`Psychoanalysis has led to more new knowledge of the human soul than all the previous two million years of thinking
put together. Zen has been around a long time and I haven't noticed any great body of knowledge flowing from it.' Without apparent irritability he let out another vigorous mushroom cloud toward the ceiling. I was fingering one of the dice, nervously pressing my fingers into the little dots; I still looked at him, he at Freud.
`Tim, I'm not going to argue the merits and demerits of Zen again with you. I've told you that whatever I've gained from Zen is not something I've been able to articulate.'
'What you've gained from Zen is intellectual anemia.'
`Maybe I've gained sense. You know that eighty percent of the stuff in the psychoanalytic journals is crap. Useless
crap. Including mine.'
I paused. `Including . . . yours.'
He hesitated, and then bubbled up a chuckle.
`You know the first principle of medicine: you can't cure the patient without a sample of his crap,' he said.
`Who needs to be cured?'
He turned his eyes lazily into mine and said: `You do.'
`You analyzed me. What's the matter?' I shot back stare for stare. .
`Nothing the matter that a little reminder of what life is all about won't cure.'
`Oh, piss,' I said.
`You don't like to push yourself, and along comes Zen and till you to 'go with the flow'.'
He paused and, still looking at me, dropped his pipe in an ashtray on the small table bide him.
`Your flow is naturally stagnant.'
`Makes a good breeding ground,' I said and tried to short laugh.
`For Christ's sake, Luke, don't laugh,' he said loudly. `You're wasting your life these days, throwing it away.'
`Aren't we all?'
`No, we're not. Jake isn't. I'm not. Good men in every profession aren't. You weren't, until a year ago.'
`When I was a child, I spoke like a child -'
`Luke, Luke, listen to me.'
He was an agitated old man.
`Well -?'
`Come back to analysis with me.'
I rubbed the die against the back of my hand and, thinking nothing clearly, answered `No.'
`What's the matter with you?' he said sharply. `Why have you lost faith in the significance of your work? Will you
please try to explain?'
Without premeditation I surged up from my chair like a defensive tackle at the sight of a shot at the quarterback. I strode across the room in front of Dr. Mann to the big window looking along the street toward Central Park.
`I'm bored. I'm bored. I'm sorry but that's about it. I'm sick of lifting unhappy patients up to normal boredom, sick of trivial experiments, empty articles `These are symptoms, not analysis.'
`To experience something for the first time: a first balloon, a visit to a foreign land. A fine fierce fornication with a new woman. The first paycheck, or the surprise of first winning big at the poker table or the racetrack. The exciting isolation of leaning against the wind on the highway hitchhiking, waiting for someone to stop and offer me a lift, perhaps to a town three miles down the road, perhaps to new friendship, perhaps to death. The rich glow I felt when I knew I'd finally written a good paper, made a brilliant analysis or hit a good backhand lob. The excitement of a new philosophy of life. Or a new home. Or my first child. These are what we want from life and now … they seem gone, and both Zen and psychoanalysis seem incapable of bringing them back.'
`You sound like a disillusioned sophomore.'
`The same old new lands, the same old fornication, the same getting and spending, the same drugged, desperate, repetitious faces appearing in the office for analysis, the same effective, meaningless lobs. The same old new philosophies. And the thing I'd really pinned my ego to, psychoanalysis, doesn't seem to be a bit relevant to the problem.'
`It's totally relevant.'
`Because analysis, were it really an the right track, should be able to change me, to change anything and anybody, to eliminate all undesired neurotic symptoms and to do it much more quickly than the two years necessary to produce most measurable changes in people.'
`You're dreaming, Luke. It can't be done. In both theory and practice it's impossible to rid an individual of all his undesired habits, tensions, compulsions, inhibitions, what-have-you.'
`Then maybe the theory and practice are wrong.'
`Undoubtedly.'
`We can perfect plants, alter machines, train animals, why not men?'
`For God's sake!' Dr. Mann tapped his pipe vigorously against a bronze ashtray and glared up at me irritably. `You're dreaming. There are no Utopias: There can be no perfect man. Each of our lives is a finite series of errors, which tend to become rigid and repetitious and necessary. Every man's personal proverb about himself is: 'Whatever is, is right, in the best of all possible people.'
The whole tendency is … the whole tendency of the human personality is to solidify into the corpse. You don't change corpses. Corpses aren't bubbling with enthusiasm. You spruce them up a bit and make them fit to be looked at.'
`I absolutely agree: psychoanalysis rarely breaks this solidifying flow of personality, it has nothing to offer the man who is bored.'
Dr. Mann harumphed or snorted or something and I moved away from the window to look up at Freud. Freud stared down seriously; he didn't look pleased.
'There must be some other.. other secret [blasphemy!] some other . .. magic potion which would permit certain men to radically alter their lives,' I went on.
`Try astrology, the I Ching, LSD.'
`Freud gave me a taste for finding some philosophical equivalent of LSD, but the effect of Freud's own potion seems
to be wearing off.'
`You're dreaming. You expect too much. A human being, a human personality is the total pattern of the accumulated
limitations and potentials of an individual. You take away all his habits, compulsions and channeled drives, and you
take away him.'
`Then perhaps, perhaps, we ought to do away with 'him'.'
He paused as if trying to absorb what I'd said and when I turned to face him, he surprised me by booming two quick
cannon shots of smoke out of the side of his mouth.
`Oh Luke you're nibbling on that Goddamn Eastern mysticism again. If I weren't a consistent self, a glutton at the
table, sloppy in dress, bland in speech and rigidly devoted to psychoanalysis, to success, to publication - and all of
these things consistently - I'd never get anything done, and what would I be?'
I didn't answer.
`If I sometimes smoked one way,' he went on, `sometimes another, sometimes not at all, varied the way I dressed, was
nervous, serene, ambitious, lazy, lecherous, gluttonous, ascetic - where would my 'self' be? What would I achieve?
