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”—