. Right across to the library. I’ve seen you opening it up in the morning a hundred times. This time I saw you closing it, at two in the afternoon. Running those wrought-iron gates across the doors in a rush. So what’s he up to? Then I heard the cars and those damned motorcycles. I drew the curtain right away. But then I stood behind the curtain and watched. That was strange, you know? I’d have sworn I’d be hiding under the bed in here as soon as I knew they were that close. But I stood there and watched. It was like watching a play!” she said with the expansiveness of inaccuracy. In fact, peering out between the curtain and the window frame with a running thrill of not disagreeable terror, she had inevitably felt that she was sizing up the house. Was it that revival of emotion that had moved her, so soon afterwards, to act?
“They pulled the flag down first. I suppose even terrorists have to do things in the proper order. Probably in fact no one is more conventional. They have to do everything that’s expected of them… Well, I’d seen you go round to that side door, the basement entrance, after you’d locked the gates. I think I’d noticed your coat, without noticing that I noticed, you know; that yellowish-brown color. So, after they’d been all over the front steps, and broken in at the side door—like ants on meat, I kept thinking—and finally all come out again and got onto their damned motorcycles and roared off to go wreck something else, and I was wondering if it was smoke or just dust that was hanging around that side door—then I thought of your coat, because of the color of the smoke,that yellowish brown. I thought, I never saw that coat again. They didn’t bring the librarian out with them. Well, so I thought probably they’d shot you, inside there with the books. But I kept thinking how you’d locked the doors and locked the gates and then gone back inside. I didn’t know why you’d done that. You could have locked up and left, got away, after all. I kept thinking about that. And there wasn’t a soul down in the square. All us rats hiding in our rat-holes. So finally I thought, Well, I can’t live with this, and went over to look for you. I walked right across the square. Empty as four a.m. It was peaceful. I wasn’t afraid. I was only frightened of finding you dead. A wound, blood. Blood turns me faint, I detest it. So I go in, and my mouth’s dry and my ears are singing, and then I see you coming with an armload of books!” She laughed, but this time her voice cracked. She turned left profile to him, glancing at him once sidelong.
“Why did you go back in? And when they were in there, what did you do? You hid, I suppose. And when they left you came out and tried to put out the fire.”
He shook his head slightly.
“You did,” she said. “You did put it out. There was water on the floor, and a mop bucket.”
He did not deny this.
“I shouldn’t have thought books would catch fire easily. Or did they pull out some newspapers, or the catalogue, or the overdue file? They certainly got something burning. All that smoke, it was awful. I was choking as soon as I came in, I don’t know how you breathed at all up there on the main floor. Anyway, you put out the fire, and you had to get out because of the smoke, or you weren’t sure the foe was really out; so you quick picked up some valuable books and headed for the door—”
Again he shook his head. Was he smiling?
“You did! You were crawling towards the stairs, crawling on your knees, trying to carry those books, when I came up. I don’t know if you would have got out or not, but you were trying to.”
He nodded, and tried to whisper something.
“Never mind. Don’t talk. Just tell me, no, don’t tell me, how you can be a Partisan, after that. After giving your life, all but, for a few books!”
He forced the whisper, like a steel brush on brass, that was all the smoke had left of his voice: “Not valuable,” he said.
She had leaned forward to catch his words. She straightened up, smoothed her skirt, and presently spoke with some disdain.
“I don’t know that we are really very well qualified to judge whether our life is or is not valuable.”
But he shook his head again and whispered, voiceless, meaningless, obstinate: “The books.”
“You’re saying that the books aren’t valuable?”
He nodded, his face relaxing, relieved at having explained himself at last, at having got it all straight.
She stared at him, incredulous, angrier than she had been at the radio, and then the anger flipped over like a coin from a thumb, and she laughed. “You’re crazy!” she said, putting her hand on his.
His hand was thickset like the rest of him, firm but uncallused, a desk worker’s hand. It was hot to her touch.
“You ought to be in a hospital,” she said with remorse. “I know you shouldn’t talk, I can’t help talking, but don’t answer. I know you should have gone to the hospital. But how could you get there, no taxis, and God knows what the hospitals are like now. Or who they’re willing to take. If it ever quiets down and the telephone works again I’ll try to call a doctor. If there are any doctors left. If there’s anything left when this is over.”
It was the silence that made her say that. It was a silent day. On the silent days you almost wanted to hear the motorcycles, the machine guns.
His eyes were closed. Yesterday evening, and from time to time all night, he had had spasms of struggling for breath, like asthma or a heart attack, terrifying. He breathed short and hard even now, but however worn out and uncomfortable, he was resting; he must be better. What could a doctor do for smoke inhalation, anyhow? Probably not much. Doctors were not much good for things like lack of breath, or old age, or civil disorders. The librarian was suffering from what his country was dying of, his sickness was his citizenship of this city. Weeks now, the loudspeakers, the machine guns, the explosions, the helicopters, the fires, the silences; the body politic was incurable, its agony went on and on. You went miles for a cabbage, a kilo of meal. Then next day the sweet shop at the corner was open, children buying orange drink. And the next day it was gone, the corner building blown up, burnt out. The carcase politic. Faces of people like façades of buildings downtown, the great hotels, blank and furtive, all blinds down. And last Saturday night they had thrown a bomb into the Phoenix. Thirty dead, the radio had said, and later sixty dead, but it was not the deaths that outraged her. People took their chances. They had gone to see a play in the middle of a civil war, they had taken their chance and lost. There was both gallantry and justice there. But the old Phoenix, the house itself: the stage where she had played how many pert housemaids, younger sisters, confidantes, dowagers, Olga Prozorova, and for the great three weeks Nora; the red curtain, the red plush seats, the dirty chandelier and gilt plaster mouldings, all that fake grandeur, that box of toys, that defenseless and indefensible strutting place for the human soul—to hurt that was contemptible. Better if they threw their damned bombs into churches. There surely the startled soul would be plucked straight up to downy heaven before it noticed that its body had been blown to stewmeat. With God on your side, in God’s house, how could anything go wrong? But there was no protection in some dead playwright and a lot of stagehands and fool actors. Everything could go wrong, and always did. Lights out, and screaming and pushing, trampling, an unspeakable sewer stink, and so much for Molière, or Pirandello, or whoever they’d been playing Saturday night at the Phoenix. God had never been on that side. He’d take the glory, all right, but not the blame. What God was, in fact, was a doctor, a famous surgeon: don’t ask questions, I don’t answer them, pay your fees, I’ll save you if I care to but if I don’t it’s your own fault.
She got up to rearrange the bedside table, reproving herself for vulgarity of thought. She had to be angry at somebody; there was nobody there but God and the librarian, and she did not want to be angry at the librarian. Like the city, he was too sick. And anger would disturb the purity of her strong erotic attraction to him, which had been giving her great pleasure. She had not so enjoyed looking at a man for years; she had thought that joy lost, withered away. Her age took advantage from his illness. In the normal course of things he would not have seen her as a woman but as an old woman, and his blindness would have blinded her: she would not have looked at him. But, having undressed him and looked after his body, she was spared hypocrisy, and could admire that stocky and innocent body with the innocent joy of desire. Of his mind and spirit she knew almost nothing, only that he had courage, which was a good thing. She did not need to know more. Indeed she did not want to. She was sorry he had spoken at all, had said those two stupid, boastful words, “Not valuable,” whether meaning his own life, or the books he had tried to save at the risk of his life. In either case what he had meant was that to a Partisan nothing was valuable but the cause. The existence of a branch librarian, the existence of a few books—trash. Nothing mattered but the future.
But if he was a Partisan, why had he tried to save the books?
Would a Loyalist have stayed alone in that terrible brownish-yellow room of smoke trying to put out the fire, to keep the books from burning?
Of course, she answered herself. According to his opinions, his theories, his beliefs, yes, certainly, of course! Books, statues, buildings, lamp posts bearing lighted lamps not strangled corpses, Molière at eight-thirty, conversation at dinner, schoolgirls in blue with satchels, order, decency, the past that ensures a future, for this the Loyalist stood. Staunchly he stood. But would he also crawl across a floor coughing out his lungs, trying to hang on to a few of the books?—not even valuable books, that’s what the librarian had been trying to say, she understood him now, not even valuable ones; there probably were no valuable books in this branch library. Just books, any books, not because he had opinions, but because he had beliefs, there with his life forfeit, but because he was a librarian. A person who looked after books. The one responsible.
“Is that what you meant?” she asked him, softly, because he had fallen asleep. “Is that why I brought you here?”
The radio hissed, but she did not need applause. His sleep was her audience.
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