With the nurse, too, I forbore from backchat: my addiction was an assassination squad, roaming the bombed-out streets in a West Belfast of the mind. I’d got my friend Dave to smuggle some cocaine on to the ward, and together we’d shot it up in the toilet. Paranoid, he’d split right away, leaving me with my grazed throat and revving heart to endure the agonies of an unanticipated ward round: the consultant, wading between the limpid beds, the stork’s plumage of his white coat parted at the breast, dipped down to peck at my wrist, yet seemed quite indifferent to my Max Roach pulse. No jazzer he.
It was my long-suffering GP who had referred me to Busner. She was understandably fed up with the house calls she had to make on my behalf: trips to the bathrooms I had locked myself inside, and where I lay on the mat, mewling as the intestinal reef knots of opiate withdrawal tightened inside me.
‘I think you’ll get on,’ she had said. ‘He’s a very, um, unusual man. I don’t expect he’ll want to treat you in any orthodox fashion — just go up to the hospital and have a chat with him.’
There were steely-green filing cabinets in Busner’s office and a chequerboard of institutional carpet tiling. The wall-mounted shelves were piled with everything from Wilhelm Reich to ‘Just William’. The hardwood kneehole desk lugged in from another era, the fronts of the shelves, the windowsills — in fact every available horizontal surface was blobbed with fossilized shits. Later, Busner told me that the coprolite collection had begun as a ‘juvenile riposte to the founding father of psychoanalysis’s own rather more aesthetic bibelots, his ancient tabletop statuary, but then… Well, it all rather got out of hand.’
On the walls there were four ‘imaginary topographies’, hefty clay bas-reliefs that I later learnt had been given to Busner by Joseph Beuys after he had treated the artist — I assume, successfully — for a drug-induced psychosis. They were ugly and rather threatening things, heavy tablets scored with miniature ravines and pinnacles. They distorted the scale of the cluttered and stuffy room — Busner had disabled the air conditioning because he couldn’t bear the noise. The view from the window was also disorienting: the gravelled roof of a wing of the hospital, upon which hunched four large rectangular water tanks — or were they, perhaps, very little?
I was aware that, together with Harold Ford, Busner had been one of the originators of the Quantity Theory of Insanity, and so assumed that he would be impressed if I brought up a half-digested splurge of Foucault with chunks of Bataille floating in it. He wasn’t dismissive, only cleared the ground between us, sweeping away the clutter of identity so that we faced one another unadorned.
We must have talked for fifty minutes or so minted lamb;* then Busner said, ‘I’m afraid my caseload is such that I won’t be able to see you on any kind of regular basis. Still, I’ve enjoyed chatting to you and I hope you have to me. I don’t want you to feel rejected and if you’d like to pop in now and again to see me you’ll always find my door open.’ He pointed at the institutional plank, its Judas window reinforced with steel mesh; it was, indeed, ajar, although I found out later this was due to severe warping.
Before we parted Busner gave me a Riddle set. This was the ‘enquire within’ game that had made the psychiatrist simultaneously a household name and a laughing stock among his peers. Alone, or with a few select friends and a bottle of wine; a scented candle lit — or smelling only of your own desperation — Riddle players were encouraged to arrange the brightly coloured acrylic tiles in patterns they found pleasing, or suggestive, or unsettling — essentially, the thing was a DIY Rorschach test, the key for which had been written by the great soul doctor himself.
Everyone had played the Riddle at some time or other in the late 1970s; it was a hula-hoop for the mind and, like all such crazes, it soon became impossibly hackneyed; lost Riddle tiles lay trapped beneath the carpet underlay of the entire culture. ‘I’m solving the Riddle!’ — which Busner mouthed on a television quiz programme where he appeared in a grid of similar celebrities, answering facile questions — became one of the catchphrases of the era — and not in a good way. Still, I thanked him for the gift and tucked it into the side pocket of whatever Oxfam jacket I was wearing that month. Forty-five minutes later I was in a walk-up flat in Camden Town trying to barter the thing for a five-quid bag of smack.
For all the years I had taken the lift to the eighth floor of the hospital I had continued to find Busner’s door open — once it was right off its hinges, laid across trestles and being planed down by a maintenance man. Busner stood in the doorway, rolling and unrolling the frayed end of his tie, watching the man work while speculating on what ailed the door as if it were a particularly unresponsive patient. Nevertheless, the next time I came it still wasn’t pulled to.
Busner said he didn’t mind the malfunctioning door — it reminded him of the 1960s, when, shortly after qualifying, he had started a ‘concept house’ in Willesden, where therapists and patients had lived together communally with no distinctions between them. While Busner had long since enacted professional closure, abandoning his conviction that mental pathologies were in reality semantic confusions, he still counselled an inter-personal approach — even when liberally dishing out Largactil.
Our own long-term therapeutic relationship certainly had a playful character; in the nearly three decades his door had been open to me, Busner had sent me for psychotherapy with a succession of colleagues. There had been an anally retentive orthodox Freudian analyst whose consulting room was a garage conversion in Dollis Hill. There was a plump cat-furred humanist in West Hampstead, whose ability to feel my pain seemed to entail her crying a lot about her own. There was a media-friendly intellectual with jet-black kiss curls and the foam-rubber voice of the insincere, who encouraged me to view my life as a narrative that might be rewritten — by him. Then there was the group therapy, the rebirthing, and even a shamanic purification rite conducted in a polythene hogan off the A303. All the while Busner lurked in the background, ready to step forward whenever my condition deteriorated.
Over the years he must — at one time or more — have prescribed me most of the neuro-pharmacopoeia, from anxiolytics, hypnotics and sedatives, through tranquilizers and anti-psychotics, to opiate and alcohol blockers, lithium and methadone. On one occasion he smuggled me in the dead of night into Friern Barnet Hospital. There, using equipment dusty with desuetude — the rubber leads perished — he administered electroconvulsive therapy to me. During the aeons-long seconds when the current surged through my cortex, I broke the restraints and surged up from the couch, then plunged through the fire-resistant ceiling tiles and flew into the suburban night. Up there I was a superhero, with no mission other than to curvet above the rain-slicked roofs.
I was not insensible to the possibility that Busner was exploiting me. After all, he had always been frank about what ailed me and my prognosis, saying early on: ‘Essentially, yours is a mimetic malaise. You have an addictive personality, certainly, also a borderline personality disorder. You are a depressive, and, without certain strategies that you’ve devised for yourself, you would undoubtedly be crippled by phobias. Any treatments that I advocate for you are not to alleviate the symptoms of these conditions — which I regard as pretty much incurable — but to legitimate them.’