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.