myself
under a herd of hippopotamuses. Or 'potami. Setting myself on fire in front of Wessen, Wessen and Woof. But I keep goofing up real opportunities.'
`Although you never consciously think of suicide you have dreamed about it.'
`Yes. But that's normal. Everybody does crazy things in dreams.'
`You feel that your dreaming of self-destructive acts s normal because…'
The intelligent reader gets the picture. The effect of non-directive therapy is to encourage the patient to speak more and more frankly, to gain total confidence in the non-threatening, totally accepting clod who's curing him, and eventually to diagnose and resolve his own conflicts, with old thirty-five dollars-an-hour echoing away through it all behind the couch.
And it works. It works precisely as well as every other tested form of psychotherapy. It works sometimes and fails at others, and its success and failures are identical with other analysts' successes and failures. Of course at times the dialogue resembles a comedy routine. My patient the second hour, that morning was a hulking heir to a small fortune who had the build of a professional wrestler and the mentality of a professional wrestler.
Frank Osterflood was the most depressing case I'd had in five years of practice. In the first two months of analysis he had seemed a rather nice empty socialite, worried half-heartedly about his inability to concentrate on anything. He tended to drift from job to job averaging two or three a year. He talked great deal about his jobs and about a mousy father and two disgusting brothers with families, but all with such cocktail party patter that I knew we must be a long way from what was really bothering him. If anything was bothering him. The only clue I had to indicate that he was anything but a vacuous muscle was his occasional spitting hissing remarks - usually of a general nature - about women. When I asked one morning about his relations with women he hesitated and then said he found them boring. When I asked him how he found fulfillment for his sexual needs, he answered neutrally, `Prostitutes.'
Two or three times in later sessions he described in detail how he liked to humiliate the call girls he hired, but he would never make any effort to analyze his behavior; he seemed to feel in his casual man-of-the-world way that humiliating women was good, normal, all American behavior. He found it more interesting to analyze why he left his last job; the office he worked in `smelled funny.'
About halfway through the session that August day he interpreted his seemingly pleasant recollections of having single-handedly destroyed an East Side bar by sitting up on the couch and looking intensely but in my professional opinion, dumbly, at the floor. Even his face seemed bulging with muscles. He sat there in the same position for several minutes, grunting quietly to himself with a sound like a noisy refrigerator. Finally he said:
'I get so tied up inside I just have to . . . to do something or I'll explode,' he said.
'I understand.'
[pause]
`Do something. . , sexually or I'll explode.'
`You get so tense you feel you must express yourself sexually.
`Yes.'
[Pause] `Don't you want to know how!' he asked.
`If you'd like to tell me.'
`Do you want to know? Don't you need to know to help me?'
`I want you to tell me only what you feel like telling me.'
`Well, I know you'd like to know, but I'm not going to tell you. I've told you about the fuckin' women I've fucked and
how they make me want to puke with their snaky wet orgasms, but I guess I'll keep this to myself.'
[Pause]
`You feel that although I'd like to know, you've already told me about your relations with women sand so you won't
tell me.'
`Actually, it's sodomy. When I get tense - it might be right after I've fucked some white-satin slut, I get … I need … I
want to ram the Goddam insides out of some woman .. . some girl . . . young . . . the younger the better.'
`When you're very keyed up you want to ram the insides out of some woman.'
`The Goddam insides. I want to sink my prick up that intestine into that belly through the esophagus up that throat and
come right out the Goddam top of her head.'
[Pause]
`You'd like to penetrate through her whole body.'
`Yeah, but up her ass. I want her to scream, to bleed, to be horrified.'
[Pause. Long pause]
`You'd like to penetrate her anus and make her bleed, scream and be horrified.'
'Yeah, but the whores I tried it with chewed gum and picked their nose.'
[Pause] `The whores you tried it with were neither hurt nor horrified.'
`Shit, they took their seventy-five bucks, shot their ass into the air and chewed gum or read a comic book. If I tried to
get rough some guy six inches taller than me would appear in the doorway with a sledgehammer or something. [Pause]
I found sodomy, per se [he smiled awkwardly] didn't end my tenseness.'
`You were unable to release, your tension by relations with prostitutes when the women seemed to experience no pain
or humiliation.'
`So I knew I had to find someone who would scream.'
[Pause]
[Long pause]
`You sought other alternatives to relieve your tensions.'
`Yeah. Fact is I began raping and killing young girls.'
[Pause]
[Long pause] [Longer pause]
`In an effort to relieve these tense feelings you began raping and killing young girls,'
`Yeah. You're not allowed to tell, are you? I mean you told me professional ethics forbid your telling anything I say, right?'
'Yes.'
[Pause]
'I find the raping and killing' of girls helps relieve the tension quite a bit and makes me feel better again.'
`I see.'
`My problem is that I'm beginning to get a little nervous ..about getting caught. I sort of hoped maybe analysis might help me find a little more normal way to reduce my tensions.'
`You'd like to find a different way to reduce tensions other than raping and killing girls.'
`Yeah. Either that or help me to stop worrying about getting caught ….'
The alert reader may now be feeling that this stuff is slightly too sensational for a typical day at the office, but Mr. Osterflood really exists. Or rather existed - more of that later on. The fact is that I was writing a book entitled The Sado-Masochistic Personality in Transition, a work which was to describe cases in which the sadistic personality developed into a masochistic one and vice versa. For this reason my colleagues always sent me patients with a markedly strong sadistic or masochistic bent. Osterflood was admittedly the most professionally active sadist I'd treated, but the wards of mental hospitals have many like him.
What is remarkable, I suppose, is Osterflood's walking around loose. Although after his confession I urged him to enter an institution, he refused and I couldn't order his being committed without breaking professional confidence; moreover no one else apparently suspected that he was an `enemy of society.'
All I could do was warn my friends to keep their little girls away from Harlem playgrounds (where Osterflood
