“Quite sure,” I said.
“An unknown woman in a dream, that is a symbol of the anima. It represents your soul which you are obviously neglecting. As I mentioned yesterday, you are too busy in the waking world and therefore your internal world is disturbed. The anima is trying to get closer to you, but you don’t want it to. And why you don’t want it to becomes clear in the next episode of the dream: the one where you encounter your mother in her ripe old age.”
I wondered how all of that was related.
“You don’t have a father?” Dr. Schtürner asked with a lot of tactfulness in his voice.
“No,” I said. “I was born out of wedlock. My mother never told me anything about my father, and I never dared to ask.”
“There you have it. By nature, you have an affinity for mysticism; if I may so, you are poetically inclined. However, the fact that you grew up without a father caused you to choose an extroverted, almost exact profession in which you have affirmed yourself as a successful man. In other words: you had to be both father and son for yourself. That is the explanation of your dream: an unresolved Oedipus complex. You don’t have a father. The day when you confronted the Sphinx, when you symbolically came to the conflict between your corporality and spirituality, you wanted to marry your mother. But the myth is incomplete: you don’t have a father and you don’t know who you should kill. So, your tragedy — symbolically, of course — is not complete, it has not been lived through to the end, you have been left without catharsis. This can be interpreted from the fact that your mother, very old, is standing with her back turned to the sea. She is no longer expecting anyone.”
I hardly managed to say anything out of my amazement.
“And what should I do?” I asked.
“Listen to what Çulabi is telling you. Your problem can be solved only in dreams.”
2
At the time, of course, I could not have guessed that Dr. Schtürner was also a member of the Order of Evangelical Bicyclists of the Rose Cross and that the whole thing had been prepared even before I was born. That night, I was not afraid of my dreams. I fell asleep fairly early; Çulabi still had not come. I waited for him in the gloomy tavern, this time it was full of people talking in a language I did not recognize, probably a Slavic one. When Çulabi arrived, I told him to tell me about my father. Who is he? Where is he? How can I find him?
“Your father died recently,” Çulabi told me. “For reasons which would not be clear to you now, we won’t talk about why he never came to see you. But you should know this: your father was an exceptional man. You can be proud of him. His name is Joseph Kowalsky.”
“Kowalsky?”
“Yes,” said Çulabi. “Kowalsky is your father. In a way, I am sort of replacing him, so I will always be around at the beginning. And you really will need help, just as I did and many others before me. Because some things are just hard to understand…”
That it really was like that, I found out the next night when Çulabi, via indescribable nightmares, led me close to the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit. The shining astral structure was damaged by emanations of the nasty thoughts of the members of the Traumeinsatz, a unit formed by the Third Reich with the goal of destroying the Order of the Evangelical Bicyclists. As if hypnotized, I stared at the building, a magnificent house of worship which is not built like earthly churches of brick and stone (of which the Tower of Babylon was also built) but of the yearning for unification with the primordial light, a yearning that itself became light.
“This is why you studied architecture,” Çulabi told me. “Your task is to repair the Cathedral and, fulfilling your age-old dream, to make it even more beautiful. But before that… Before that you have to finish one more job, up there, in the waking world…”
The task was banal. Senseless. At least I thought so in the beginning. To Bajina Bašta, a nondescript town in the heart of the Balkans, I was supposed to take two small documents, A Tale of My Kingdom and A History of Two-Wheelers; further, I was to hide those documents in a pile of magazines where they would await their future finder and reader. However, residing in that little town during that foggy autumn, I realized that I had gotten onto the trail of my task: I was not supposed to do any kind of study of space; I was to write a paper on the organization of a space in which, in one place, all of the evil of this world could be gathered so that it could be systematized and systematically destroyed. After three months of work, I made the Outline for the Project of the Universal Insane Asylum.
On the pages which follow, I present the results of my work.
L. LOENTZE. THE PLAN OF THE GRAND INSANE ASYLUM
For the beginning it is necessary to build an insane asylum with a capacity of 20,000,000 patients. Since a building of such great dimensions (12 mi. x 4 mi. x 6 mi.) is difficult to build on the surface, it is foreseen that eleven of the twelve planned levels will be underground, which is an exceptional position for defense against an aggressor. The hospital is structured like a country and all its citizens are only potentially crazy. It is different from other countries only in the names of its regions; instead of the usual toponyms, diagnostic ones will be introduced: paranoia, schizophrenia, Oedipus complex, guilt feelings, sadism-masochism, neurosis, alcoholism-drug addiction, suicidal tendencies, asocial behavior, complexes, etc. The surface region — neurosis — is the administrative and cultural center of the Grand Insane Asylum. The official ideology of the country is psychoanalysis.
“Subtly stated,” it says in the Basics of Psychoanalysis, “a man is neither crazy nor sane; a man is not anything but, of course, he cannot be told that.” Illnesses of the psyche are nothing other than the consequences of the errant belief that the psyche exists and of the desire to be something. Thus, mental health is just the ability to adapt to that desire. Spiritual strength is not in the will, but in the ability to make the will submissive to desire, that is — to satisfy all desires. For this reason, it is planned that every citizen is to be psychoanalyzed at least once a week.
The surface floor holds a large number of offices for psychoanalysis. In each of them, there is a table and an armchair for the analyst, a copy of Introduction to Psychoanalysis, a tape recorder, a couch for the patient, and the analyst’s picture on the wall. In the hospital, which is the pinnacle of democratization and de-idolization, every citizen will have their own picture on the wall in their room; this is a necessary outcome of the long process of liberating the personality and the attainment of self-consciousness — the triumph of the final creation of the human race. Throughout history, people were estranged from themselves; first they worshiped pictures of God, then of the king, and in the end, Stalin. Both fear and worship were external for centuries. In the Grand Insane Asylum, everyone will be the object of their own adoration and the owner of their own fears.
In the Offices, psychoanalytic sessions will constantly be taking place. Patients confide the past to the analysts who, with the aid of the central computer, ROMA III, find the most suitable possibility for satisfying the most suppressed desires, longings and fantasies; the least painful ways of treating the guilty conscious and other complexes. Cassette tapes are carefully stored in the memory of the computer. So the past of all the inhabitants is materialized in a way. That instills security in the citizens of the Asylum; behind them is not just empty nothingness after all. On the other hand, the all-knowing and all-remembering ROMA III computer makes the secret police and security organs a thing of the past. Everyone answers only to impartial, pure Intelligence. Everything is known about everyone, but no one knows anything about anyone else. Discretion and non-transparency are guaranteed. The progress is obvious: while the early tyrants insisted exclusively on the physical submission of their subjects, later the rulers paid ever more attention to spiritual loyalty and orthodoxy. The computerization of the unconscious is a step forward; it excludes all subjectivity and partiality.