As always, the central point is a
deceptively simple one: he was a psychiatrist. I don't mean this simply in a
professional sense. I mean it, if I may be permitted the word, in an
ontological sense. Applied to him "psychiatrist'' did not indicate a
specialized field of study, a career, a life's work; applied to him
"psychiatrist" summed up in four sharp syllables the totality of his
being. He was not so much a man engaged in the practice of psychiatry as he was
a psychiatrist to whom a body, a complex of more or less inconsequential
biological accidents and habits, had been appended.
I don't say this in any pejorative sense.
As psychiatrists go he was a good one, perhaps even a great one. I don't really
know; as is usual in our age I have nothing to judge by but the facts. I here
submit those facts to general scrutiny:
His clients included many of the most
illustrious figures of our culture---eminent lawyers, bankers, actors, actresses,
business leaders, rock musicians, socialites, writers, even several fellow
psychiatrists, in all, dozens upon dozens whose interior geologies showed the
inevitable flaws and strains, chips, cracks, fissures, and faults that the age
seems expressly designed to heighten and intensify in each of us.
He adhered to no particular school. Trained
in the classical Freudian tradition, he had spent several years in Europe
studying under the Master's immediate heirs, but so omnivorous was his appetite
for scientific knowledge of the soul, so enormous was his capacity, that he had
absorbed all that had been thought, spoken, or written upon the matter, slighting
no discipline or tradition, however ephemeral or negligible it might seem to
his colleagues. This was the source, the wellspring, of his myth. To a Freudian
he seemed a fellow Freudian, to a Jungian a Jungian, to an Adlerian an
Adlerian, to an Eriksonian an Eriksonian. He understood gestalt theories and
practices more thoroughly than did men who had made them their life's study, and
he had mastered transactional analysis, logotherapy, milieu therapy, psychodrama,
and other modern doctrines and techniques so completely that often it seemed
inconceivable that he had not developed them himself. In his practice his
judgment was legendary. He knew instinctively when to analyze at length, when
to confront sharply, when to medicate, when to shock. He got results. Among his
associates (he hardly seemed to have peers) his words approached dogma. Even
when he spoke casually, off the cuff (over lunch and a drink, say), his every
sentence, his every pause, seemed ex cathedra. To say simply that he was highly
esteemed is to expose the poverty of language. His status was as close to that
of a sage as is possible in these difficult times.
"The psyche is the fundamental ground
of all existence, all experience," he liked to say. "To know it
intimately is to know all that there is to know. These are fortunate times and
we are fortunate men, for to understand the soul and its operations no longer
requires the metaphysical cant to which our predecessors in this effort, for
lack of an objective science, were forced to resort."
Naturally he was rich. He owned his
office, a handsome suite in a prestigious part of the city. He had a large
apartment, comfortable but not extravagant, decorated in a rich but appropriate
style (he had a taste for works of African art --- carved tribal masks, primitive
statuettes, that sort of thing). Near the shore he owned an older home, which
he had had meticulously restored as a retreat. His single passion outside of
psychiatry was sailing.
He was unmarried, perhaps because his work
left him so little time for social amenities other than the professional
conferences, at which he was always properly formal, strictly business. He was
invariably invited to present a paper at each such congress, and just as
invariably these papers were the high point of the gathering, centering as they
always did around a fascinating new interpretation of psychological fact or a
bold speculation so profound and far-reaching in its consequences that it
promised to provide abundant raw material for the psychiatric industry for some
time to come.
One might imagine that his fame was as
far-reaching as were his speculations, but for many years this was not so. For
a long time, his renown encompassed only that relatively small universe that is
the psychiatric world, yet this limited recognition was sufficient for him. He
divided his time among his practice, the psychiatric congresses, and sailing,
using whatever remained to write an occasional article for the psychiatric
journals.
It was this last activity that fate chose as
her wedge. In one of these articles he proposed a revolutionary new theory of
the structure, function, and dynamics of the psyche. It was a complex as well
as an unorthodox interpretation of known facts, a great leap of the imagination.
He wrote with unusual passion, like a man who feels that he has stumbled onto a
great secret. He spoke of "hitherto fore secret recesses of the psyche,
individual and collective" where the "true divine fire" had been
hidden from the Promethean advance of science. He alluded to a secret language
of the psyche, "a grammar of incoherence, as yet unrecognized,
undeciphered by conventional theorists."
He spoke of a "mechanism of the soul, a court of inevitable
justice," the function of which was to punish incursion as though it were
in fact blasphemy. He boldly split from much of the "objective" psychiatric
thought of the past and just as boldly reshaped what remained.
From this sweeping
technical speculation arose one of those savage feuds common in the
intellectual community, a battle waged on paper only, but a battle no less
unrestrained than the most open and furious bloodfeud of the city streets. A
colleague, a West Coast theorist and practitioner, was bothered by this odd,
"reactionary" interpretation and wrote a long article in rebuttal for
the next edition of the journal in question. For most of this rebuttal he
limited himself, as was professionally appropriate, to the specific theoretical
matter at hand. He refuted our doctor (he felt) point by point. He cited the
lack of data, the nearly metaphysical nature of the argument. He drew the hard
conclusions of the theory, showed how, if accepted, it must retard the progress
of psychological inquiry, "perhaps even of civilization itself," many
decades. He was thorough and (he felt) he was fair. Still, it must be granted
that among those many pages there were two sentences (perhaps three) which, if
not in content then in tone, could conceivably have been interpreted as an
implied personal assault. I say could have been so interpreted, for the way in
which such men assault one another is perhaps as subtle and as ultimately inconclusive
as the discipline to which they give their lives. Any reader who takes the
trouble to visit the library will discover that it requires several intensive
readings and the guidance of one well versed in the language of such matters to
uncover the offending sentences, which, to our doctor, seemed as inflammatory
as the shelling of Sumter or the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
Keep in mind, however,
that psychiatry was the totality of this man's being, the very substance of his
marrow and his cells, the single reality around which the vapors of existence
had congealed into the loose fabric of matter. Thus, these two (or three)
sentences, which seemed to suggest that he had transgressed the boundaries of
science and had stepped over into that very mysticism that he had given his
life to explaining away, these sentences slashed as deeply as any bayonet or
ghetto switchblade. And they were, to him, far more deadly. Science claims as
one of its prerogatives a certain precision, and these sentences, so inconsequential
to the untrained spirit, were a case in point: they found their mark with surgical
accuracy. Naturally his retaliation was immediate, the instinctive response of the wounded
animal. Impatient, he submitted his carefully worded reply to another of the
professional journals and thereby broadened the theater of combat. In length it
approached that of his "learned
colleague" (for he still thought of
the other man in this manner, not yet conscious of him as an opponent, a
rival). It, too, contained veiled
allusions. It, too, provoked a quick response. So the battle was engaged. It
flared for many months, ranging far and wide over the professional journals, articles
and rebuttals appearing suddenly now here, now there, like tight formations of
attack bombers ranging over a disputed territory. Each new article seemed ever
so slightly more personal, ever so slightly more vicious; each contained more
frequent and less veiled questionings of the professional competence and, at
last, even of the basic stability of the two opponents. The dispute became the
focal point of the psychiatric world. Troops enlisted on either side, and the
journals were filled with pieces long and short supporting one position or the
other. Demonstrating its debt to its culture, the dispute began to exhibit the
same malicious spirit that so characterizes the public life of the age.
Such intellectual Armageddons are not
rare, of course, but the public usually pursues its affairs unaware of these
wars in its midst, since such conflicts, with no clear action or outcome, no
maps with bright arrows showing territories lost or gained, no body counts and
few atrocities, fail to excite the popular imagination. Occasionally there are
exceptions to the verbose, invisible nature of such disputes. By way of example I point out the case of Dr. P. de Santerre, the Canadian biologist who,
several years ago, resolved his quarrel over a proposed re-ordering of the
phylum Coelenterata by shooting the colleague who opposed him.
Gradually, then, the conflict took on a
new dimension for our doctor. He began to see himself in an unaccustomed light.
It was no longer a simple theoretical dispute, no longer even a simple personal
difference. His conviction of his rectitude, always strong, grew stronger
yet. The original question was now a
cause. Others might enlist behind him, but the primary responsibility, the main
burden, the sacred duty, remained his
and his alone.
His sailing was the first casualty.
Although he continued to go up to the shore, in fact went up there more often,
he rarely left the second floor study, and the bright red sailboat languished
two seasons without use. He paced the
floor long after midnight for days on end in deep concentration searching the
massed knowledge in his brain and on his shelves for some new fact, some new
precedent or clue, that he might fling across the country in fresh salvo.
At first the question itself remained
uppermost in his mind, but gradually he found that with each new word, each new
sentence, each new thought, the image of
the other man's face became more vivid and dominant until it, and it alone,
drove him on. The original dogmatic dispute took second place,
and it seemed to those few
objective observers who remained that history was indulging her fancy for
repetition, that the battle was a muted re-enactment of the furious arguments
of early church fathers or of the clash of Reformation titans.
Some time later the popular press at last
took notice of the affair: a crisp half-column in Time. To both men this seemed
a clear signal for an escalation of sorts, and, despite the warnings of their
respective supporters, they took the opportunity to move the contest outside the
professional arena. The magazines of popular psychology were first. These were followed by interviews on radio
programs, by lectures at campuses across the country, and finally by several
appearances on the television talk shows. The difficulty, of course, was that while
this new audience was certainly
intelligent, it was not expert, not
professional. The doctrinal point was
perhaps too obscure, too academic, a subtlety of high psychology
presented for judgment to a lay court. Still, the personal antagonism between the two men was
sufficient to hold public interest, and they took care to season their acrimony
with at least enough background material to render the vague outline of the
dispute intelligible. Beyond that, the debate became primarily a public
exercise in character assassination.
Reputations were now at stake, reputations
were now the central issue. This much the public could appreciate. Our doctor
was now the representative, the personification, the embodiment, the
incarnation of the cause that had once been the idea that had at first been the
crucial point of the debate. His defeat in the public arena, even if it were a
defeat for the wrong reasons, was the defeat of the cause; his triumph was its
triumph. The critical importance of the idea itself, that unorthodox
interpretation of an arcane point at best only poorly understood by the general
public to which it was now being presented, had perhaps diminished but only, our
doctor would assert privately, in a tactical
sense. Once he had been
vindicated, the theory, the cause, would vindicate itself, would have the
necessary room to grow, would take root and flourish in the general
consciousness. It was only the stubborn resistance of this other, this enemy, that
forced him to stand, as it were, in the place of his idea, to propagate and
defend it in this manner.
In the end he threw himself headlong into
the fray. He closed his office, abandoned his practice (temporarily, he said),
and retired fulltime to the house by the shore, appearing only on those
occasions when he had a chance publicly to engage his opponent. His articles, produced
now in furious bouts of concentration more like temper than thought, appeared
more and more frequently, gradually becoming more strident, more hysterical in
tone and phrasing. To say that he began to waste away from the effort of the
contest would perhaps be overly romantic, but clearly he began to show the
signs of a terrible strain. His face, once calm, sustained, objective, began to
undergo a transformation, to become lined, weathered as though by the sea, deepened as though somehow it had
appropriated to itself in its brief moments of anguish and (lately) doubt all
the long years of anguish and doubt to which its owner, its wearer, had so
patiently listened. Once strong, benign, impenetrable, it seemed now suffused
with a strange light, a strange
intensity, the sort of bright frenzy one expects to find only in portraits of
the artists of an age long dead, an uncanny light, almost eerie,
almost possessed.
The public requires action if its interest
is to be sustained: so runs the law of this age, perhaps of any age. It
entertained this intellectual struggle for a time because the vagaries, the
eccentricities, the contests of the purely academic world were not as familiar
to it as, say, those of the political world, and the display of thought and
spite afforded it by these two men had engaged its curiosity. But without
continued action the outcome of which directly concerns its own fate (and who
would presume to claim that such was the case here?), the public shifts its
attention as quickly as the sea shifts sand on the beach. Besides, the Dow was shaky and the World
Series near at hand. Our doctor's West
Coast opponent realized this and was content when the expected shift of
interest at last occurred. His name, up to now relatively obscure, had enjoyed
a brief but intensive circulation. His practice had doubled, he had purchased a
handsome office suite in a prestigious part of the city, he had moved to a
larger, more comfortable apartment. When the editors first of the popular magazines
and then of the scholarly journals began to return his articles, noting that
the coverage had reached a saturation level, he took a two month sabbatical in
Munich, planning to launch on his return
a lecture tour on an entirely unrelated subject.
For our doctor, however, these rejections
were a terrible blow. That the general public might lose interest he could
understand; that the scientific community should also turn its back was
unthinkable. In time they would come to their senses. Meanwhile, he was
determined to press on, regardless of their collective lapse. He sold the
apartment in the city, he sold the bright red sailboat. He rose early, read, thought,
and wrote until one or two each morning. He broke his concentration only for
necessary meals, for necessary sleep, for an occasional solitary walk. He used
a tape recorder now as well as a pen and paper, so that no thought, no
idea, might escape.
He lived this way for three and a half
years, wholly obscure, wholly intense. One day at the end of that time a woman
and her daughter, out early to collect driftwood thrown up by the tide, found
him on the silent beach, pale and thin beneath an immense orange sky. The
inquest ruled death by natural causes.
The party that later examined his effects
found thousands of pages of manuscript and several hundred tapes, all of them
dealing with his theory, many of them in the form of rambling letters, or, in
the case of the tapes, imaginary conversations, addressed to the man who had
been his adversary. Those who understand such things say that of this enormous
testament only a minute fraction is in an intelligible form. The rest, a
monument to incoherence that will provide the psychiatric industry with abundant
raw material for some time to come, will require many, many years to decipher and organize.
I am told that the work has already begun.
