options I would create. In letting the dice choose among possible women I might pursue for a night, for example, I might give Lil one chance in six, some new woman chosen at random two chances in six, and Arlene three chances in six. If I played with two dice the subtleties in probability were much greater.
Two principles I always took care to follow. First: never include an option I might be unwilling to fulfill; second: always begin to fulfill the option without thought and without quibble. The secret of the successful dicelife is to be a puppet on the strings of the die.
Six weeks after sinking into Arlene I began letting the dice diddle with my patients: it was a decisive step. I began creating as options that I comment aggressively to a patient as my insights arose; that I restudy some other standard analytic theory and method and adopt it for a specified number of hours with a patient; that I preach to my patients.
Eventually I began also to include as an option that I give my patients assigned psychological exercises much as a coach gives his athletes physical exercises: shy girl assigned to date make-out artist; aggressive bully assigned to pick a fight with ninety-eight-pound weakling and purposely lose; studious grind assigned to see five movies, go to two dances and play bridge a minimum of five hours a day all week. Of course, most meaningful assignments involved a breach of the psychiatrist's code of ethics. In telling my patients what to do, I was booming legally responsible for any ill consequences which might result. Since everything a typical neurotic does eventually has ill consequences, my giving them assignments meant trouble. It meant, in fact, the probable end of my career, a thought which for some reason I found exhilarating. I was like a professional psychiatrist, the very jockstrap of my basic self; I was becoming belly to belly with whim.
In the first few days the dice usually had me express freely my own feelings toward my patients - to break, in effect, the cardinal rule of all psychotherapy: do not judge. I began overtly condemning every shabby little weakness I could find in my sniveling, cringing patients. Great gob of God, that was fun. If you remember that for 'four years I had been acting like a saint, understanding, forgiving and accepting all sorts of human folly, cruelty and nonsense; that I had been thus repressing every normal reactive impulse, you can imagine the joy with which I responded to the dice letting me call my patients sadists, idiots, bastards, sluts, cowards and latent cretins. Joy. I had found another island of joy.
My patients and colleagues didn't seem to appreciate my new roles. From this date my reputation began to decline and
my notoriety to rise. My college professor of English at Yale, Orville Boggles, was the first troublemaker. A big, toothy man with tiny dull eyes, he had been coming to me off and on for six months to overcome a writing block. He hadn't been able to do more than sign his name for three years, and in order to maintain his academic reputation as a scholar he had been reduced to digging out term papers he had written as a sophomore at Michigan State, making small revisions and getting the articles published in quarterlies. Since no one read them past the second paragraph anyway, he hadn't been caught; in fact, on the basis of his impressive list of publications he had received tenure the year before he came to me.
I had been unenthusiastically working on his ambivalent feelings toward his father, his latent homosexuality and his
false image of himself, when under the impetus of the dictates of the dice I suddenly found myself one day exploding. `Boggles,' I said after he arrived one morning (I had always previously addressed him as Professor Boggles); `Boggles,' I said, `what say we cut the shit, and get down to basics? Why don't you consciously and publicly decide to quit writing?'
Professor Boggles, who had just lain down and hadn't yet said a word, quivered like a huge sunflower leaf at the first breath of a storm. `I beg your pardon?' `Why try to write?' 'It is a pleasure I have long enjoyed' `Merde.' 'He sat up and looked toward the door as if he expected Batman to break in any moment and rescue him. `I came to you, not because I am neurotic, but in order to cure a very simple writing block. Now -' `You are a patient who came with a cold and who is dying of cancer.'
`Now that you seem unable to cure the block you try to convince me not to write. I find this '
'You find this uncomfortable. But just imagine all the fun you could be having if you gave up trying to publish? Have
you looked at a tree in the last six years?'
`I've seen many trees. I want to publish, and I don't know what you think you're doing this morning.'
`I'm letting down the mask, Boggles. I've been playing the psychiatrist game with you, pretending we were after big
things like anal stage, object cathexis, latent heterosexuality and the like, but I've decided that you can only be cured
by being initiated into the mysteries behind the facade, into the straight poop, so to speak. The straight poop, that's
symbolism, Boggles, that's-'
`I have no desire to be initiated.'
`I know you don't. None of us do. But I'm letting you pay me thirty-five dollars per hour, and I want to give you your
money's worth. First of all, I want you to resign from the university and announce to your department chairman, the board of trustees and to the press that you are going to Africa to re-establish contact with your animal origins.'
`That's nonsense!'
'Of course it is. That's the point. Think of the publicity you'll get: 'Yale professor resigns to seek Truth.'
It'll get a lot more play than your last article in the Rhode Island Quarterly on 'Henry James and the London Bus Service.' Moreover-'
'But why Africa?'
`Because it has nothing to do with literature, academic advancement and full professorships: You won't be able to fool yourself that you're gathering material for an article. Spend a year in the Congo, try to get involved with a revolutionary group or a counterrevolutionary group, shoot a few people, familiarize yourself with the native drugs, let yourself get seduced by whatever comes alone, male, female, animal, vegetable, mineral. After that, if you still feel you want to write about Henry James for the quarterlies, I'll try to help you.'
He was sitting on the edge of the couch looking at me with nervous dignity. He said `But why should you want me to stop wanting to write?'
`Because as you are now, Boggles, and have been for forty-three years, you're a dead loss. Absolutely. I don't mean to sound critical, but absolutely. Deep down inside you know it, your colleagues know it and at all levels I know it. We've got to change you completely to make you worth taking money from. Normally I'd recommend that you have an affair with a student, but with your personality the only students who might open up for you would be worse off than you and no help.'
Boggles had stood up but I went serenely on.
`What you need is a more extensive personal experience with cruelty, with suffering, hunger, fear, sex. Once you've experienced more fully these basics there might be some hope of a major breakthrough. Until then none.'
Old Boggles had his overcoat on now and with a toothy grimace was backing toward the door.
'Good day, Dr. Rhinehart, I hope you're better soon,' he said.
`And a good day to you, Boggles. I wish I could hope the same for you, but unless you get captured by the Congolese rebels, or get sick in the jungle for eight months or become a Kurtzian ivory trader, I'm afraid there's not much hope.'
I rose from behind my desk to shake hands with him, but he backed out the door.
Six days later I got a polite letter from the president of the American Association of Practicing Psychiatrists (AAPP) noting that a patient of mine, a Dr. Orville Boggles of Yale, had paranoic hallucinations about me and had sent a long, nasty, highly literary complaint to the AAPP about my behavior. I sent a note to President Weinstein thanking him for his understanding and a note to Boggles suggesting that the length of his letter to the AAPP indicated progress vis-a #161;vis his writing block. I also gave him permission to try to have his letter published in the South Dakota Quarterly Review` Journal.
Chapter Thirteen
